Using Amazon QuickSight

Customers considering using the Microsoft Power BI Suite with AWS are encouraged to evaluate Amazon QuickSight as an alternative. This fully managed cloud service natively connects to data sources in AWS, reducing the complexity and cost when compared to other BI solutions.

How Amazon QuickSight works

When compared to other BI solutions, Amazon QuickSight has the following benefits:

• With Amazon QuickSight, there’s no need to download and install a client application. All functionality, including authoring and reporting, can be accessed from any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, and so forth) by a web browser.

• Amazon QuickSight is delivered as a fully managed, cloud-native SaaS application and is simple to build and deploy dashboards to production. The service is serverless, which means that you do not need to calculate how many nodes and servers you need to support your users. QuickSight also takes full advantage of high availability features provided by AWS for resiliency.

• It’s easy to get started in small or large settings, with the ability to add users from a point-and-click interface within QuickSight. No external administrator intervention needed.

• Amazon QuickSight is powered by Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (SPICE) for a fast response time (in the milliseconds) and interactive visualizations. Datasets can currently scale up to 200 GB.

• Amazon QuickSight pricing is simple, inexpensive, and has two components: report authors and report readers. Report authors, who create and publish interactive dashboards, are priced per user. If users do not log in during a given month, there are no charges for those users. Report readers are charged per 30-minute session, with a maximum of $5.00 per reader per month. A free trial allows you to evaluate Amazon QuickSight without any charges. For more information, see Amazon QuickSight Pricing.