What Is Amazon QuickSight: Features, Pricing + How To Use

Are you searching for an efficient, managed visualization tool that will develop attractive visualizations in minimal time? Learn What is Amazon QuickSight and Why AWS QuickSight is for you!

Your search should end here. In today’s data-driven business landscape, an enormous amount of data exists, which if accurately mined and modeled, can give you a strong edge over your competition.

To accomplish similar breakthroughs, you need BI tools like AWS QuickSight that allow you to visualize and analyze the available data based on your business needs.

In this Amazon Quicksight tutorial to help you out, we’ll shed some light on Amazon QuickSight, including:

  • What is Amazon QuickSight?
  • What is Amazon QuickSight Used for?
  • Amazon QuickSight Editions
  • Amazon QuickSight Pricing
  • Reasons to Use AWS QuickSight

What is Amazon QuickSight?

Powered by machine learning, Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service that enables you to create dashboards and data visualizations for users in your organization, regardless of their location.

  1. The service is an alternative to popular business intelligence tools such as Microsoft’s Power BI and Tableau.
  2. It’s a cloud-scale service that helps you transmit comprehendible insights to your colleagues, no matter where they are.
  3. It will connect to your cloud data and bring together data from a myriad of sources. For instance, AWS QuickSight can incorporate AWS data, B2B data, third-party data, SaaS data, big data, spreadsheet data, and more.
  4. Since it’s a fully managed service, you benefit from built-in redundancy, global availability, and enterprise-grade security.
  5. Using the user management tools that come with it, you can scale the solution from ten users to 10,000 users without having to manage or deploy infrastructure.
  6. With AWS QuickSight, decision-makers can explore and analyze information in an engaging visual environment.
  7. They can access Amazon Quicksight Dashboards securely from their mobile devices or any other device on your network.

Now that you have a basic understanding of Amazon QuickSight, let’s go through some of its use cases:

Use Cases of AWS QuickSight

1. Connecting to Data Lakes

Once data from Amazon S3 and other data lakes are gathered, it’s pushed into the AWS Glue crawler before being loaded into the AWS Glue data catalog.

Upon the completion of this process, data is moved to AWS EMR, AWS Athena, or AWS Redshift spectrum.

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Then comes the time when data is transmitted to QuickSight for performing visualization.

2. Connecting to Operational Databases

The data that’s collected from IoT, sales orders, or clickstreams, is loaded into Amazon RDS or other operational databases.

It’s then moved to AWS QuickSight for visualization, where it’s transformed into engaging reports, embedded analytics, and reports.

3. Connecting to Data Warehouses

This connection is not much different from the association with operational databases, except for the fact that data is moved to data warehouses rather than operational databases after it’s collected from IoT, clickstreams, or sales orders.

A common example of a data warehouse is Amazon Redshift. From there, the data is again sent to AWS QuickSight for visualization.

By now, you should develop a clear understanding of the most important use cases of AWS QuickSight. But if you want to invest in the solution, you should be aware of some of its Editions:

Amazon QuickSight Editions

To cater to different business needs, Amazon offers AWS QuickSight in two distinct editions that have their own set of costs and features. They include:

QuickSight Standard Edition:

This edition is perfect for personal data exploration and analysis.

QuickSight Enterprise Edition:

  • This edition comes with not only the features offered by the standard edition but also some extras. It’s designed for BI deployments that are of large scale.
  • The decision to pick the edition will depend on your business needs.
  • For instance, the standard edition should be fine if all you want to do is create on-the-fly visualizations and analyses of CSV or spreadsheet data.
  • But if you wish to deploy complex functions like authenticating your QuickSight users through Active Directory, or embedding a dashboard into a website, you’ll need to invest in the enterprise edition.

Regardless of your choice, start with the free 60-day trial with your chosen edition. If you begin with the standard edition, you may upgrade to the enterprise one whenever you want.

The process should be seamless, with all your user data and authentication details easily migrated to the other edition.

Since one of the biggest determinants of your edition choice will be pricing, let’s now take a look at the costs associated with these editions:

Amazon QuickSight Pricing by Edition

Here is an overview of pricing for the Standard and Enterprise editions:

QuickSight Pricing
QuickSight Pricing

1. Standard Edition Pricing

  • When you sign up for AWS QuickSight, you’ll have an AWS SPICE capacity of 1 GB and one free user. Every subsequent user will cost $9/user per month with an annual subscription.
  • If you opt to make month-to-month payments, each user will cost $12 per month, apart from the SPICE capacity.
  • You should be interested in knowing where AWS Also grants a free upfront SPICE capacity of 10 GBs.
  • For additional capacity, however, 25 cents will need to be paid extra for each GB consumed.
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2. Enterprise Edition Pricing

  • Like with the standard edition, you’ll get one GB of SPICE capacity and a free user. Beyond that, the Enterprise edition’s pricing becomes complicated.
  • The price structure is split into two user classifications, namely authors and readers.
  • A QuickSight author has the authority to manage users, set data imports, set up email reports, develop and publish engaging dashboards, and more.
  • Readers, on the other hand, consume those dashboards. To view shared dashboards, all they need to do is log in to their account.
  • Using a mobile app or a web browser, they can export data as a CSV file, filter data, or drill down to details.

You have two options for pricing:

  1. Each QuickSight account includes authors, for which the pricing is based on users. Starting at $18/user per month, pricing works as a yearly subscription and goes up to $24/user per month. If you decide to make month-to-month payments, every user should receive a free SPICE capacity of 10 GBs, and for additional SPICE capacity, every GB costs 38 cents.
  2. If your user base is predictable, you should choose this option in which the cost is 30 cents/session, where a single session lasts 30 minutes, starting when a reader logs in and starts interacting with the Amazon Quicksight Dashboard. With this option, the most you’ll be paying for a user will be $5 each month, and that too when the reader hits or exceeds 17 sessions.

Hence, AWS QuickSight involves complex pricing, but thankfully, both editions offer a free trial of 60 days, during which you can set up author and reader users for your organizational team.

Next, you can begin understanding and observing the overall usage, building out the pricing-per-model that you’ll be charged.

Why Should You Use AWS QuickSight: Top Features

Some of the reasons to use AWS QuickSight include:

1. Smart Interactive Visualizations

  • Thanks to the SPICE calculation engine, you can model accurate processes and retrieve the data needed faster than ever.
  • Its built-in visualization tool observes the patterns in the backend data sets to provide you with a string of suggestions.
  • Supported by your analytical patterns, the “Autograph” feature evolves to predict data analysis accurately over time.

2. High Scalability

  • You may use AWS QuickSight for multiple business domains to independently measure business metrics.
  • It’s frequently scaled for hundreds of thousands of users who are capable of working simultaneously and independently across all sources of data.

3. Compatibility with Data Source

Another important reason to use AWS QuickSight is its compatibility with data source entities like file sources; relational sources of data such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, etc.

SaaS data sources; and CSV files. Other data sources are typically accessed by importing or linking them via supported ones.

4. Portability

  • Yes, AWS QuickSight is also a portable, handy tool that’s particularly valuable for entrepreneurs.
  • This is because you can access them from wherever they want, such as through their tablet, laptop, smartphone, or desktop.
  • By installing the offline mode, you may even access it offline. All you need to do is install the app and sign in. If you have iOS, there’s a native mobile app available too.
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5. Unmatched Flexibility

  • Given AWS QuickSight’s incredible flexibility, you won’t feel constrained while using it.
  • You won’t need to delve much into behind-the-scenes work to play with massive amounts of data.
  • Upon logging in, you’ll get access to dashboards that allow you to create visualizations in no time.

Amazon QuickSight data sources

Let’s try to find out all the data sources that are supported by Quicksight.

  • It supports all RDS like Oracle, Aurora, and Teradata.
  • Supports Databricks, Timeseries, and S3, zip files can be imported directly from S3.
  • It does support IoT Analytics and Snowflake.
  • Along with that, it supports file sources like JSON, xlsx, and comma/tab-delimited files.

Apart from there are multiple sources that work seamlessly with Quicksight.

amazon quickSight vs tableau

So, let’s try to find out the difference between these two popular tools used widely.

QuicksightTableau
PricingQuicksight is cheaper with Enterprise users costing 34$ per monthPricey with 1445$ per deployment and billed monthly/yearly
HostingOnly available in the AWS cloudIt’s available as the cloud as well as an on-premises offering.
DemandQuicksight is yet to be adopted by large businesses. Its mostly preferred by small and mid-size businessAdopted and used by large-scale organizations.
UsabilityQuiet complex to learn the tool.Pretty simple tool to use.
SuitabilityThis tool is suitable for ad-hoc reporting and analytics as well.This is mostly used for dashboard reporting, analytics, and predictive analytics
PlatformWorks only in the AWS Cloud environment.Works in windows, Linux, mac-os as well as the cloud.

amazon quickSight vs power bi

Let’s see how Quicksight and Power Bi are different.

QuicksightPower Bi
PricingQuicksight is cheaper with Enterprise users costing 34$ per month$5000 for PowerBi premium per month
UsabilityWidely used because it’s easily compatible with all the services in the amazon ecosystemThis is also used by users using the Azure ecosystem. Mainly used for creating pipelines for data transfer.
FeasibilityLimited option in choosing graphs and chartsA lot of options to choose between graphs and charts
EnvironmentCan be used directly in the cloud. It’s relatively new so new features are getting every daySet up of power bi in on-premises is quite a hassle except for the windows system.
CompatibilityIt is independent of any environment as it’s in the cloud only.Except for windows, all other environment faces some issue when using power bi.

AWS quicksight examples

QuickSight is used vastly in many industries, let’s look at a few of the examples.

  1. IoT – Better results by monitoring device performance.
  2. Finance – Generate expenses dashboard based on department. Monitor stock performance.
  3. Education – Metrics, of budget, total revenue, expenditures, and student data analysis.

AWS quickSight API?

QuickSight supports API that can be used to pull down the dashboards to the webpage of your preference.

And all those API calls are logged in the CloudTrial logs as well.

We can use the AWS SDK to make API calls to Amazon QuickSight.

amazon quickSight vs google data studio

Let us try to find the similarities or differences between these two tools.

QuickSightGoogle Data Studio
EnvironmentOnly works in AWSOnly works in google cloud
Pay as per the usage.Pay as per the usage.
Data visualization toolThis is also a data visualization tool

Conclusion

After going through this comprehensive guide, you should have understood what is AWS QuickSight, what it is used for, its editions, its pricing and some reasons you should use it.

If you do plan to invest in the solution, keep in mind that it will connect to data on SaaS applications, AWS platform, Big Data, 3rd party apps, spreadsheets, and other sources.

Upon getting data access, it will set up interactive and customizable dashboards that will assist you in visualizing your data.

We hope that this guide makes your decision of choosing AWS QuickSight easier.

FAQS: What is Amazon QuickSight

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