We’re big fans of Amazon QuickSight here at PMsquare, and for good reason. QuickSight is rapidly evolving into a top-notch BI and data visualization tool and even entered the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI this last year. QuickSight is fundamentally a very good visualization and reporting platform, but with all the options available in the crowded BI market, what are the top reasons to choose Amazon QuickSight?

Infinite Scale at a Great Price

QuickSight is perhaps the world’s only BI tool built from the ground up to be truly serverless. This means that QuickSight can seamlessly and automatically scale behind the scenes to accommodate spikes in demand, new consumption patterns, and increased user counts. At no point are you ever asked to reserve compute capacity or develop an infrastructure plan. Licensing is straightforward and very reasonable:

• Authors: $18 a month

• Readers: $0.30 per session, up to a max of $5 a month

You also have the option of purchasing sessions in bulk at a fixed low price, rather than licensing named users. This approach is much friendlier than the traditional approach to capacity licensing based on CPU cores, where you pay for compute that you never end up using. It’s easily one of the most economical BI options on the market. Full details here.

Built for your Amazon data

QuickSight brings a number of unique advantages to bear for clients already invested in AWS for application hosting and data infrastructure. Because it is co-located alongside these workloads, data often never leaves a single data center. This reduces complexity, security concerns, and ingress/egress costs.

It also gives you access to AWS’s ever-expanding library of data analytics capabilities. Qucksight has easy access to data in S3, directly or via Athena, as well as Redshift and any database running on RDS. It’s easily integrated into a data pipeline to report from your lakehouse or visualize your Sagemaker projects. Serverless deployments and easy licensing allow you to scale in minutes for your exact use case, and decommission just as quickly.

Overall, QuickSight’s colocation alongside your most important data and computational tasks gives you a unified security and governance model across all data access points while providing simple deployment and great performance.

QuickSight Q

QuickSight Q is QuickSight’s natural language query solution, and boy is it a good one. It’s very well integrated into the UI making it exceptionally easy for end users to access and understand. It’s also smart, able to understand business terms related to domains such as sales, healthcare, etc., and render the best-fit visualization in seconds. It’s built on a foundation of machine learning, so it improves over time as it gets to know your user base.

Where it really shines though is in how it enables rapid development of NLQ-based workflows. Users are able to grade every QuickSight Q response and provide feedback on how satisfied they are with the answers it generates. This feedback is aggregated and presented to QuickSight administrators and data engineers, who use it to refine NLQ data sets and improve the overall fit for NLQ data products.

Want to know more?

These are just 3 reasons to love Amazon QuickSight – there are many more. If you’re interested in exploring how QuickSight can fit into your organization, we’re always available to share the excitement. We know you’ll be just as geeked as we are.

Next Steps

We hope you found this article informative. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for data and analytics news, updates, and insights delivered directly to your inbox.

If you have any questions or would like PMsquare to provide guidance and support for your analytics solution, contact us today.