Amazon QuickSight vs. Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI and Amazon QuickSight are business intelligence (BI) tools aimed at helping companies interpret and understand business data. Amazon QuickSight is a lightweight solution optimized for as-needed use. In contrast, Microsoft Power BI is designed for dedicated usage across a company, with standard per-user pricing and deep customizability.

Microsoft Power BI is almost equally popular with mid-size businesses as well as enterprise-level corporations, likely due to its per-user licensing and integration with the Microsoft Office 365 suite. Amazon QuickSight is most popular with mid-size companies and larger enterprises as well, although it also has a strong presence among SMB users. This is likely because its pricing model’s pay-as-you-go feature makes it affordable for smaller organizations.

Features

Although both products offer shareable charts and other data visualizations, they have individual strengths that set them apart from each other.

Microsoft Power BI thrives on its variety and customization capability. Its open-source repository contains a broad selection of high-quality user-submitted visualizations, all of which can be individually tweaked by end users. Its sharing features make it easy to show others the visualizations you’ve created, and it integrates well with MS Azure and Office 365.

Amazon QuickSight, as its name suggests, is designed for speed and ease of use. It’s lightweight and runs well even on large datasets with many users. QuickSight’s library of standard charts and visualizations can be quickly applied to various data sources, especially data from other Amazon Web Services (AWS) products. Users without an Amazon QuickSight license can access charts for a small per-usage fee, making it an attractive option for businesses that don’t require regular access to BI software for their employees.

Limitations

Amazon QuickSight and Microsoft Power BI both provide essential BI functionality, but they each have unique drawbacks to consider before purchasing.

Amazon QuickSight can be lightweight to a fault for some users. Its library of graphs and charts is limited when compared to some other BI solutions, and it doesn’t allow for the extensive customization Microsoft Power BI supports. New users report that its UI can be unintuitive at times. Amazon’s active development of the product means new features and improvements, but it can also introduce unexpected bugs and errors for end users.

Microsoft Power BI’s extensive variety, though helpful for many, can cause its own problems. Finding proper documentation for user-submitted visualizations may be difficult, and some may be missing documentation entirely. Some users may face a steep learning curve before they’re able to use the software’s advanced features. Microsoft Power BI can also consume a large amount of computer resources and may run slowly for some users. Finally, its pricing model may be reasonable compared to its competitors, but is less granular than Amazon Quicksight’s model.

Pricing

Amazon Quicksight offers two pricing models for its base product, and an add-on pricing structure for its data anomaly detection service.

Amazon QuickSight’s Standard Edition is $9.00 per user per month with an annual subscription, or $12.00 per user per month for a month-to-month subscription, with 10 GB per user of storage and $0.25 per GB for additional storage.

Amazon QuickSight’s Enterprise Edition has two separate pricing structures for Authors and Readers. Authors can create and publish data visualizations, while Readers have access to the dashboards created by Authors. For Authors, pricing is $18.00 per user per month for an annual subscription, or $24.00 per user per month for a month-to-month subscription, with 10 GB per user of storage and $0.38 per GB for additional storage. For Readers, pricing can vary from $0.30 to $5.00 per 30-minute session, per user, per month, depending on the number of Readers and how often they use the product. For more details, refer to the vendor’s pricing page.

Microsoft Power BI offers two options for pricing. The Power BI Pro tier is $9.99 monthly per user and includes all of its data visualization and BI features on the cloud, with 10 GB of storage per user and a limitation of 1 GB for each individual dataset. The Power BI Premium tier is $4,995 monthly with no additional per-user fee and adds features aimed at enterprise-level BI, including big data analytics and on-premises deployment. It also expands the storage to 100 TB total, with a 10 GB maximum size per dataset.