How is QuickSight different to other BI tools?

Amazon QuickSight was built to address pain points of the traditional BI tools and provides IT and business teams with a fast, cloud-powered BI service at one-tenth the cost of traditional BI software.

Here are the key features that make QuickSight the next generation cloud-powered BI tool:

• QuickSight empowers data analysts to build their reports quickly by pointing them to any data source without the need of a large IT team that traditionally has to build metadata in a BI tool before data analysts can use them.
• QuickSight pricing starts at $9 per user per month and is a complete managed service, which eliminates the need for software install and maintenance.
• QuickSight has deep integration within AWS data sources including RDS, DynamoDB, Kinesis, S3, Athena, and Redshift. It also supports user file uploads in Excel, CSV, TSV, and can also connect to Salesforce Cloud and on-premise databases. This list will continue to grow.
• QuickSight has smart visualizations that infer data type and provide suggestions for best possible visualizations. Additionally, QuickSight also suggests relationships between datasets.
• QuickSight has easy to use browser-based interface and does not require any desktop software to build metadata and/or reports.
• QuickSight has a special distributed and intelligent caching layer that provides blazing fast performance and response times.
• QuickSight allows users to share analysis, read only dashboards, and story board with peers.
• QuickSight has planned integration with a number of partner BI tools like Tibco, Domo, and Qlikview so that enterprises can leverage current investment, but still benefit from the caching and deep connectivity that QuickSight provides.

The following diagram shows the simplified flow from data to visuals using QuickSight:

Figure 1.3: QuickSight simplified process

It has the following four steps, most of which can be done by a power user without the need for personal IT:

1. Source data from various sources including files, RDBMS on the AWS data platform.
2. Import data to QuickSight caching layer (SPICE).
3. Prepare/edit data if required for analysis.
4. Visualize and publish to dashboards.