QuickSight Vs. Microsoft Power BI 

What are BI Tools?

Business intelligence (BI) tools are technology services, which enable organizations to organize and analyze big data. BI tools like QuickSight and Microsoft Power BI take raw data and transform it into powerful, insightful visuals. As we have said before on this blog, the point of data is to guide action. BI tools are simply a means to action, informed by raw data. 

Intro to QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-based business intelligence service that connects to your data in the cloud and can combine it with many different data sources. As a fully managed cloud-based service, Amazon QuickSight provides enterprise-grade security, global availability, and built-in redundancy. QuickSight’s low cost, which is mostly based on usage, is perfect for scaling from 10 users to 10,000 without needing to deploy or manage any infrastructure. 

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At West Loop Strategy, we are crazy about QuickSight and we recommend it to any organization, especially businesses already using AWS services! We love QuickSight’s “Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation, Engine" (SPICE) functionality and ease of use. We also appreciate that AWS continues to develop new features for QuickSight users that make our lives easier! QuickSight’s documentation is intuitive and there is an active community committed to helping people navigate QuickSight. 

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Intro to Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is another business intelligence tool. While not as lightweight as Amazon QuickSight, Power BI offers several unique features like the ability to import user-submitted visualizations. Power BI is full of powerful features, but documentation for Power BI can be limited, which can make using Power BI more challenging. Power BI can still be a great choice for organizations that are already integrated with the Office 365 suite as the tool is integrated with Microsoft Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, and more. We should note that Power BI’s per-user pricing is more expensive than QuickSight, especially at the enterprise level.

We cannot deny that Microsoft Power BI has more features than QuickSight. Deployment pipelines are a relatively new and popular feature of Power BI for organizations with Premium access. Power BI deployment pipelines allow organizations to easily develop and test content in siloed environments before deploying the content to users, which sets Power BI apart from other BI tools. Also, Power BI has a higher degree of customization for creating aesthetic reports. 

Conclusion

There is no perfect BI tool for every use case. When assessing which tool is best for your organization, you need to decide what is important to you. Do you want more bells and whistles? Or, do you want an intuitive, lightweight, and scalable tool? 

We usually suggest organizations consider using QuickSight as their primary BI tool, but Power BI has its benefits as well! If you need any help designing your BI infrastructure or migrating across tools, West Loop Strategy is here to help. Please, don’t hesitate to reach out if we can be of assistance!

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