Amazon Quick Sight
Amazon Quick Sight — until October 2025, Amazon QuickSight — is AWS's serverless business intelligence service, billed per user or per session, with SPICE, its in-memory engine, caching data for dashboards that must stay fast without hammering the source.
LicenseCommercial
DeploymentManagedServerless
PricingSubscription
Operational complexityLow
WorkloadInteractive
Use it when
- The stack already lives in AWS: dashboards read Athena, Redshift, and S3, and the bill arrives with the rest of the account.
- Many occasional viewers make per-seat pricing painful: capacity pricing bills sessions in bulk, and readers are $3 a month.
- Dashboards must stay fast without hammering the source: SPICE, the in-memory engine, serves them without re-querying.
- Serverless matters: nothing to size and no cluster to run.
Think twice when
- Governance needs depth: row-level security is Enterprise edition only and keys on text fields only, so dates and numbers cannot be restricted.
- Analysts want a real modelling layer: datasets with calculated fields are as far as it goes; Looker or a dbt-based tool goes further.
- The organisation spans many AWS accounts: any Pro tier adds a $250 monthly per-account infrastructure fee, paid once per account.
How it runs
Fully managed and serverless in AWS; each dataset either imports into SPICE or queries the source directly. Connectors are AWS-centred plus Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and the usual databases. Renamed Quick Sight in October 2025 as part of Amazon Quick Suite; the engine and existing API integrations are unchanged.
Details
CompareHow Amazon Quick Sight answers the questions Business Intelligence turns on.
Business Intelligence
| How it works | |
| Authoring model | Drag-and-drop analyses, with custom SQL where needed |
| Semantic layer | Datasets with calculated fields; topics add a layer for natural-language questions |
| Query execution | Import into SPICE, the in-memory engine, or direct query, chosen per dataset |
| Chart library | Over 30 built-in types, extended by Highcharts and custom visual content rather than a third-party plugin marketplace |
| Definitions in | AWS-managed; assets export as JSON through the asset bundle APIs |
| Alerts and delivery | Threshold alerts on KPI, gauge, table and pivot visuals, mailed to whoever set them; Enterprise edition, and unavailable on embedded dashboards or in the mobile app |
| Connections | |
| Connectors | AWS-centred but broad: Athena, Redshift, S3 and S3 Tables, Aurora, OpenSearch, Timestream, plus Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Trino, Starburst, Teradata and the usual databases; CSV, JSON and Excel uploads; a short SaaS list of Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, GitHub and Adobe Analytics |
| Embedding | Enterprise edition, through GenerateEmbedUrlForRegisteredUser and GenerateEmbedUrlForAnonymousUser or a 1-click embed code; the console, dashboards, visuals and the Q search bar all embed, and anonymous viewers need session packs on capacity pricing |
| Access | |
| Access control | Row-level security by a permissions dataset keyed on user or group, Enterprise edition only, and text fields only, so dates and numbers cannot be restricted at all |
| Cost | |
| Billing unit | Authors at $24 a month and readers at $3, or $40 and $20 on Pro; or capacity pricing buying sessions in bulk from $250 a month, which is how anonymous embedded viewers are paid for, and any Pro tier adds a $250 monthly per-account infrastructure fee, paid once per account |
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