When we talk about Business Intelligence, everyone knows it is a highly contested market offering multiple choices to go with. Whether you want Tableau or SAS, IBM Cognos, or QlikView, whatever the tool you like to use be at ease as all of these tend to offer improved functionality and features.
Today in this article, we will be talking about the two popular BI tools which have taken the BI market by storm. So let us take a look at both tools and see what each has for us.
Overview:
Both Microsoft Power BI and Amazon QuickSight are business intelligence tools. They both aim to help companies not only interpret but understand the business data in a convenient manner. If we talk about Microsoft Power BI then it is designed for dedicated usage across a company. While Amazon QuickSight is considered to be a lightweight solution and therefore can be optimized for as-needed use.
Power BI is popular with mid-sized businesses and enterprise-level corporations as well why; most probably because of the per-user licensing and integration with Microsoft Office 365 suite.
Whereas QuickSight is more popular with mid-sized companies and larger enterprises as well.
Related: Power BI vs Tableau vs QlikView
Comparison Based on Features:
Power BI
- What Power BI thrives on is the variety and customization capability.
- It is an open-source repository and contains a broad selection of high-quality user-submitted visualizations.
- The sharing features offered by Power BI allow you to show your visualizations to others as well.
- It integrates really well with Office 365 and MS Azure.
QuickSight
- QuickSight on the other hand offers speed and ease of use.
- It is very lightweight and thus runs effectively even on larger datasets and multiple users.
- Similarly, it offers a library of standard charts and visualizations which can be applied to different data sources.
Comparison Based on Advantages (Pros):
Every tool offers both advantages and disadvantages and the same is the case with Power BI and QuickSight. So let us first take a look at the benefits/advantages it offers.
Power BI
- Power BI offers excellent integration and compatibility with data sources. The interface shows the database in the menu view form which allows users to select their data source and then connect to data to begin the analysis and reporting process.
- Power BI stands in the area of finance as it offers a wide range of analytical tools. With that, it offers fraud protection and compliance monitoring tools thereby making it a secure BI tool to use.
- Similarly, it offers efficient tech support, meaning any issue you encounter can be resolved faster.
- It is quite inexpensive and faster as compared to Tableau or QlikView.
- It offers the provision of APIs which allows developers to club Power BI dashboards to other products.
- Discover the secrets to Mastering Financial Reporting in Power BI in our expert-written piece.
QuickSight
- With AWS QuickSight, you can integrate different data sources like Apache Spark, Redshift, and Amazon Aura.
- It offers visualization recommendations for the presented data. It has a feature named “AutoGraph” that has been built using a certain set of algorithms and learns the data first and then recommends the appropriate or most relevant graphs.
- The SPICE Engine requires no prior setups and thus can be activated easily. This also shows that all the users can work on the interactive analysis with data sources in the AWS side-by-side. And that is how QuickSight manages to offer a reliable and faster work environment.
- Similarly, the overall installation of QuickSight is a little less complicated than other BI tools. Meaning it can be done in an hour or less.
- Furthermore, QuickSight as compared to other BI tools has been proven to be cost-friendly why because users are charged on the basis of usage only.
Related: Power BI vs Google Data Studio
Comparison Based on Disadvantages (Cons):
Power BI
- Unlike QuickSight, the installation process of Power BI is rather difficult. But if you are in Windows 10 environment then the situation is otherwise.
- The most unfortunate thing about Power BI is that report sharing is now paid and has a license which was not the case in 2017 that is; it was free.
- Power BI makes it challenging to deploy dashboards into production.
- Similarly, MySQL systems face setbacks and show inconsistencies most of the time.
QuickSight
- As of this point, QuickSight is only available on web browsers and that too as an iOS app. So, all Android mobile users would face a setback if they ever have to work with QuickSight. But the good news is that support for Android is expected soon.
- Many users have reported database issues.
- Even though QuickSight offers better visualizations yet this tool has limited options when choosing graphs or charts.
- Similarly, there are some functionality and security issues reported by users most probably due to limited support or updates.
- Even though QuickSight is an amazing tool but since it is new so it has to work on improving features to make a good impact in the BI environment.
Comparison Based on Pricing:
If we talk about pricing then Power BI offers two packages;
Power BI Pro:
With Pro, you have to pay $9.99 a month.
Power BI Premium:
- Premium package comes at $20 per user per month.
- and from $4,995 per capacity per month.
For further details, you can click here.
QuickSight
- The Amazon QuickSight reader session is charged at $0.30 per 30-minute session and the maximum charges are $5 per reader in a month.
- With that, it offers multiple pricing packages for which you need to click here.
Conclusion:
Both the Business Intelligence tools Power BI and QuickSight are no doubt very effective and serve different purposes for different organizations. It just depends on the organization as to what features they require and how much they are willing to pay to use these tools.
