Amazon Quick
Last updated: Sep 25, 2026
Rationale
Amazon Quick, formerly known as Amazon QuickSight, is our tool for dashboarding and reporting through its business intelligence component, Quick Sight.
The main reasons why we chose it over other alternatives are:
- It is fast at querying and graphing.
- It is easy to use, with a traditional drag-and-drop structure.
- It follows a pay-what-you-use pricing model.
- It provides email reports with an in-line display and file attachment.
- It handles large tables without truncation.
- It includes advanced visualizations such as box plots and funnels.
- It has flexible filtering.
- It offers row-level security.
- It works well with dbt.
Alternatives
The following alternatives were considered but not chosen for the following reasons:
Grow
- It replicates the data to its own database, making it redundant and slow.
- Its database cannot handle large amounts of data.
- It does truncate tables.
- It is redundant to dbt.
Looker
- dbt makes LookML unnecessary.
- It truncates large tables.
- It requires an annual commitment.
Preset
- It does not work well for non-time series data.
- It requires an annual commitment.
Power BI
- It is not web-based.
- It is not compatible with macOS.
Trevor
- Its flexibility makes it redundant with dbt.
- It struggles with tables in the order of a million rows.
Mode
- It is not designed for building dashboards but for reporting.
- Makes reusability painful.
- Additional capacities, such as Python notebooks, don't fit our needs.
Usage
We use Amazon Quick to create compelling dashboards for internal use (e.g., engineering metrics).