Amazon QuickSight

What do you like best?

Low starting cost

The "Spice" concept really makes a difference in computing speed

Transparent pricing

Responsive support teams

What do you dislike?

Everything feels half-baked. It feels like the product team just wanted to try to match features with leading BI tools for optics, but most lack a lot of real utility/functionality. They're just there to fool folks into thinking that it's feature-rich.

Dashboard+Dataset Ownership - Dashboard+Dataset ownership and visibility are managed in a completely decentralized manner. If a dashboard/Dataset has problems (either QuickSight related or caused by a manual change) as an admin, I'd expect to be able to immediately have access to the problematic asset. Instead, I need to spend an hour or two hunting down the owner of said dashboard/dataset.

Lack of trendlines - Completely unacceptable for a data visualization tool.

Lack of support for map visualizations (this review is only in regards to the US) - The US has many county names that collide (their names match exactly), most visualization tools allow for FIPS, but QuickSight does not support it. Zipcodes polygons are unusable as many areas lack polygons.

Emailing reporting - My company needs the ability to email visualizations and reports to ~700 of external customers (mostly banks) on a daily basis, in order to do this, we need to walk each of our customers through setting up a QuickSight log-in, then we need to work with those customers in maintaining their user accounts. While we know there are hacky workarounds that we can implement outside of QuickSight, we don't for security purposes. So at least for our use case, QuickSight itself is cheaper than other tools on the market, but we ended up spending more in the long run to maintain our needs.

Offboarding Bugs - Clearly QuickSight needs to spend more time to QA the offboarding process as each time we offboard an author or an admin, all sorts of havoc occurs and it takes weeks for the tech support team to help resolve the problem.

"Insights" - It's a bit of a joke. They likely tossed this "ML" feature in there to be able to use buzzwords to attract potential customers, but it simply doesn't work.

Buggy

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Like most Amazon products, wait until it's been out for at least 5 years before considering. Amazon has a reputation of going to market with half baked products while overpromising in every sales call.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Problems we're trying to solve: Basic analytical visualizations and emailing these visualizations out to our external customers (banks).

Benefits realized: None so far, I have far more gripes with the tool than positive discoveries.