Updated October 25, 2026
· ~2 min read
Power BI is the default BI tool in most Microsoft companies, and its pricing changed twice recently: Pro rose to $14 a user per month in April 2025, and Premium capacity is moving to Fabric F SKUs. Amazon Quick Sight is AWS's BI tool, priced per user with very cheap readers. For a company whose data is on AWS, the comparison is worth running.
Power BI's strengths are its modelling language (DAX), Power Query, Excel integration and the number of analysts who already use it. Retraining is a real cost of switching. Quick Sight's strengths are AWS-native access (IAM, VPC connections to Redshift and RDS, Athena over S3), per-session or very cheap reader pricing, and embedding dashboards in customer-facing applications without per-viewer licences. The Pro tiers on both sides add natural-language questions and generated summaries. Price those only for the people who will use them.
Question 1 of 2
Are your analysts already fluent in Power BI?
**Power BI:** the richer authoring tool, a huge base of people who already know it, and deep Excel and Microsoft 365 integration. The right default in a Microsoft shop. **Quick Sight:** much cheaper for large numbers of viewers, native to AWS data sources and IAM, and easy to embed in applications. Authoring is less flexible than Power BI Desktop. Many companies run both: Power BI for analysts, Quick Sight for embedded and widely shared operational dashboards.
Reporting Modernization: SSRS, Power BI Premium and Fabric
SSRS has no new versions after SQL Server 2025 and Power BI Premium capacity is moving to Fabric F SKUs. We inventory what is actually used, size the right capacity or licences, and move reports to Power BI, Fabric or Amazon Quick Sight on the data you already have.
AWS Data Lakehouse Platform
A production data lakehouse on AWS (S3-backed data lake with Glue, Iceberg, Athena, and Redshift) structured for analytics, ML feature stores, and governed data sharing.
We work with startups and growing companies on AWS architecture decisions. Tell us about your situation and we will recommend the right approach.
As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.