Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Grafana VS Amazon QuickSight

Compare Grafana VS Amazon QuickSight and see what are their differences

Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Amazon QuickSight logo Amazon QuickSight

Fast, easy to use business analytics at 1/10th the cost of traditional BI solutions
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Amazon QuickSight Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-01

Grafana features and specs

  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages of Grafana

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.

Amazon QuickSight features and specs

  • Scalability
    Amazon QuickSight is built on the AWS cloud infrastructure, ensuring it can scale seamlessly with your data needs, from small projects to large enterprise deployments.
  • Integration with AWS Services
    QuickSight easily integrates with other AWS services like S3, Redshift, and RDS, making it a natural choice for organizations already using AWS.
  • Pay-per-Session Pricing
    QuickSight offers a pay-per-session pricing model, which can be cost-effective for organizations with variable or infrequent usage patterns.
  • Machine Learning Insights
    QuickSight includes machine learning capabilities to automatically detect anomalies, forecast trends, and offer deeper insights with minimal manual intervention.
  • Ease of Use
    The platform offers a user-friendly interface that allows users to create and share interactive dashboards and visualizations without extensive technical expertise.
  • Security
    QuickSight follows strong security protocols, benefitting from AWS's comprehensive compliance certifications and data protection mechanisms.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon QuickSight

  • Customization Limitations
    Some users find that QuickSight lacks the depth of customization options available in other BI tools, which can be limiting for highly specialized reporting needs.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While basic features are user-friendly, mastering advanced functionalities and integrations can require a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues
    Some users have reported performance lags, especially when handling large datasets or running complex queries.
  • Limited Visualization Options
    QuickSight offers fewer visualization types compared to competitors like Tableau or Power BI, which can be restrictive for some users.
  • Dependence on AWS
    QuickSight works best within the AWS ecosystem, which may not be ideal for organizations using a variety of cloud providers.
  • Cost Management
    Although the pay-per-session model can be cost-effective, it can also become expensive if not carefully managed, especially in larger organizations with frequent access needs.

Analysis of Grafana

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Grafana is generally considered to be a good choice for users looking for a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly data visualization tool. Its ability to integrate with numerous data sources and its rich feature set make it a popular choice among developers, engineers, and IT operations teams.

Why this product is good

  • Grafana is widely regarded as a robust and versatile open-source data visualization and monitoring platform. It supports a wide range of data sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and many others, making it highly adaptable for various use cases. Grafana's intuitive and interactive dashboards allow users to visually track the performance and health of their system in real-time, enhance operational efficiency, and facilitate better decision-making. Its strong community support, frequent updates, and rich plugin ecosystem further contribute to its reputation as a reliable tool for monitoring and analytics.

Recommended for

    Grafana is particularly recommended for IT professionals, data analysts, and engineers who need to monitor and visualize large datasets in real-time. It's ideal for organizations running complex systems or applications that require comprehensive monitoring to ensure uptime and performance are maintained. Additionally, Grafana is suitable for teams that value open-source solutions and require a platform that can integrate with multiple data sources and adapt to various monitoring needs.

Analysis of Amazon QuickSight

Overall verdict

  • Amazon QuickSight is a strong option for businesses seeking an effective BI tool, especially if they are existing AWS customers. Its seamless integration with other AWS services, flexibility in handling different data sources, and pay-per-session pricing model make it attractive for varying business needs. However, those without an AWS environment or requiring extensive customization might explore other BI tools for a better fit.

Why this product is good

  • Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service provided by AWS that allows users to easily create and share interactive dashboards. It is designed to provide scalability, ease of use, and integration with the AWS ecosystem, making it a practical choice for organizations already using AWS services. Its strengths include fast data processing, rich visualization options, and machine learning insights.

Recommended for

    Organizations that are already using AWS services, need a scalable BI tool with low operational overhead, and want to leverage built-in machine learning for data analysis. It is particularly well-suited for teams seeking fast deployment and straightforward collaboration on BI insights.

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

  • Review - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • Review - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

Amazon QuickSight videos

Amazon QuickSight - Overview

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to Amazon QuickSight: Business Analytics for Everyone - AWS Online Tech Talks
  • Review - Introducing Amazon QuickSight

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Grafana and Amazon QuickSight)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Business Intelligence
0 0%
100% 100
Data Dashboard
89 89%
11% 11
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Grafana and Amazon QuickSight

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If youโ€™re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels includingโ€ฆ
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though itโ€™s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since youโ€™ve landed yourself here, Iโ€™m guessing that youโ€™re one of those people. Fear not! Weโ€™ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafanaโ€™s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Amazon QuickSight Reviews

10 Best Alternatives to Looker in 2024
AWS QuickSight: QuickSight, part of the Amazon Web Services suite, offers high scalability and seamless integration with other AWS services. It's designed for fast, cloud-powered business insights, making it an excellent choice for businesses leveraging cloud infrastructure.
25 Best Reporting Tools for 2022
Amazon QuickSight is a Cloud-scale Business Intelligence (BI) Service and is available under the Amazon Web Services platform. It connects to various data sources in the Cloud and allows users to combine data from these sources. Amazon QuickSight can include AWS data, third-party data, B2B data, Excel data, and many more. Amazon QuickSight has a user-management tool by which...
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be a lot more popular than Amazon QuickSight. While we know about 250 links to Grafana, we've tracked only 17 mentions of Amazon QuickSight. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Grafana mentions (250)

View more

Amazon QuickSight mentions (17)

  • Best architecture to provide real time data analytics to users?
    Maybe use Quicksight to then dashboard it? https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Being Data-Driven is a Mindset Shift
    QuickSight (business intelligence dashboards). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • tool to display tabular reports out of organization
    Based on your 3 requirements, I would recommend Amazon QuickSight. https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/ Its a Pay as you go model and allows you to scale with your business. You have better control over your assets within and outside your organization. It has Author/Reader roles to control how your dashboards/analysis are consumed. I can help you with quick demo if that helps and potentially help roll out as well if... Source: over 2 years ago
  • AWS Beginner's Key Terminologies
    Amazon QuickSight (analytics) Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that you can use to build visualizations, perform analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. Https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Less in coding job position
    For BI, there are services like https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/. Source: almost 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Grafana and Amazon QuickSight, you can also consider the following products

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Microsoft Power BI - BI visualization and reporting for desktop, web or mobile

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Sisense - The BI & Dashboard Software to handle multiple, large data sets.