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QuickSight

Rationale

QuickSight is our tool for dashboarding and reporting.

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 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 the million rows.

Mode

  • It is not thought for building dashboards but for reporting.
  • Makes reusability painful.
  • Additional capacities such as Python notebooks don't fit our needs.

Usage

We use QuickSight to create compelling dashboards for internal use (e.g., engineering metrics).