When I reviewed self-service exploratory business intelligence (BI) products in 2015, I covered the strengths and weaknesses of Tableau 9.0, Qlik Sense 2.0, and Microsoft Power BI. As I pointed out at the time, these three products offer a range of data access, discovery, and visualization capabilities at a range of prices, with Tableau the most capable and expensive, Qlik Sense in the middle, and Power BI the least capable but a very good value.

A new entry, Amazon QuickSight, runs entirely in the AWS cloud, has good access to Amazon data sources and fair access to other data sources, and offers basic analysis and data manipulation at a basic price. Of the three products I reviewed in 2015, QuickSight most closely resembles Power BI, only without the dependence on a desktop product to create data sets—or the level of analysis power provided by the Power BI Desktop/Service combination.