Choosing the right type of embedding for your use case

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If you want to embed Quick Sight into your application, you’ll find that Amazon Quick Sight provides a variety of options:

  1. You can embed a whole dashboard,
  2. Or just a single visual,
  3. Or the Quick Sight Q bar to allow your users to ask questions with natural language.
  4. You can also embed the Quick Sight console to allow your authors to create their own dashboards from within your application.

A big question asked by our customers is whether they should choose anonymous embedding or user-based embedding.
If you have the same question, then this article walks through some of the things you need to consider as you make that decision.

Let’s start with the difference between anonymous and user-based embedding.

Simply put, anonymous embedding is for when your application doesn’t need a registered Quick Sight user to access Quick Sight content.

This could mean that you don’t manage your users at all (in the case where you are providing your dashboard on a public facing website for anyone to consume).
Or, it could mean that you manage your users logging into your application but you don’t want or need to additionally manage your users in Quick Sight.

User-based embedding is for when your users accessing Quick Sight content are managed in Quick Sight.

So how do you know if you need to manage your users in Quick Sight?

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Let’s start with the questions around the features you want to use.

  • If you want to allow your customers to create their own dashboards within your application, you’ll need user based embedding as only registered Authors can create and own assets in Quick Sight.

  • On the security side, if you want to use column-level security, then users need to exist within Quick Sight.

    • Note that, fine-grained row-level security (that allows you to create AND and OR logic in your rules) is now supported for both user-based and tag-based RLS, with tag-based rules supporting anonymous embedding use-cases

  • In terms of cost optimisation, a new Quick Sight pricing model was announced on 30th April 2024.

    • Quick Sight subscriptions created prior to 1st May 2024 are billed according to the previous user-based pricing model ($0.30 per session, up to a maximum of $5 per month per user, or $10 for Readers with Q), unless a request has been made to upgrade to the new pricing model
    • The new user pricing model is fixed for Quick Sight Readers at $3 per month per user ($20 per month for Reader Pro), so regardless of usage, the cost is based on the number of users
      • Note that, all Quick Sight subscriptions will be transitioned to the new pricing model on 1st May 2025
    • The alternative to user-based pricing is capacity pricing, with commitment plans that can provide lower per session costs. However, with capacity pricing, reader costs are not capped, therefore higher than expected usage could result in greater cost.
    • Please refer to the Quick Sight pricing page to help estimate your monthly spend.

  • Finally, your cost analysis may reveal that one pricing model is preferred to the other. For example, if you have a small number of readers, capacity pricing may not be cost-optimal. However, if your application is large-scale and supports many users, capacity pricing can deliver lower prices per session and also avoids the overhead of managing users in Quick Sight.

For further information about how to embed Quick Sight, please review these resources:

See also these videos from the Amazon Quick Sight YouTube Channel

Many Thanks,
Andrew & Steph

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