The short answer
Amazon Quick Suite is broader than Amazon Q Business, and the migration is a rebuild for anything beyond plain search. Bring Your Own Index moves your existing Q Business index across in a day and Q Business keeps running in parallel, but BYOI is capped at two indexes per region on a quota that cannot be increased, and it excludes Q Apps, Actions and guardrails. Q Apps must be recreated as Quick Flows. Pricing changes shape too: Q Business was $3 or $20 per user plus hourly index units, while Quick's Professional and Enterprise tiers add a $250 per account per month infrastructure fee.
Last updated: July 2026. Source: AWS, Amazon Q Business availability change and migration guidance, Amazon Q Business pricing, Amazon Quick Suite pricing.
AWS has told Amazon Q Business customers where to go next, and the destination is Amazon Quick, usually written Amazon Quick Suite. The recommendation is stated plainly in the migration documentation: customers should "migrate their Q Business applications and implement any new generative or agentic AI solutions on Amazon Quick."
What the recommendation does not convey is scope. This is not a rename or a console refresh. Quick is a different and considerably wider product, and the migration ranges from genuinely easy to a multi-sprint project depending on what you built. Here is the comparison, drawn from AWS's own documentation and pricing pages.
What is the difference between Amazon Q Business and Amazon Quick Suite?
Q Business was a focused product: connect your enterprise data sources, index them, and give employees a chat interface that answers from that content with permissions respected. One job, done inside AWS.
Quick is a platform. AWS describes it as a unified system covering "documents, enterprise applications, databases, data warehouses, and real-time internet information," and the component list is long: Quick Sight for interactive data visualization, Flows for workflow automation, Automate for business process automation, Research for in-depth analysis, Spaces for aggregating files, dashboards, topics and knowledge bases, and Apps for interactive applications, plus mobile and desktop clients.
If your Q Business deployment was an answer engine, you are moving to something that also wants to build dashboards, run multi-step workflows and act on your behalf. That is an upgrade if you wanted those things, and scope creep if you did not.
Amazon Q Business vs Amazon Quick Suite: the comparison table
| Dimension | Amazon Q Business | Amazon Quick Suite |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Closed to new customers from July 31, 2026 | Open, and the recommended destination |
| Scope | Enterprise search and chat over connected data sources | Chat, agents, Flows, Automate, Research, Spaces, plus QuickSight BI |
| Per-user price | Lite $3/user/mo, Pro $20/user/mo | Free $0, Plus $20/user/mo annual, Professional $20/user/mo, Enterprise $40/user/mo |
| Infrastructure charge | Index units billed hourly: starter $0.140/hr, enterprise $0.264/hr | $250 per account per month on Professional and Enterprise; none on Free or Plus |
| Usage metering | Multimedia: $0.003/image, $0.006/min audio, $0.050/min video | Monthly agent hours per tier, $3 per agent hour overage, $5/GB/mo storage overage |
| Index capacity | About 20,000 documents or 200 MB extracted text per unit | Pooled per user: 50 GB on Professional, 25 GB on Enterprise |
| Document-level ACLs | Index-level ACLs plus a centralized User Store | S3, Confluence Cloud, SharePoint and Google Drive only; must be enabled at knowledge base creation and cannot be changed later |
| Connectors beyond the native list | Native connector catalogue plus custom connectors | MCP integrations, which cannot serve as knowledge base data sources |
| Roadmap | Frozen: new feature requests no longer considered | Active |
The easy part: Bring Your Own Index
Credit where it is due, AWS designed a sensible on-ramp. Bring Your Own Index lets you attach your existing Q Business index to Quick as a knowledge base without reconnecting a single data source or rebuilding the index. You create a knowledge base in the Quick console, select Amazon Q Business as the source, pick the index and save.
Critically, AWS states this "does not affect your existing Q Business application in any way." Your Q Business chat profile is replicated in Quick and both run side by side, so you can evaluate with real content and real users before committing to anything. For a first step, that is genuinely low risk and worth doing early.
The constraints are worth knowing before you architect around it. You can connect a maximum of two Q Business indexes per region, and AWS is explicit that this quota cannot be increased. Once indexes are selected and saved they cannot be directly unselected. A connected Q Business index knowledge base cannot be modified the way native Quick knowledge bases can. And only the document types Q Business supported are supported in the connected index.
The hard part: what does not come across
BYOI moves your index. It does not move the application you built on top of it.
Q Apps are excluded. They must be recreated as Quick Flows. AWS's documented approach is inventive, if unusual for enterprise migration guidance: open the Q App, use the Quick browser extension to analyze the page, and prompt Quick to generate a description that recreates it as a Flow, then paste that into the Flows builder and iterate in Run Mode. It works, but it is a per-app manual exercise with tuning, not a bulk conversion. AWS also notes that some Q App features such as forms "are not yet available in Quick Flows," so a form-driven Q App may have no clean destination yet.
Guardrails and Actions are excluded. Your global controls, topic-level controls, blocked phrases and custom action configurations do not transfer through BYOI. AWS's stated workaround is to recreate content governance using Quick's native configuration and migrate action workflows to Quick Flows. If your Q Business rollout passed a compliance review on the strength of its guardrails, plan to redo that review.
The User Store does not exist in Quick. Q Business gave you a centralized user store for managing users and groups across data sources. In Quick, AWS writes, "user management operates at the knowledge base level rather than through a centralized user store." The workaround is IAM Identity Center groups plus Space-level sharing, organizing knowledge bases by team or role. That is a different administrative model, and for large organizations it is a design exercise rather than a settings change.
Connectors and the MCP gap
Some Q Business connectors have no native Quick equivalent. AWS's answer is the Model Context Protocol, with Quick acting as an MCP client connecting to remote MCP servers. There is a four-step console wizard, and AWS lists validated MCP integrations for Visier, HuggingFace, Intercom, Linear and PagerDuty Advance.
The limitation that decides whether this helps you is stated clearly and deserves emphasis: MCP integrations "provide action capabilities (querying, invoking APIs) but cannot be used as knowledge base data sources for document indexing." So if you were indexing a system through a Q Business connector and Quick has no native equivalent, MCP does not solve your problem. It lets Quick take actions in that system, not search it.
Four more constraints apply to MCP integrations: a fixed 60 second timeout that fails with an HTTP 424, no support for custom HTTP headers, static tool lists that require deleting and recreating the integration to pick up server-side changes, and no step-up authorization. Teams that already run their own integration layer between systems will find this familiar territory, and many prefer to keep that plumbing separate rather than couple it to whichever assistant they happen to be using this year.
How the cost comparison actually works out
The two products bill on different shapes, so a per-user comparison alone will mislead you. Take a hundred people as a worked example.
On Q Business Pro: 100 seats at $20 is $2,000 per month, plus one enterprise index unit at $0.264 per hour, which is roughly $193 per month. Call it about $2,193 before multimedia processing or extra capacity. If your corpus exceeds roughly 20,000 documents or 200 MB of extracted text you add units, and the infrastructure line grows.
On Quick Professional: 100 seats at $20 is $2,000, plus the $250 per account per month infrastructure fee, so about $2,250. Close enough to be a wash at this size. On Quick Enterprise, which is the tier you need if you want to configure integrations at all, 100 seats at $40 is $4,000 plus $250, so about $4,250, roughly double.
That Enterprise requirement is the detail to check against your own plan. AWS states that "configuring integrations requires an Enterprise subscription," covering action connectors, knowledge base setup and integration management, while Professional users can only use integrations that have been shared with them. If your administrators need to build knowledge bases, at least those seats have to be Enterprise.
Then add the metered layer: agent hours are capped per tier at 4 per month on Professional and 8 on Enterprise, with overage at $3 per agent hour, and storage beyond your allocation runs $5 per GB per month. Neither of those existed in the Q Business model, and both make the bill harder to forecast. Anyone who has watched a usage-metered cloud line item drift knows this is where budgets quietly break, which is why it is worth putting the same discipline on it that you would put on any other cloud and SaaS spend line.
Frequently asked questions
Is Amazon Quick Suite the same as Amazon Q Business?
No. AWS calls Quick "the next evolution of Amazon Q Business," but it is a broader platform rather than a renamed version. Quick adds Flows for workflow automation, Automate, Research, Spaces and QuickSight for analytics on structured data, alongside the chat and knowledge base capabilities that Q Business provided.
How long does migrating from Q Business to Quick Suite take?
The index itself can move in under a day using Bring Your Own Index, which attaches your existing Q Business index to Quick without reconnecting data sources. The rest depends on what you built. Recreating Q Apps as Quick Flows, rebuilding guardrails, and reproducing per-user access controls on a non-IAM-Identity-Center setup are each separate pieces of work.
Do I lose anything migrating from Q Business to Quick Suite?
Several things do not transfer through BYOI. Q Apps, Actions and Q Business chat guardrails are all excluded and must be recreated. The centralized User Store has no equivalent, since Quick manages users at the knowledge base level. Some Q App features such as forms are not yet supported in Quick Flows.
Is Amazon Quick Suite more expensive than Amazon Q Business?
At the Professional tier it is roughly comparable: about $2,250 per month for 100 users versus about $2,193 on Q Business Pro with one enterprise index unit. Quick Enterprise at $40 per user plus the $250 account fee is roughly double. Quick also meters agent hours at $3 per hour over your allowance and storage at $5 per GB per month, which Q Business did not.
Do I have to migrate to Amazon Quick Suite?
No. AWS has published no shutdown date for Q Business and it remains fully supported with bug fixes and security updates, so there is no forced deadline. Quick is the recommended path if you are staying inside AWS. Since you are being asked to re-platform anyway, it is a reasonable moment to compare alternatives to Amazon Quick Suite rather than migrate by default.
The decision underneath the migration
Every migration is a chance to ask whether you are solving the right problem. AWS is offering you a wider platform, priced with an account fee and metered agent hours, in exchange for a rebuild of your apps, guardrails and in some configurations your access model. For teams who want agents and BI in one place, that trade is good.
For teams whose real requirement was always "let people find the answer without asking three colleagues," it is worth pricing the narrower option. InSearch does that one job: a single query across Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce, a written answer with inline citations to the exact source documents, and item-level permissions inherited from each app and enforced at query time for every user regardless of how they sign in. No index to bring, no Flows to rebuild, no account fee. Ask it something in the box above.