Amazon Q Business vs Q Developer: AWS's Confusing Q Twins

Wait, let me back up. Q Developer used to be CodeWhisperer - I actually liked that name better, but whatever. Amazon's obsessed with calling everything "Q" now, probably because they think it makes them sound like Google with their mysterious naming schemes.

So now we've got Q Business, which is basically what happens when AWS tries to build SharePoint search that doesn't make you want to throw your laptop out the window. It crawls through all your company's random document dumps - Slack channels, Confluence spaces, that one folder on the shared drive that nobody's organized since 2019.

And Q Developer? It's GitHub Copilot but it keeps trying to sell you AWS services. Ask it how to handle file uploads and it'll suggest Lambda with S3 triggers instead of just letting you use a normal file input.

The one thing Q Developer gets right - it actually knows Lambda functions time out at 15 minutes (900 seconds max). It won't suggest Lambda for batch jobs that need to run for hours, which is more than I can say for GitHub Copilot, which once suggested Lambda for a 6-hour data migration job.

The real difference is simple - Q Business searches documents, Q Developer writes code. If your problem involves non-technical people looking for information, you want Q Business. If your problem involves developers writing AWS-specific code, you want Q Developer. If you're debugging at 3am wondering why your Lambda keeps timing out, Q Developer might actually help.

Who Gets Stuck With These Things

Look, Q Business is for companies where people spend entire afternoons hunting for that one document they know exists somewhere. We rolled it out to about 50 people last year. Three people were still using it after the first week.

The problem isn't the tool - it's that people are creatures of habit. Your sales team knows exactly where to find the pricing sheet in that one SharePoint folder. Yes, it takes them 10 minutes, but they've been doing it for three years and muscle memory is hard to break.

Q Developer is supposed to be for developers who work with AWS, but honestly? Most of us just use GitHub Copilot and deal with googling AWS docs when we need to. Q Developer's free tier is actually pretty good - better than Copilot's free version - but the suggestions are weirdly AWS-specific. Ask it to help with database design and it immediately suggests DynamoDB, even when Postgres would be fine.

Actually, let me tell you about Q Business setup because the AWS docs make it sound easy. It's not.

We spent two weeks trying to get Q Business to properly index our Confluence space. The connector kept timing out on large pages, and when it finally worked, it somehow missed half our documentation. Our DevOps guy ended up having to manually exclude certain page types because they were breaking the indexing.

And the permissions mapping? Jesus. Every data source needs its own permission setup. SharePoint needs one set of credentials, Slack needs another, Salesforce needs a third. By the time you're done, you've got service accounts and API keys scattered everywhere.

Q Developer is way easier - install the VS Code extension, sign in with your AWS account, done. Takes maybe five minutes if you already have AWS CLI configured. I've never had it crash VS Code, unlike that time the AWS Toolkit extension took down my entire development environment and I lost a morning's work.

Oh, and if your company doesn't use AWS SSO already? Good luck. Setting up IAM Identity Center from scratch is like performing surgery with a spoon. The SAML configuration alone will make you question your career choices.

I hate talking about AWS pricing because it changes constantly and there are always hidden costs you don't see until the bill arrives.

As of... let me check... August 2025, Q Business has two tiers. The Lite tier is $3/user/month, but it's basically useless. You hit the limits with maybe 10-20 searches per user per day. Nobody uses this in production.

The Pro tier is $20/user/month, which is where AWS makes their real money. But wait - there's more! There's consumption pricing on top. I think it's $200 per 30,000 "units" but I'm honestly not sure what a "unit" is in AWS terms. Our bill just shows line items for "Q Business consumption" with numbers that don't make sense.

For our 25-person team, Q Business Pro costs around $500/month base price, plus whatever the consumption charges end up being. Last month it was an extra $150, the month before it was $400. Your mileage will definitely vary.

For a 25-person team, that's $500/month for Pro. For 100 people, it's $2,000/month. Compare that to just training people to search SharePoint better or using Notion AI for $10/user.

Q Developer Is More Straightforward (Mostly)

The free tier is actually pretty good. I've been using it for side projects and it gives you basic code completions without hitting limits constantly. AWS says there are "limited agentic requests" per month but I've never hit whatever that limit is. Maybe 50? 100? They don't say.

Pro tier is $19/user/month, which is basically the same as GitHub Copilot Business ($20/month). You get 1,000 chat requests monthly, plus the Java transformation thing that can supposedly upgrade Java 8 to Java 17 automatically. I haven't tried that because our Java apps are ancient but not that ancient.

The weird part is the IP indemnity coverage. AWS promises they'll cover your legal costs if someone sues over AI-generated code. My lawyer friend says it's mostly marketing theater, but it makes procurement teams happy.

I think Q Developer free is actually better than GitHub Copilot free, but that might just be because I work with AWS services a lot. For general development, Copilot is probably still the better choice.

The Costs They Don't Put in the Marketing Slides

Q Business setup is brutal. We had our IT guy working on it for three weeks straight. The SharePoint connector broke twice, the Confluence integration needed custom API keys that took forever to get approved by our security team, and when we finally got it working, nobody used it because the search results weren't what they expected.

Our IT guy quit two months later. I'm not saying Q Business was the reason, but the stress of setting up enterprise software that promises to be "simple" when it's definitely not? That doesn't help anyone's mental health.

Q Developer hidden costs are mostly about usage overages. The free tier is generous until you actually start using it heavily. We had one developer hit some kind of limit on their personal account and got slammed with a surprise $23 bill. AWS sent the billing alert AFTER he went over - super helpful, guys.

The Java transformation pricing sounds reasonable - $0.003 per line over the 4,000-line monthly limit. But our legacy monolith has like 80,000 lines of code. If we tried to transform the whole thing at once, that's probably a $240 overage fee, assuming I did the math right.

Real cost comparison:

• GitHub Copilot Business: $19/user/month
• Q Developer Pro: $19/user/month
• Microsoft Copilot (Office 365): $30/user/month
• Q Business Pro: $20/user/month + consumption charges

Q Developer is price-competitive. Q Business is expensive compared to training people or using existing search tools better.

Does This Shit Actually Save Money?

Q Developer: If you're doing AWS-heavy development, probably. It knows AWS quirks that GitHub Copilot doesn't. For generic development, stick with GitHub Copilot - larger model, better community support.

Q Business: Depends on how badly your document search sucks. If people spend hours hunting for information daily, $20/user might be worth it. If your documents are well-organized and searchable, you're paying $20/user to avoid teaching people how to search. Consider alternatives like Notion AI ($10/user) or Microsoft Search.

The ROI calculations AWS provides are marketing bullshit. Real value depends on your specific use case and how dysfunctional your current systems are.