Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky, behind only the moon, with a magnitude of -4.8. The Moon tops it at -12.74 at its brightest and the Sun is a whopping -26.74. the brightest visible star is Sirius with 'only' -1.46 magnitude.
Venus appears so bright because the clouds in its atmosphere reflect about 70% of sunlight back into space - it has an albedo of 0.75 (albedo is a measurement of reflectivity)!
It's not as obvious in the photo just how much it is to the naked eye, so I've blown up part of the image to illustrate - pure white!
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