business intelligence tools power bi pricelist

“How much does Power BI cost?” is a question that comes up frequently during conversations we have with business leaders who are looking to take their business intelligence practices to the next level via a data analytics platform like Power BI.

We’ve noticed there is some general confusion around Power BI pricing, so here’s a quick article to provide some clarity on the matter. (This information is based on March 2021 Power BI prices.)

Power BI has two main licensing options: Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium. Power BI Pro is priced per user, per month. The Power BI Premium option, however, not only has pricing per user per month, but also has a second pricing option called “per capacity”.

Power BI Premium (per user) costs $20/month and is actually in the process of being made available to the public. Power BI Premium includes all of the features available in Power BI Pro and offers a few additional features to users.

For instance, Power BI Premium (per user) license holders enjoy the ability to create paginated reports, a model size limit of 100 GB (versus 1 GB for Power BI Pro users), the ability to refresh datasets 48 times per day (versus 8 for Power BI Pro users), and a batch of useful and more technical features, like Advanced AI, Dataflows, and XMLA endpoint read/write connectivity.

Furthermore, Power BI Premium (per user) license holders enjoy the governance and admin capabilities of Power BI Pro, but additionally get the application lifecycle management feature of Power BI. Lastly, Power BI Premium (per user) offers 100 TB for storage, whereas Power BI Pro only offers 10 GB.

The second pricing option for Power BI Premium is called “per capacity”. This pricing option is ideal for large organizations who either have large business intelligence / data analytics / IT teams and departments, and/or organizations that have a large group of users who need access to reports and dashboards.

The pricing for Power BI Premium (per capacity) is $4,995 per month. Additionally, users still need a Power BI Pro license in order to publish content into Power BI Premium capacity.

One of the biggest perks of Power BI Premium Capacity is that license holders do not need a Power BI Pro license to consume content. Thus, large organizations can take advantage of this pricing option so that their multitude of users can view important reports and dashboards that are published to their Power BI Premium capacity environment. (As noted earlier, though, in order to publish content, a Power BI Pro license is still required).

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics service that provides a full overview of your most critical data. Connecting to all of your data sources, Power BI simplifies data evaluation and sharing with scalable dashboards, interactive reports, embedded visuals and more.

Power BI has gained popularity within the last several years, but it’s not the only option. You can check out our BI Reviews page, where we list over 50 reviews.

In our comparison of pricing plans, by-quote pricing stands out as it helps vendors custom fit the feature set to your needs. Pricing is almost always affordable to a small business and scales to higher price plans as your BI requirements also expand. These tools are available on a price-quote basis. You can directly contact the vendors to get a customized quote that will surely suit your needs.

A Self-Service plan comes for $220/month. Features include up to 300k events, 1 hour setup call, and email, among many others. Its Growth plan is sold at $500/month, which include up to 300k events, phone support, MailChimp and Optimizely implementation and engage notifications, to name a few. Finally its Power plan comes for $700/month, including feature like 10+ hours of training, advanced implementation and highest support SLA, among many others.

The BI platform is designed to run with any database and allows for detailed analysis and interpretation of business data. The solution’s arsenal of tools and features effectively simplifies creation of both simple and complex reports and presentations. The software also generates reports using data gleaned from any source as basis.

Microsoft Power BI also enables users to track their business with its dashboards, which can be accessed via any device. Its Power BI Embedded has extra exporting capabilities and can be embedded into custom applications. If need be, you can publish your reports and visualizations directly on the web, allowing you to target social media posts and emails.

The platform can be purchased in two pricing models. The Power BI plan, which comes for free, has features such as dashboards and reports creation, author content, data exploration and native Android, Windows and iOS applications, among many others. The Power BI Pro package, on the other hand, is available for $9.99/user per month. Prominent features include all Power BI features, access to on-premise data, collaboration using Microsoft 365 and shared data queries, to name a few.

Microsoft Power BI is a suite of business intelligence (BI), reporting, and data visualization products and services for individuals and teams. Power BI stands out with streamlined publication and distribution capabilities, as well as integration with other Microsoft products and services. But is it a good choice for your organization?

"Power BI," Microsoft says, "is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data and share insights across your organization, or embed them in your app or website." The solution comprises several products and services, and value and versatility comes from leveraging the individual elements, and taking advantage of how they work together.

Power BI service is a secure Microsoft hosted cloud service that lets users view dashboards, reports, and Power BI apps — a type of content that combines related dashboards and reports — using a web browser or via mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android.

Power BI Desktop is a free, self-service data analysis and report authoring tool that you install on a Windows computer. It can connect to more than 70 on-premises and cloud data sources to turn information into interactive visuals. Data scientists and developers work with Power BI Desktop to produce reports and make them available to the Power BI service.

Power BI Pro is cloud-based software that comes with a monthly fee of $10 per user. The biggest difference between Power BI Desktop and Power BI Pro is the ability to collaborate with other Power BI users and distribute reports and visualizations to other Power BI subscribers across the organization (see chart below).

Unlike Power BI Desktop and Pro, Power BI Premium is not an application. Premium gives an organization space and capacity in a Microsoft-hosted cloud to share reports. An organization can choose how to apply its dedicated capacity by allocating it based on the number of users, workload needs, or other factors — and scale up or down as needed.

If your organization has many people who create reports and visualizations, and who don"t share information often, a Pro subscription may be sufficient. However, if you must share the information both inside and outside of your organization, you"ll need a Premium subscription. Power BI Premium is priced based on the number of virtual cores Microsoft dedicates to the service. You can see prices at the Power BI pricing page.

Report Server is an on-premises report server. You can create reports in Power BI Desktop or Pro, and viewers can use Report Server to access those reports on a web browser or mobile device, or they can receive them as an email. Report Server would be useful for a company that has restrictions on cloud usage.

Power BI Embedded allows developers to embed Power BI dashboards and reports into other applications, either within their own organization — which requires users to sign in to a Power BI account — or in an application for a client or customers who don"t have a Power BI account.

How do you know whether Microsoft Power BI is right for your organization? Here are seven reasons to choose Power BI — and one reason you may want to choose something else:

Streamlined publication and distribution. Instead of emailing large files or putting them on a shared drive, analysts upload reports and visualizations to the Power BI service, and their data is refreshed whenever the underlying dataset is updated.

Ability to customize Power BI app navigation. An "app navigation experiences" feature gives report developers the power to customize navigation to help viewers find content quickly and understand the relationships between different reports and dashboards.

Cortana integration. Power BI works with Microsoft"s digital assistant, Cortana. Users can verbally ask questions in natural language to access charts and graphs. This can be especially helpful for users with mobile devices.

Artificial Intelligence. Power BI users can access image recognition and text analytics, create machine learning models, and integrate with Azure Machine Learning.

So, why would you want to pass on Power BI? Well, the online Power BI service — including Pro and Premium — is accessible from any web browser, but the Power BI Desktop application is not available for Linux or Mac operating systems. If you"re in a Mac-only environment, Microsoft Power BI Desktop may not be right for you.

Before you analyze your data with Power BI, you"ll need to replicate data from all of your sources into a data warehouse. Using an ETL tool to replicate data into a cloud-based data warehouse, such as Microsoft"s Azure Synapse, makes it easy to combine data from all of your sources for a holistic view of your business.

You can simplify and streamline data ingestion by using a cloud-based ETL service like Stitch that automates the process of connecting to and extracting data from sources and loading the data into your destination. From there you can use Power BI to perform the in-depth analysis you need.

Our approach is simple, straightforward, and ready to go right out of the box. Try Stitch for free and start getting data-driven insights from Microsoft Power BI tomorrow.

Congrats! Your organization has made the decision to pick Power BI as your business intelligence platform of choice. Now it’s time for the rubber to hit the road—figuring out how to roll out the tool for report authors and consumers alike.

To have the best possible foundation for collaboration, you need the right tools. Microsoft loves to make licensing flexible but ends up with too many options that are just downright confusing.

This Ultimate Power BI Licensing Guide will help you understand different licensing considerations so you can make an informed decision, get the most bang for your buck, and plan your organization’s Power BI rollout.

Publish the report to PowerBI.com within a container called a Workspace, which we can think of as your development environment (analogous to an Editors Desk).

Power BI Desktop is a FREE download and the full-featured authoring tool for Power BI reports. Connect to data sources, build models, and visualize your data without paying a penny. When you save your work, it will be saved as a .PBIX file that you can treat as “source code.”

The Power BI Service (the term for PowerBI.com) also has free capabilities for those with a work, school, or government email. Consumer email does not allow free access.

With a free account, you are provided a “My Workspace” on PowerBI.com where you can publish reports and set up automated data refresh for your own viewing pleasure. The catch is you cannot create an App from My Workspace, but you can share individual reports to others to view if they have a Pro license.

Want to share your report with someone else? GOTCHA! That is where Power BI licensing comes into play. The only way you can see other people’s reports with a free Power BI account is with a Premium Workspace or App. Want to share your report publicly for free? No problem!

It is very easy for website crawlers to find your public report no matter what you do. However, if it is truly for public consumption, the Publish to Web also provides an embed code if you want to integrate a Power BI report on to your website, blog post, or portal…totally for free.

There are countless reasons to go cloud-first for your BI deployment. On-premises data sources? No problem. With Microsoft’s Power BI Gateway technology you can push data up to the cloud without punching holes in your security firewall or sacrificing performance.

Microsoft pushes out monthly updates to both the Power BI Desktop tool and Power BI Service. If you want the most up-to-date capabilities of Power BI, choosing to leverage the Power BI Service is imperative.

Is your organization cloud-averse? Much to my chagrin, Power BI Report Server may be right for you. There are only two ways to purchase Power BI Report Server:

My main gripes about Power BI Report Server is that it feels like “half a loaf” compared to the Power BI Service AND it has its own version of Power BI Desktop (yikes!).

Power BI Desktop “optimized” for Report Server is several versions behind its cloud counterpart. Every IT Department’s worst nightmare is having to support an organization that has both types of Power BI Desktop and must maintain a common version throughout the org.

Also, don’t get the false sense of security that sticking on-premises is safer. I doubt your security budget can keep up with Microsoft’s continual investment in cloud security. The Power BI Service also provides many data governance options that are enticing like data sensitivity labels.

I deliberately will not be going into considerations for Power BI Report Server in the following sections because this is not a true licensing path. You are either cloud averse, you purchased SQL Server Enterprise edition already, or you’re on a shoe-string budget—which are all valid reasons!

Power BI Free is essentially its own type of license. When users log in to PowerBI.com for the first time, they assign themselves a free license and/or start a free Pro trial without even knowing it.

You can turn off the ability for users to self-serve a free license, thus turning off their ability to access PowerBI.com unless they are assigned a free license.

What is the point of a free license? If you have Power BI Premium, that means free users can consume content. That also means they need access to PowerBI.com, unless it is A-SKU Power BI Embedded Premium…more on that below.

A Power BI Pro license is needed for both developers and report consumers to view reports in the Power BI Service in the absence of Power BI Premium. It costs a flat price of $10 per user per month for all the amazing features of the Power BI Service.

Power BI Pro has so much to offer for this price…it is unbelievable. Just look at this comparison chart and notice the only gaps between Pro and Premium are mostly for deployment options, administration, and data science. Notable Power BI Pro features:

Going wall-to-wall E5 for all your users has its price benefits, but you will still miss out on Power BI Premium features focused on delivering Enterprise BI (more on this below). But deciding to go E5 means your organization is committed to self-service analytics.

Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) was a big change to licensing options that went GA in early 2021. Like Power BI Pro, both developers and report consumers need a Power BI Premium Per User License to take advantage of Premium features without a Premium capacity (consumption-based) SKU.

This licensing option provides access to Power BI premium features on a per-user basis. Both developers and consumers will need a PPU license to access the premium features.

It costs $20 per user per month if you get it as a standalone license and includes all the features in Power BI Pro. If you already have Power BI Pro, you’d pay an extra $10 to access all the additional features, such as advanced AI and self-service prep for big data.

Power BI Premium Per User is Workspace-specific. And no…you can’t mix and match with Pro or consumption-based tiers. To start using Power BI Premium Per User, all you have to do is create a Workspace then go to your Workspace settings and choose Premium Per User—easy as that!

Ah…the vexing question of calculating your consumption-based compute needs. Whether you are purchasing a cloud data warehouse in Azure (or any other cloud provider) or Power BI Premium, it is extremely difficult to predict your needed expenditure without empirical information. The need for a proof-of-concept (POC) or starting small at first is critical to success.

Your custom application built to embed Power BI leverages a single service principal Power BI account to authenticate the use of the Power BI Embedded API.

You must use row-level security (RLS) in a multi-tenant type paradigm where one Power BI Premium Workspace serves many clients. Otherwise, you need to have a single-tenant type paradigm where each client has their own Power BI Premium Workspace. The added flexibility to use RLS at the app level is another option—and how I remember what “app owns data” means.

Whether you are in the Power BI Service, M365 app, Teams, SharePoint, third-party service, or your own custom application, your embedded Power BI must use a Power BI login (with Azure AD) to authenticate access for your Power BI free users.

If you have the budget and want to go all-in on self-service analytics and Enterprise BI features, then Power BI Premium is a no-brainer. You get EVERYTHING…and yes, I mean everything even with the starter P1 SKU.

Typically, I recommend organizations to start incrementally with Pro licenses and Power BI Premium Per User rather than unleash all at once. But no one is stopping you from taking the dive!

What differentiates the decision to go wall-to-wall E5 Power BI Pro licenses versus Power BI Premium? Your organization may have both…and yes, there is a reason for this.

Enabling everyone in the organization to have Power BI Pro licenses is centered around the self-service analytics path from data analysts to business users. Power BI Premium enables so much more, including:

Thus, Power BI Premium extends capabilities out to the data engineer and data scientist while also delivering more robust Enterprise BI capabilities for the rest of the user spectrum.

In-context analytics for your business applications allows you to embed reports where they make the most impact on workflow (like SharePoint or Teams). Save your users from having to keep a Power BI Service browser window open and navigating away from your line of business applications.

Power BI Embedded (A SKU) is specifically offered for building external-facing custom applications. But, this SKU can also be used for internal-facing analytics, which opens up a wealth of options.

Essentially you are buying access to the Power BI Embedded API and choosing to have flexibility on how you authenticate users. If your org has app dev experience with .NET, then you will be happy to learn how lightweight developing an app to embed Power BI reports is.

A SKU is the most economical of Premium options because you have absolute control of your capacity expenditure—like starting and stopping on a whim. But you don’t get any of the luxuries of Power BI Service for report consumers. Here is a post specific to A SKU use.

When you purchase a P SKU, you also get access to the Power BI Embedded API…should you want to build a custom application off your capacity in an “app owns data” or “user owns data” paradigm.

More new features are coming out soon, including discoverable datasets, optimized reports for mobile devices, deployment into Teams App, new governance functionalities, automatic aggregations, embed Power BI in Jupyter Notebook, and more.

This workspace can either generate a Power BI Premium App (P SKU), embed to organization destinations with user owns data (EM SKU, M365 authenticated user), or embed anywhere with app owns data (A SKU, one service principal user with “choose your own authentication” method).

Premium Gen2, an architecturally redesigned generation of Power BI Premium, will offer Power BI Premium capabilities to all A SKU licenses and additional perks to P SKUs. This updated enterprise-grade capacity-based offering is more scalable. It also helps reduce management overhead and enhance performance.

Power BI Premium is typically referring to the P SKUs when you read posts in the wild. Less common are the EM and A SKUs, although they have equal merit. Here is the link comparing Power BI Pro versus Premium features for reference.

Your BI Development team will ALWAYS need a Power BI Pro license (yes, even to publish on-premises to Report Server). Yes, the Desktop tool is free to make and open the source code of reports (.PBIX files). But publishing the report outside of “My Workspace” will require a license.

Even if you are using the consumption-based options, authors will need a Power BI Pro license to push reports to the Power BI Service Workspaces where the “App” consumption layer can either be the typical Power BI App, embedded line of business application destinations (like SharePoint or Dynamics), or its own stand-alone embedded application.

Power BI Premium Per User is a great option if your BI developers want to leverage premium features, without the price-tag of going straight to a Power BI Premium P SKU. Premium features your BI team will care about:

The Power BI Embedded A or EM SKU grants you a workspace with a subset of Premium features at a much lower starting price point than P SKU but requires minimum A/EM levels to unlock certain capabilities. For example with A2/EM2 you can use AutoML in Power BI and will need A4/EM4 for Paginated Reports.

With Power BI Premium Per User, Microsoft manages the scaling of the capacity for you behind the curtains (like Power BI Pro) and you get mostly all the Premium features.

It is worth noting that Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User function are on “shared” capacity in the Microsoft cloud. Thus, they are subject to latency issues if you have “noisy” neighbors. Power BI Premium provides dedicated capacity if you are extremely latency conscious.

Take an incremental and empirical approach to choose the right Power BI licensing. Focus on these four variables: volume, audience, features, and use case with a roadmap for scale.

Congrats! Your organization has made the decision to pick Power BI as your business intelligence platform of choice. Now it’s time for the rubber to hit the road—figuring out how to roll out the tool for report authors and consumers alike.

To have the best possible foundation for collaboration, you need the right tools. Microsoft loves to make licensing flexible but ends up with too many options that are just downright confusing.

This Ultimate Power BI Licensing Guide will help you understand different licensing considerations so you can make an informed decision, get the most bang for your buck, and plan your organization’s Power BI rollout.

Publish the report to PowerBI.com within a container called a Workspace, which we can think of as your development environment (analogous to an Editors Desk).

Power BI Desktop is a FREE download and the full-featured authoring tool for Power BI reports. Connect to data sources, build models, and visualize your data without paying a penny. When you save your work, it will be saved as a .PBIX file that you can treat as “source code.”

The Power BI Service (the term for PowerBI.com) also has free capabilities for those with a work, school, or government email. Consumer email does not allow free access.

With a free account, you are provided a “My Workspace” on PowerBI.com where you can publish reports and set up automated data refresh for your own viewing pleasure. The catch is you cannot create an App from My Workspace, but you can share individual reports to others to view if they have a Pro license.

Want to share your report with someone else? GOTCHA! That is where Power BI licensing comes into play. The only way you can see other people’s reports with a free Power BI account is with a Premium Workspace or App. Want to share your report publicly for free? No problem!

It is very easy for website crawlers to find your public report no matter what you do. However, if it is truly for public consumption, the Publish to Web also provides an embed code if you want to integrate a Power BI report on to your website, blog post, or portal…totally for free.

There are countless reasons to go cloud-first for your BI deployment. On-premises data sources? No problem. With Microsoft’s Power BI Gateway technology you can push data up to the cloud without punching holes in your security firewall or sacrificing performance.

Microsoft pushes out monthly updates to both the Power BI Desktop tool and Power BI Service. If you want the most up-to-date capabilities of Power BI, choosing to leverage the Power BI Service is imperative.

Is your organization cloud-averse? Much to my chagrin, Power BI Report Server may be right for you. There are only two ways to purchase Power BI Report Server:

My main gripes about Power BI Report Server is that it feels like “half a loaf” compared to the Power BI Service AND it has its own version of Power BI Desktop (yikes!).

Power BI Desktop “optimized” for Report Server is several versions behind its cloud counterpart. Every IT Department’s worst nightmare is having to support an organization that has both types of Power BI Desktop and must maintain a common version throughout the org.

Also, don’t get the false sense of security that sticking on-premises is safer. I doubt your security budget can keep up with Microsoft’s continual investment in cloud security. The Power BI Service also provides many data governance options that are enticing like data sensitivity labels.

I deliberately will not be going into considerations for Power BI Report Server in the following sections because this is not a true licensing path. You are either cloud averse, you purchased SQL Server Enterprise edition already, or you’re on a shoe-string budget—which are all valid reasons!

Power BI Free is essentially its own type of license. When users log in to PowerBI.com for the first time, they assign themselves a free license and/or start a free Pro trial without even knowing it.

You can turn off the ability for users to self-serve a free license, thus turning off their ability to access PowerBI.com unless they are assigned a free license.

What is the point of a free license? If you have Power BI Premium, that means free users can consume content. That also means they need access to PowerBI.com, unless it is A-SKU Power BI Embedded Premium…more on that below.

A Power BI Pro license is needed for both developers and report consumers to view reports in the Power BI Service in the absence of Power BI Premium. It costs a flat price of $10 per user per month for all the amazing features of the Power BI Service.

Power BI Pro has so much to offer for this price…it is unbelievable. Just look at this comparison chart and notice the only gaps between Pro and Premium are mostly for deployment options, administration, and data science. Notable Power BI Pro features:

Going wall-to-wall E5 for all your users has its price benefits, but you will still miss out on Power BI Premium features focused on delivering Enterprise BI (more on this below). But deciding to go E5 means your organization is committed to self-service analytics.

Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) was a big change to licensing options that went GA in early 2021. Like Power BI Pro, both developers and report consumers need a Power BI Premium Per User License to take advantage of Premium features without a Premium capacity (consumption-based) SKU.

This licensing option provides access to Power BI premium features on a per-user basis. Both developers and consumers will need a PPU license to access the premium features.

It costs $20 per user per month if you get it as a standalone license and includes all the features in Power BI Pro. If you already have Power BI Pro, you’d pay an extra $10 to access all the additional features, such as advanced AI and self-service prep for big data.

Power BI Premium Per User is Workspace-specific. And no…you can’t mix and match with Pro or consumption-based tiers. To start using Power BI Premium Per User, all you have to do is create a Workspace then go to your Workspace settings and choose Premium Per User—easy as that!

Ah…the vexing question of calculating your consumption-based compute needs. Whether you are purchasing a cloud data warehouse in Azure (or any other cloud provider) or Power BI Premium, it is extremely difficult to predict your needed expenditure without empirical information. The need for a proof-of-concept (POC) or starting small at first is critical to success.

Your custom application built to embed Power BI leverages a single service principal Power BI account to authenticate the use of the Power BI Embedded API.

You must use row-level security (RLS) in a multi-tenant type paradigm where one Power BI Premium Workspace serves many clients. Otherwise, you need to have a single-tenant type paradigm where each client has their own Power BI Premium Workspace. The added flexibility to use RLS at the app level is another option—and how I remember what “app owns data” means.

Whether you are in the Power BI Service, M365 app, Teams, SharePoint, third-party service, or your own custom application, your embedded Power BI must use a Power BI login (with Azure AD) to authenticate access for your Power BI free users.

If you have the budget and want to go all-in on self-service analytics and Enterprise BI features, then Power BI Premium is a no-brainer. You get EVERYTHING…and yes, I mean everything even with the starter P1 SKU.

Typically, I recommend organizations to start incrementally with Pro licenses and Power BI Premium Per User rather than unleash all at once. But no one is stopping you from taking the dive!

What differentiates the decision to go wall-to-wall E5 Power BI Pro licenses versus Power BI Premium? Your organization may have both…and yes, there is a reason for this.

Enabling everyone in the organization to have Power BI Pro licenses is centered around the self-service analytics path from data analysts to business users. Power BI Premium enables so much more, including:

Thus, Power BI Premium extends capabilities out to the data engineer and data scientist while also delivering more robust Enterprise BI capabilities for the rest of the user spectrum.

In-context analytics for your business applications allows you to embed reports where they make the most impact on workflow (like SharePoint or Teams). Save your users from having to keep a Power BI Service browser window open and navigating away from your line of business applications.

Power BI Embedded (A SKU) is specifically offered for building external-facing custom applications. But, this SKU can also be used for internal-facing analytics, which opens up a wealth of options.

Essentially you are buying access to the Power BI Embedded API and choosing to have flexibility on how you authenticate users. If your org has app dev experience with .NET, then you will be happy to learn how lightweight developing an app to embed Power BI reports is.

A SKU is the most economical of Premium options because you have absolute control of your capacity expenditure—like starting and stopping on a whim. But you don’t get any of the luxuries of Power BI Service for report consumers. Here is a post specific to A SKU use.

When you purchase a P SKU, you also get access to the Power BI Embedded API…should you want to build a custom application off your capacity in an “app owns data” or “user owns data” paradigm.

More new features are coming out soon, including discoverable datasets, optimized reports for mobile devices, deployment into Teams App, new governance functionalities, automatic aggregations, embed Power BI in Jupyter Notebook, and more.

This workspace can either generate a Power BI Premium App (P SKU), embed to organization destinations with user owns data (EM SKU, M365 authenticated user), or embed anywhere with app owns data (A SKU, one service principal user with “choose your own authentication” method).

Premium Gen2, an architecturally redesigned generation of Power BI Premium, will offer Power BI Premium capabilities to all A SKU licenses and additional perks to P SKUs. This updated enterprise-grade capacity-based offering is more scalable. It also helps reduce management overhead and enhance performance.

Power BI Premium is typically referring to the P SKUs when you read posts in the wild. Less common are the EM and A SKUs, although they have equal merit. Here is the link comparing Power BI Pro versus Premium features for reference.

Your BI Development team will ALWAYS need a Power BI Pro license (yes, even to publish on-premises to Report Server). Yes, the Desktop tool is free to make and open the source code of reports (.PBIX files). But publishing the report outside of “My Workspace” will require a license.

Even if you are using the consumption-based options, authors will need a Power BI Pro license to push reports to the Power BI Service Workspaces where the “App” consumption layer can either be the typical Power BI App, embedded line of business application destinations (like SharePoint or Dynamics), or its own stand-alone embedded application.

Power BI Premium Per User is a great option if your BI developers want to leverage premium features, without the price-tag of going straight to a Power BI Premium P SKU. Premium features your BI team will care about:

The Power BI Embedded A or EM SKU grants you a workspace with a subset of Premium features at a much lower starting price point than P SKU but requires minimum A/EM levels to unlock certain capabilities. For example with A2/EM2 you can use AutoML in Power BI and will need A4/EM4 for Paginated Reports.

With Power BI Premium Per User, Microsoft manages the scaling of the capacity for you behind the curtains (like Power BI Pro) and you get mostly all the Premium features.

It is worth noting that Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User function are on “shared” capacity in the Microsoft cloud. Thus, they are subject to latency issues if you have “noisy” neighbors. Power BI Premium provides dedicated capacity if you are extremely latency conscious.

Take an incremental and empirical approach to choose the right Power BI licensing. Focus on these four variables: volume, audience, features, and use case with a roadmap for scale.

In the market for data analysis tools, Power BI is the most outstanding software, as confirmed by Gartner"s Magic Quadrant that places it as the industry leader for twelfth consecutive year. Power BI is differentiated for its ease of use and the price of its licenses, which will allow you to encourage a data culture in your business. We are official Microsoft Power BI partners.

Below, you will see a series of demos of dashboards at Power BI that we have developed so you can get a first idea of ​​what this data analysis tool can offer you.

As we mentioned before, this tool has established itself as the most outstanding solution in its market. In addition to generating spectacular dashboards, Power BI makes teamwork much easier because you can share your dashboards and the price of the license is very affordable, so all decisions made will be based on data.

Whether connecting to a data repository or directly to the original sources (ERP, CRM, SGA, databases, files such as Excel, PDF, text ...) Power BI allows you to transform your data into relevant information for the decision making.

Every organization is overloaded with data and challenged to turn that data into the best decisions possible. Power BI is an interactive business intelligence tool that allows any user to build powerful reports and dashboards to provide valuable insights into their data.

Using these insights everyone can then make more informed business decisions. Having the best data can mean seeing market trends before they emerge, spotting issues with manufacturing faster, or selling more of their own solution by building in Power BI into their own product offerings.

Power BI Desktop is a complete data analysis tool that allows for advanced report creation. This software is installed directly on your local desktop, where there is more functionality available than inside of the Power BI Service. Power BI Desktop allows you to connect to many data sources, transform that data, as well as create calculated columns and measures for the data that you pull in. Once you have your report created, you can publish it to the Power BI Service, where licensing dictates who it can be shared with.

The Power BI Service is the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)part of Power BI. The Service enables you to publish your reports from Power BI Desktop, create dashboards from the published reports, and share this content with others inside and outside of your organization. The Service supports limited features in report creation, but most of that power is left to Power BI Desktop. Within the Service, you can create apps and workspaces with related content in them so that you have your reports and dashboards grouped all in one location.

Power BI Mobile enables users to securely access and view live Power BI dashboards and reports on any device, with native mobile BI apps for iOS and Android. This brings rich mobility to both your Cloud and on-premises data while keeping it secure through mobile device and application management capabilities from Microsoft Intune. Users with a Power BI free license can also now view and access workspaces where they’ve been added as viewers directly from the workspaces list.

The free version of Power BI is designed for a single user to create ad-hoc reporting and data exploration. The dataset size is limited to 1GB per individual dataset and an overall storage quota of 10GB per user.

Power BI Pro enables users to share their dashboards and reports with each other for consumption inside the Power BI Service – which fosters powerful collaboration and distribution of insights. Like the free tier, there is a 1GB per individual dataset limit. There is a 10GB storage limit for each user, and data can be refreshed a maximum of eight times a day. This license enables users to publish their reports and dashboards to a shared workspace in the Power BI Service and utilize shared processing power within Office 365 (you do not get dedicated compute resources). Power BI Pro is included in both the Office 365 E5 or M365 E5 license packages. Microsoft also offers a separate package for $9.99 per user per month.

Power BI Pro is a great solution for small to medium-sized organizations who are looking to gain insights from their data on a small scale. Or when a customer is already licensed for the Office/Microsoft 365 E5 plans and is okay with the limits in data refresh and storage limits of a Pro License/see below for a detailed chart.

Power BI Premium is priced based on computing capacity (how much compute power is needed) or by users/month. Both provide dedicated storage for your business – up to 100TB per tenant. It allows Power BI Free users to access and consume the data contained in the dashboards and reports inside of a workspace that is on Premium Capacity. So, only Power BI developers would need to have a Power BI Pro license. Both Power BI Premium per user and per capacity offer mobile app access and provide a maximum of 48 refreshes per day for each dataset.

The main difference between per user and per capacity is that per-user gains a lot of the features and functionality of Power BI Premium per capacity without the organizational sharing functionality; whereas only per capacity allows an organization to consume content without a per-user license and enables on-premises reporting with Power BI Report Server instead of being hosted in the Cloud. Per capacity licensing also brings multi-geo deployment management, bring your own key (BYOK), and Autoscale add-on availability – which is currently in preview for Power BI Premium Gen2.

Customers also have the ability to run a Power BI Report Server on-premises if that is their preference. The license for the Power BI Report Server is offered in two ways. The first is included in the Power BI Premium per capacity. The second is included in the license for SQL Server Enterprise licensing when owned with Software Assurance.

Depending on your performance needs, the prices can range, but Interlink can work with you to find an option that fits your needs. For example, the P1 Node, which is the smallest offered, provides 8 vCores of dedicated processing power within Office 365(4 for rendering, 4 for processing of data), 25GB of RAM, and costs $5,000 per month. Customers can scale their capacities either vertically by upgrading the SKU on the capacity or horizontally by adding another instance of Power BI Premium per capacity.

Power BI Premium is for clients who have a large number of consumers of data who are not report developers and/or those that need the additional processing power and storage to work through their complex and large datasets.

Microsoft recently released a new version of Power BI Premium, Power BI Premium Generation 2 (Premium Gen2). Premium Gen2 is currently in preview and is available for Premium subscribers to use during the preview period. You can use the original version of Premium or switch to Premium Gen2 at no cost. You"ll have to beware that this is a tenant-level setting, so you can only use one or the other for your Premium capacities.

Power BI allows your organization to optimize report performance, build customized reports and dashboards, and create customized solutions. Contact us to accelerate business functions and profitability by utilizing data and insights. We can help navigate which licensing options are best for you.

Power BI is a Business Intelligence tool from Microsoft’s “ecosystem”. The capabilities of this tool are rapidly expanding. It may not be long before Power BI is functionally equal to Tableau. Choose Power BI if:

from hundreds of supported local sources such as MS Office programs: Excel, PowerPoint as well as integration with other Microsoft environments (e.g. SharePoint). Also in the cloud – with such services as Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Azure SQL DB.

You may have heard that this tool is free. This is true if you need to link to data from files, build a report and view it yourself. On the other hand, if you need to show the dashboard to others, then you will need Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium. Power Bi Premium is the full functionality of this tool, comparable to Tableau Server.

is a free application that runs on Windows computers, allows you to connect to data, build a report and save to file and publish the report in the Power BI Online service.

is a free report server available through a web browser and mobile app that combines the functionality of Power BI Desktop (without the ability to save a file to your computer) with the ability to share reports, comment on them, set up data refresh processes and more.

enables big data analytics, cloud and on-premises reporting. It has advanced administration and deployment controls. Dedicated compute and cloud storage resources are included. Purchasing a Power Bl premium license allows each user to use all the content of the Power BI service.

In order to freely use Power BI and create analysis it is recommended to know DAX language. Mastering the M language is required to build data models in Power Query. Mastering these technologies is an essential part of the PBI implementation process.

In simple terms, Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics tool. It’s designed in a way that even non-technical users will have an easy time using it.

Power BI Desktop is the software you install on your computer. You can use it to connect to different data sources and make reports out of those data.

Power BI Service, officially called Power BI, is the online version. This is the only version you can use to create Power BI dashboards out of your reports.

Power BI Mobile is a mobile application you can install on your phone and tablet. It’s designed to consume Power BI content which means you can’t use it to create dashboards or reports.

Power BI Pro licenses individuals for the creation of content and consumption. Yes, to consume content made by others, you need to be on Power BI Pro (unless your organization is on the Power BI Premium plan and you have access to the content).

Some think that they could get away by only licensing some users with a Pro license while the rest use the free plan. But that won’t work since to share and view the shared dashboard, the user has to have a Power BI Pro license.

For large companies like those that have 500 users or more, the most optimal choice is getting a Power BI Premium license for the organization and getting a Pro license for all the creators.

Power BI is a robust business intelligence and analytics service that’s price lesser than most of its competitors. For example, Tableau prices almost twice as Power BI does. Among Power BI’s peers, it’s only Power BI that offers a free service that is as powerful as what it offers.

Whatever plan your organization decides to use, what’s important is how efficient you are at using Power BI. Fortunately, there are lots of blogs out there that teach Power BI. If you like, you don’t have to go far since we also have our own Power BI tutorial designed for beginners.

IBM Cognos Analytics and Microsoft Power BI are two of the top business intelligence (BI) and data analytics software. Both of these applications are in heavy demand, as organizations seek to harness the vast repositories of data – with ever more created hourly.

As two highly regarded analytics platforms, users often are forced to choose between Power BI and Cognos. There are arguments for and against each data analytics platform. It is hard to say that you could go wrong with either BI tool. But which is best?

Microsoft encompasses a massive number of associated platforms and applications. Power BI, therefore, offers a diverse set of features that range far beyond BI and analytics. Integration with the likes of Microsoft Office, Office 365, Teams, Azure, and SharePoint is a major selling point. Specific to analytics, Power BI encompasses data preparation, data discovery, dashboards, and data visualization.

Microsoft releases weekly updates to its cloud-based Power BI service. Recent feature additions include AI-infused experiences, smart narratives (NLG), and anomaly detection capabilities. A Power BI Premium version enables multi-geography capabilities and the ability to deploy capacity to one of 42 data centers around the world.

Newer users appear to find Power BI a little easier to use than Cognos. But the AI-powered and Watson-backed analytics of Cognos lower the barrier to the use of advanced data science techniques.

The conclusion: Power BI wins on broad usage by a non-technical audience whereas IBM has the edge with technical users. That said, both platforms cater to beginning and advanced users. Overall, Microsoft wins in this category due to generally more favorable user reviews and commentary about ease of use.

IBM Cognos has tools to bring together a multitude of data sources as well as an AI Assistant tool that can communicate in plain language to get fast recommendations that are easy to understand. It also generates an extensive collection of visualizations.

Both products have pros and cons with regard to the strength of their platforms. Power BI has a fully functional SaaS version running in the Azure cloud as well as an on-premises version resident in Power BI Report Server.

Power BI Desktop is also offered for free as a stand-alone personal analysis tool. Yet when power users are engaged in complex analysis of multiple on-premises data sources, they need to download Power BI Desktop. The on-premises Power BI offering isn’t as rich as the cloud version with regard to dashboards, streaming analytics, natural language, and alerting.

CRM and BI often go together. Power BI integrates relatively well with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. IBM Cognos doesn’t venture much into the CRM territory, although IBM is more than happy to integrate Cognos with other CRM platforms.

Microsoft has an extensive array of integration options, APIs, and partnerships. Power BI is tightly embedded into much of the Microsoft and Windows ecosystems. The company, though, is addressing some integration challenges.

Gartner noted that Power BI’s handling of content promotion and publication can generate administrative overhead. This isn’t an easy fix, which will add manual labor between Power BI apps and its collaborative development environment known as Workspaces.

Microsoft is very good at keeping prices low as a tactic in growing market share. It offers a lot of features at a relatively low price. Power BI Pro, for example, costs approximately $10 per month per user. The premium version is $20 per month.

The bottom line for any rival is that it is hard to compete with Microsoft Power BI on price when it comes to automated ML capabilities and AI-powered services.

Microsoft is committed to investing heavily in Power BI and enhancing its integration across other Microsoft platforms. Any organization that is a heavy user of Office 365, Teams, Dynamics, and/or Azure will find it hard to resist the advantages of deploying Power BI.

And those advantages are only going to increase. On the AI front, for example, the company boasts around 100,000 customers using Power BI’s AI services. The company is also putting effort into integrating with other applications and in making it easy to autotune query performance. Those with an eye on budget, yet still want a rich BI platform, will probably favor Power BI.

Consider, too, the existing sales teams and distribution channels for Microsoft products. With such a huge user base and so many tentacles across the world, Power BI may only be a click away for many organizations.

But IBM isn’t called Big Blue for nothing. It boasts a massive sales and services team, and global reach into large enterprise markets. Cognos, then, is likely to do well against Power BI within the existing IBM customer base. But for non-IBM shops, it struggles to compete with Power BI.

Not only is it one of the most popular business intelligence solutions on the market, but it’s also produced by one of the giants of the technology industry. But is it worth the hype? In this review, we will take a closer look at Microsoft Power BI – and help you decide if this is the best BI tool for your business.

Microsoft Power BI offer a full suite of solid business analytics tools that can simplify the management of your big data. Is your business struggling to make sense of it all? By implementing Power BI, you can easily transform your structured or unstructured data into actionable reports containing data-driven insights. This can take your decision-making to the next level.

A clear advantage is that the software is far from complicated to deploy and use. The easy-to-use interface allows relevant individuals – such as your business development team, your analysts or your developer – to create personal dashboard with the key information their roles require. In addition to the seamless navigation, Microsoft Power BI contains key features, such as:

You might be surprised to find that Microsoft is offering one of the most affordable business intelligence solutions on the market. At the moment, Power BI comes in three price ranges.

The Power BI Desktop: This free analytics suite allows you to connect numerous data sources, clean and prepare data, and create reports. While it lacks a lot of the key features, it’s still a worthwhile choice for small companies taking their first steps towards better business intelligence.

The Power BI Pro: This is a monthly subscription, and it starts at $9.99 per month per user. Fully managed by Microsoft, this self-service BI allows for collaboration, sharing, and ad hoc analysis (in addition to all the features found in the free version). It’s also worth mentioning that the price of this suite is lower than a lot of its competitors.

The Power BI Premium: This is a full analytics suite containing everything a large, data-driven organisation can dream of. It contains Enterprise BI, big data analytics, cloud reporting, advanced deployment controls, and instant access to Power BI content for any users. The premium BI suite is offered at $4,995 per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource.

Tableau is another leading business intelligence tool, and it’s a strong competitor to Power BI. With this solution, you can visually analyse data, create interactive dashboards, and connect to Big Data sources in order to process relevant data. The prices start at$12 per user per month for the on-premise solution and goes up to $70 per user per month.

With Power BI, Microsoft is offering a flexible data solution – with brilliant visualization features – that can accelerate your decision-making. This is also backed up by a very reasonable pricing.

Whether you should implement Power BI, however, depends entirely on the needs and requirements of your organisation. It’s therefore essential that you have a full overview of your current data challenges and future requirements before you sign up for a new solution.