business intelligence tools power bi price

If you’re interested in buying Power BI, different packages are currently available with different costs. Power BI Desktop is offered as a free download; Users can purchase Power BI Pro for $9.99/user/month; Power BI Premium costs $20/user/month. In addition, Microsoft also offers a free Power BI trial for those who want to learn a little bit more about this software before purchasing it.

Microsoft Power BI is a group of BI (business intelligence) services and products that converts data from various sources into reports, visualizations, and interactive dashboards. This allows users to share data insights with others who work at their organization or to embed them onto a website or application. Power BI offers effective business solutions with each of its individual elements and provides users with even more capabilities when these components work together.

One of the main benefits of working with Power BI is that it can integrate with other Microsoft services and products and third-party platforms. Users can connect Power BI to Excel, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange, among others. Whether your data is stored in an on-premises data warehouse, a cloud-based warehouse, or an Excel spreadsheet, Power BI can easily connect to these data sources, provide visualizations based on the data they contain, and offer insights that you can then share with other stakeholders. There are several Power BI products, each of which has different uses; Power BI Desktop creates reports, Power BI Services publishes the reports, and the Power BI mobile app provides users with a way to view each dashboard or report.

Power BI is a valuable tool for illustrating what’s happening within an organization in the present. It also has applications for helping to anticipate what may transpire in the future. Because it relies on machine learning capabilities, Power BI can locate patterns in data, then draw from these patterns to predict various “what-if” scenarios. Based on these predictions, Power BI users can create forecasts and work to prepare for different demand patterns that may emerge. They can then communicate this information through data visualizations, which impart key data findings to stakeholders to make more educated business predictions.

Power BI is a go-to for those who work with data because it can be used to input huge stores of data that would be a struggle for other platforms to process. Because this intelligence suite is cloud-based, it provides users with regularly updated algorithms and intelligence capabilities. Those who use Power BI can personalize their experience by creating dashboards that allow them to quickly and easily access necessary data. In addition, it’s possible to create alerts in Power BI, which provide users with up-to-date measurements. Best of all, because this platform can integrate with other business management tools, such as Office 365, SharePoint, SAP, Google Analytics, and Hadoop, it remains a hugely popular tool for those working with data across platforms.

Power BI Pro costs $9.99/user/month. This version is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and includes mobile app access. It also provides users with the ability to publish and share reports. The model size limit for Power BI Pro is 1GB, and the refresh rate is 8/day. The maximum storage is 10GB/user.

Power BI Premium is available for $20/user/month. This version includes mobile app access and the capacity for publishing and sharing reports and paginated reports. The model size limit for Power BI Premium is 100GB, and its refresh rate is 48/day. The maximum storage rate for this version is 100TB.

Power BI Premium is also available starting at $4,995/capacity/month. This licensing version is designed for organizations. It does not require per-user licenses. However, this version requires a Power BI Pro license to publish content into Power BI Premium capacity. It also enables autoscale of the buyer’s Azure subscription to scale Power BI Premium capacity automatically. This version of Power BI Premium includes mobile app access, paginated reports, and on-premises reporting via Power BI’s Reporter Service. It has a 400GB model size limit and a refresh rate of 48/day. The maximum storage capacity for this version is 100TB.

For those who may not be ready to invest in a paid Power BI subscription, Power BI Desktop is available for free. This tool has applications for helping users create their own interactive visual analytics reports. In addition, a free Power BI trial is also available from Microsoft, which is an excellent option for anyone who wants to learn more about Power BI before purchasing the software.

Microsoft Power BI has over 115 million users and is considered the industry-leading BI platform. Companies worldwide rely on this data solution, and the demand is expected to grow as more organizations see the value in collecting data. This versatile tool is relied on by Developers, Administrators, Designers, Marketers, and Accountants, among others, to cut down on risk and errors and facilitate intelligent decision-making. Many professional benefits await those with a background in using Power BI, and knowledge of this suite of tools can open many professional doors.

Power BI’s drag-and-drop system can quickly and easily transform data into meaningful visualizations. Power BI users can create dashboards or reports that present their findings in mere minutes from inputting data. Professionals can easily share these reports with both internal and external stakeholders. In addition, Power BI provides a way for users to monitor and control data usage, providing access only to those who should have it. When using Power BI, users can view real-time data at any time and from any location, making it a popular tool for those on the go.

If you’re not ready to invest in a lengthy course, you can still start learning how to work with data for free online. In Noble Desktop’s free Data Science Webinar, you’ll receive instruction on core data science concepts, such as how professionals can use data science in the business sector and the different tools Data Scientists use when handling data. This 80-minute webinar is a great way to familiarize yourself with the field of data science and learn more about how professionals manage and analyze large volumes of data.

In addition to Noble Desktop’s business intelligence and data science resources, other top educational providers also offer free Power BI instruction. Udemy’s Power BI Quick Start is a free, two-hour course containing helpful video content on creating your own interactive Power BI dashboard. Students also receive instruction on creating full reports and publishing them on the Power BI service. Udemy also has another free Power BI course, Learn Power BI Fast, in which users learn how to create a professional Power BI report in under two hours. Participants also receive instruction and both basic and advanced data visualization concepts.

In addition, Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI is free from edX. This course teaches students how to use Microsoft Power BI in approximately four weeks. Certification is available for those who pay for the course, or students can elect to simply explore the free content.

Noble Desktop"s Power BI Bootcamp is an excellent option if you want to learn more about using Power BI. This project-based course prepares students to use Power Query for data querying, Power BI’s data model for connecting to datasets, and its report view for designing interactive data visualizations and dashboards. Students work with different case studies to learn how to work with various Power BI capabilities and this tool’s DAX language for creating visualizations based on their data. All students have the option of a free retake for up to one year to revisit the material and gain additional practice.

Another excellent learning option for individuals who are interested in working with Power BI is Noble Desktop’s Data Analytics Certificate. This intensive course is offered in the in-person and live online format and provides participants with hands-on instruction with core data analytics and business intelligence tools and programs. Those enrolled complete real-world projects using Microsoft Excel, Python, SQL, and Tableau and have the option of also taking the Power BI Bootcamp free of charge. All students receive instruction from an expert instructor and one-on-one mentoring.

“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).

Power BI is a range of software services, apps, and connectors that work in conjunction to turn unrelated data sources into insights that are cohesive, interactive, and visually immersive. The data may be a collection of cloud-based data warehouses, on-premise hybrid data warehouses, or an Excel spreadsheet. The Power BI tool allows easy connection to the data sources; it also allows the visualization and identification of what is important, and share that with anyone.

The way to use Power BI depends on one’s role in a project or team. People may use Power BI differently according to preference. Power BI can be very flexible for users in this way.

For instance, Power BI can be used for viewing reports and dashboards. It can also be used for number-crunching and generating, publishing, and viewing business reports. A sales professional can use the Power BI phone app to monitor progress on sales quotas and drill into the details of a new sales lead.

Power BI developers may use Power BI APIs to push data into data sets or embed reports and dashboards into custom applications. It is also possible to create a new visual according to one’s ideas and share it with others. One may also implement each element of Power BI at different times depending on the end goal of a project.

As you can see, the usage of the Power BI tool can vary depending on the feature or service that works best for the situation. For example, Power BI Desktop helps in creating reports and statistics, monitoring the progress of manufacturing in a real-time dashboard in the Power BI service, viewing inventory, etc. Based on a Power BI data set, one can also create a paginated report of mailable invoices.

Power BI is a cloud-based BI service that was released by Microsoft in 2014. It uses years of experience in SQL Server, Access, MS Excel, etc. It enables businesses to clean and transform data into meaningful insights by thoroughly analyzing the data.

Power BI has a very easy-to-use interface. Even without prior knowledge and experience in programming, one can use Power BI. Its inbuilt intelligence allows one to choose attributes for reports by suggesting the best reporting element.

Here is an example of how easy is Power BI. After choosing the right data source, when opting for sales and category, the tool will identify the column chart on its own. Similarly, for sales and location, it will pull out the map chart automatically.

The user interface (UI) in Power BI is very simple and easily connects to the data source. On selecting the data source, a simple drag and drop allows the selection of attributes for the report.

Additionally, QA makes it extremely convenient and easy for one to have their written questions answered by Power BI through values or graphs based on the question asked. For example, a question like “What was this year’s revenue by month?” will return a graph showcasing the monthly revenue.

Power BI was built based on the founding platform of MS Excel and follows a similar approach for designing reports. Excel is a widely used software around the world, which makes Power BI easy to pick up as well. Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access database served as the foundation for

Power BI comes with options that make it really easy to collaborate. Users can collaborate with others to compile interactive reports and dashboards in app workspaces.One can even publish them to a larger audience. Sharing these dashboards or reports with a smaller audience is even possible over the mobile app with Power BI.

The reports can be printed by the user as well as exported in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. The reports and dashboards can be published to public websites and anyone in the world can access and interact with them.

Power BI Desktop is available for free and the user can create simple or complex reports and dashboards. Not only that, but the pro licenses of Power BI are quite affordable at US$10 per month). For a larger audience, Power BI has a premium option allowing customization of cost based on usage.

Power BI comes with a wide array of connectors for data sources like MySQL database, SQL Server database, Oracle database, IBM Informix, Microsoft Excel, IBM DB2 database, MailChimp, Facebook, GitHub, IBM Netezza, PostgreSQL database, SAP HANA, Sybase database, Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Analysis services database, Azure Blob Storage, Salesforce, and many more.

Visualization:Microsoft’s SDK in Power BI contains a huge library to create custom visualizations. This allows the users to customize the UI as per their requirements.

Data shaping:Power BI’s Query Editor tool is very flexible and comes with a ton of features. It is self-documenting and offers the opportunity to go deeper in the DAX language for data modeling.

Data modeling:The data modeling options offered by Power BI are very efficient. It is derived from experiences in SQL database and Cube technology, and this makes Power BI a powerful solution.

If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant again, you will see that there are quite a lot of competitors of Power BI such as IBM Watson Analytics, Google Analytics, Sisense, and ZOHO reports to name a few; but, Power BI stands tall in the market mainly because of its ease of use and prompt help available from Microsoft.

Ultimately, Power BI is able to drive better decision-making in businesses through its ability to provide insights in visually impressive and interactive reports. It established a data-driven culture with BI for everyone. Additionally, it keeps the data secure and includes end-to-end encryption and sensitivity labeling as well as provides real-time access monitoring.

A major driver in the uptick of M&A and venture activity are cloud warehouses likeAmazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake. They have brought down the cost and complexity to build a data platform, in a shift away from Hadoop, with BI tools as the catalyst to make data exploration and visualization available to a much wider audience.

There’s a bit of confusion on how these tools work and their use cases. So in this post, we’re helping you find the answers, by looking at the current BI tool landscape and their differentiators.

BI tools facilitate exploration and visualization of data, and for the purpose of this post, we’re only including tools that support the major data warehouse (Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure SQL Data Warehouse.)

Commercial – “Legacy”. Tools in this category offer an installable version of their product or a SaaS subscription. The key point though is that they ingest data into their platform before analysis happens, i.e. they schedule and run an extract of the full data set from your cloud warehouse on a regular basis.

Commercial – “Modern”. Tools in this category query the data “where it lives”, i.e. in your data warehouse. Unlike the legacy tools, they don’t run an extract of your data set and query data on a scheduled or ad-hoc basis in your warehouse.

Redashis a simple and powerful BI tool, suitable for advanced users since you need to know SQL to work with it. Redash provides an interactive query editor for sharing both the dataset and the query that generated it.

Redash provides the most impressive list of data sources from all open source BI tools in our review. You can use almost any data source you can imagine, from CSV to Elasticsearch, and of course the major data warehouses likeAmazon Redshift, Snowflake and BigQuery. You can explore the full listhere.

Domois a powerful cloud-based BI tool with solid data visualization capabilities that integrates with multiple data sources, including spreadsheets, databases, social networks, and almost any other existing cloud or local software solutions.

Qlik Senseis a powerful BI solution. Its Associative Engine automatically finds relationships inside the data. This simplifies the study of data and allows easy combination of any data sources, no matter how large or complex they are, into a single view.

Qlik Sense lets you explore data at any level of detail you need, explore the shape of the data and pinpoint outliers. AI-powered insight suggestions will not allow any meaningful data to escape from you. Qlik Sense also provides an opportunity for you to dive into advanced analytics calculations from R and Python using simple clicks.

Qlik Insight Bot adds AI-powered conversational analytics capabilities to Qlik Sense. With it, you can receive comprehensive reports, ask questions and discover insights using natural language.

Power BI is a business intelligence tool from Microsoft with all the benefits that Microsoft services ecosystem provides. PowerBI connects with the company’s main products, such as MS Excel, Azure Cloud Service, and SQL Server.  Power BI is marked as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.

Power BI interface is simple and clear, it will be familiar to Windows users. Visualizations are created by drag-and-drop. All you need to create any graphics – click on the desired item and drag it to an empty space in the report.

Power BI supports plenty of ways to incorporate or import your data (streaming data, cloud services, excel spreadsheets and third-party connections) and provides a simple API for integration with your applications.

Looker introduces innovation in how to collaborate on BI projects. Each project or data analyses can be saved as aGit project. In this way, you can use the full power of modern version control systems when collaborating on data.

With Integrate.io, Looker users get all the tools they need to optimize their queries running on Amazon Redshift. For more info on how this feature works, visitintermix.io/looker.

Chartio provides two modes of work: drag-and-drop interactive mode or SQL mode. While its UI is quite powerful, it is not so easy for non-experienced users as UI of some other competitors. Chartio has built a visual version of SQL, which enables you to explore, transform and visualize data on the fly through a drag-and-drop interface.

With intermix.io, Chartio users get all the tools they need to optimize their queries running on Amazon Redshift. For more info on how this feature works, visitintegrate.io/chartio.

Periscope Datais one of the new tools for BI. It provides support for different data source connection and data preparation using SQL, Python, and R. It also allows to perform predictive analytics and unstructured data analysis (for example, during the natural language processing).

With intermix.io, Periscope Data users get all the tools they need to optimize their queries running on Amazon Redshift. For more info on how this feature works, visitintermix.io/periscope.

On the chart below, you can see the searching trends for 3 open source BI tools described in this article: Metabase, Apache Superset, and Redash. At the time of writing, the most popular tool is Metabase which is approximately 2 times more popular than its closest pursuer, Redash. Also, you can notice that while the popularity of Apache Superset and Redash remains on a relatively stable level, the popularity of Metabase started to grow in the last couple of months (at the time of writing).

As was mentioned earlier, “legacy” commercial BI tools include Tableau, Domo, Qlik, and PowerBI. Their search popularity on Google Trends is depicted in the graph below. Tableau is the undoubted leader here. Its popularity is substantially higher than all other instruments. PowerBI ranks second. Domo is a little bit more popular than Qlik, but the level is relatively the same. There is no vivid trend for any platform, with unexpected peaks due to one-time events (i.e. the Tableau acquisition by Salesforce). The stable (side) nature of trend for all of these tools emphasizes their matureness in BI world one more time.

The leader in the set of “Modern” BI tools is even more clear than in the set of “Legacy” tools. Looker is like a giant among them. To better understand the gap between these instruments remember that Google Trends displays the relative popularity. Now, Looker at the time of writing has 37 points, while Chartio, Mode, and Periscope Data have 2, 3, and 1 point respectively. Looker had a huge peak in popularity due to its acquisition by Google. The trend is not clear here for any of the instruments. They all remain at the same level.

In this article, we highlighted some of the most popular business intelligence tools. We split them into open source and commercial proposals. In turn, commercial tools were conditionally split into “legacy” and “modern”.

“Modern” BI tools have emerged relatively recently. These tools provide some new value for data users. In many aspects, they are very good and can be considered as worthy competitors to the “legacy giants”.

We briefly described features of each of the instruments as well as tried to measure their popularity and existing trends. We can say that regardless of the fact that there are a lot of BI tools nowadays, there is no “swiss knife”. In each case, a person or organization should consider their use case, estimate what and how they need, which resources are available and then decide which instrument will be the optimal choice.

What I’ve enjoy about using Power BI is that have simplified the process of creating and sharing reports. It’s a very helpful tool to visualize data, and you can connected with several data sources like Excel, SQL and Access. You can share a report via link and you can choose the option that works best for you, like if, everyone that have the link can access to the report or some specific people. The people that have access can view and interact with the report but not modify it. An interesting and helpful feature is mobile layout view. You can create views of reports adapted to mobiles. I learned to create dashboards in Power BI by myself, there’s no need of a full training before start using this tool.

What I’ve enjoy about using Power BI is that have simplified the process of creating and sharing reports. It’s a very helpful tool to visualize data, and you can connected with several data sources like Excel, SQL and Access. You can share a report via link and you can choose the option that works best for you, like if, everyone that have the link can access to the report or some specific people. The people that have access can view and interact with the report but not modify it. An interesting and helpful feature is mobile layout view. You can create views of reports adapted to mobiles. I learned to create dashboards in Power BI by myself, there’s no need of a full training before start using this tool.

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.

You"ve got valuable data. But it"s useless if you don"t use it. A key piece in unlocking the power in your data is using an excellent Business Intelligence (BI) tool. BI tools enable you to create beautiful visualizations and dashboards so that more people in your company can make data-driven decisions.

But there are so many tools on the market, how can you decide? That"s where we come in. We"ve gone through the top tools and have selected the best 11. We"ll run through the major features and drawbacks of each and then give you some questions to help you decide which to choose.

If you want to do more advanced analysis, you can pipe the SQL directly to Python or R notebooks within Mode. These notebooks have the top 60+ libraries for data science already installed, so power users will be able to do pretty much anything they want. There is also an excellent report builder that lets you build fully custom dashboards, and you can share the reports with anyone instantly via URL and Slack.

Looker"s goal is to empower any user, department, or customer to use modern BI and analytics to support data-driven workflows of any kind. One of the huge innovations from Looker is LookML. It extends SQL to make it version-controlled with Git, collaborative, extensible, and modular. With LookML, you can define terms such as "net revenue" or "gross margin," and they will be the same for everyone in the company because there is one central repository where this is all stored. This means Looker is geared slightly more towards a tech-savvy audience than some of the other tools here.

Count"s notebook interface allows it to offer more functionality than standard dashboarding tools.Users can use notebooks to not only build reports but to clean data, build internal apps and produce database dictionaries and other reference materials.

Plus, Count enables users to create queries in SQL or using a drag and drop interface,giving team members of all skills all the tools they need to rapidly explore data together.

If you want superb reporting and shareability, this is where Tableau shines. It permits users to share analyses easily within their organization while maintaining control over who has access. Moreover, Tableau has one of the most robust mobile experiences of any of the business intelligence tools on this list, very beneficial if your BI team does a lot of its work on the go.

For those comfortable working with Excel and the Microsoft stack, Power BI will feel like home.You can connect to pretty much any data source, and since it is used by companies such as Adobe, Gartner, and Forrester, you know you are in safe hands.

Moreover, it is one of the most cost-effective tools on this list and comes with excellent protection and governance protocols. However, performance tends to lag on very large data sets, so you may want to look elsewhere if your data is massive.

It works with any data warehouse and is cloud-native, so you don"t need to install anything on your client"s machines, nor do you need to move or replicate your data. Connect it to your cloud data warehouse and ETL tools of choice, and Panintelligence does the rest. Their site is full of positive G2 reviews and awards, so you know that this tool works well.

However, you are limited in how you can download and share visualizations (pdfs only), and the range of charts is not as extensive as other tools on this list. You can schedule regular update emails but, since it"s all web-based, you can also go to the URL and check the reports whenever you want in real-time.

Unlike Metabase, Redash is geared more towards SQL-savvy users. It puts a big emphasis on their powerful online SQL editor, which lets you browse schema and click-to-insert while also creating snippets that you can reuse in the future.

So there you have it! A collection of the top BI tools on the market in 2021. All of them can make wonderful charts and dashboards to breathe life into your data and help you uncover trends you wouldn"t have seen otherwise.

While we"ve summarized each tool"s main ideas in this article, nothing beats trying them out for yourself. Thankfully, most of the tools come with an all-access free trial of at least 10 days. And, since it usually takes just a few minutes to get them connected to your database, you can test them all to your heart"s content.

The former will lend themselves more towards newer tools like Trevor.io, the latter to Tableau and Power BI, with Mode and Looker being a nice middle ground.

What are you using elsewhere in your data stack? You can use all of the tools with pretty much any data stack. Yet, tools like Power BI and Google Data Studio will fit more easily into Microsoft and Google stacks, respectively.

This is a personal preference. Even though all the tools make charts, not all of them are made equal. Some are clearly more beautiful than others. If you"re a cool start-up that wants to make eye-catching client-facing charts, don"t choose a BI tool that produces lackluster enterprise looking ones.

Some business intelligence tools pride themselves on their community (Tableau and Metabase), whereas others say their customer support is second to none (Trevor.io and Looker).

Thinking about implementing a platform to help you pluck useful, actionable insight from your data? You’re in the right place. In this post, we’re going back to basics to find out exactly what Microsoft’s flagship BI software Power BI does, how much it costs, and what it can do for your business. Strap in.

Power BI is the collective name for an assortment of cloud-based apps and services that help organizations collate, manage, and analyze data from a variety of sources, through a user-friendly interface.

Primarily, Power BI pulls data together and processes it, turning it into intelligible insights, often using visually compelling and easy-to-process charts and graphs. This allows users to generate and share clear and useful snapshots of what’s happening in their business.

Power BI is something of an umbrella term and can refer to either a Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop, an online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called Power BI Service, or mobile Power BI apps available on Windows phones and tablets, as well as for iOS and Android devices.

Power BI is built on the foundation of Microsoft Excel, and as such, the learning curve from Excel to Power BI is not that steep; anyone who can use Excel can use Power BI, but the latter is far more powerful than its spreadsheet counterpart.

Microsoft Power BI is used to run reports and surface insights based on a company’s data. Power BI can connect to a wide range of data sets, and “tidies up” the info it’s fed so that it can be better digested and understood. The reports and visuals generated from this data can then be shared with other users.

Power BI helps users see not only what’s happened in the past and what’s happening in the present, but also what might happen in the future. Power BI is infused with machine learning capabilities, meaning it can spot patterns in data and use those patterns to make informed predictions and run “what if” scenarios. These estimates allow users to generate forecasts, and prepare themselves to meet future demand and other key metrics.

For businesses who want more reporting power and analytical muscle than that offered by Excel, Power BI is the next level in business intelligence. With Power BI, businesses can assemble, scrutinize, and visualize data from across the company, giving them greater insight into their operations and performance, and allowing them to make more informed decisions based on real data.

The platform integrates with other popular business management tools like SharePoint, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, as well as other non-Microsoft products like Spark, Hadoop, Google Analytics, SAP, Salesforce, and MailChimp

With data security a massive talking point for modern businesses, Power BI ensures data is safe, offering granular controls on accessibility both internally and externally

Though business intelligence products tend to be mainly the remit of business analysts and data scientists, thanks to its user-friendly nature, Power BI can be used by a range of people within a business.

How you use it depends on what your role is; Power BI can generate custom dashboards depending on what data is relevant, and what information you need access to.

It’s primarily used by business intelligence professionals, who use it to create data models and reports which are then shared throughout their organization. Not all businesses will have the scale or the need to support a full-time data whiz, however, so Power BI is often used as a self-service tool by various branches of the business to check up on progress and turn up insight into their team’s performance.

Power BI works with whatever data you tell it to, so you can report on pretty much anything. It’s often most popular with departments like finance, marketing, sales, human resources, it, and operations.

There are a handful of versions of Power BI to choose from, depending on your budget, your needs, and how you want to deploy it. These versions range from light use to comprehensive features, free to premium, so users can select the one that best meets their requirements.

You can opt for a Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop, an online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service, a mobile Power BI app available on iOS and Android phones and tablets, or an on-premise version known as Power BI Report Server. There’s also a white-label service for software developers.

Power BI Embedded — A white-label version of Power BI which Independent Software Vendors can embed in their own apps, rather than build their own analytical features

Power BI Report Server — An on-premise version of the Power BI Desktop app for businesses that need to keep their data and reports on their own servers

Also known as Power BI Free, Power BI Desktop is a free desktop application you can install right on your own computer. Power BI Desktop works cohesively with the Power BI service by providing advanced data exploration, shaping, modeling, and report creation with highly interactive visualizations. You can save your work to a file, and publish your data and reports right to your Power BI site to share with others.

So what do you get with Power BI Desktop? Just like paid versions of Power BI, Desktop allows you to connect to data sources to Power BI, with no limits or restrictions other than the total amount of data you can feed in, and how much you can upload at a time. Desktop users get 10GB of total storage in the Power BI cloud, and can upload data 1GB at a time.

Desktop will cleanse and organize data, and you can create as many visualizations as you want; Desktop gives you full access to Power BI’s library of visualization templates. You can also export data and reports to Excel. Using Power BI Desktop, you can refresh your reports up to eight times every day, either on the hour, or the half-hour.

The “catch” with Power BI Desktop is that you can’t share anything with your peers. You can publish reports to the web, but these reports will then be made public, which isn’t ideal when you’re dealing with proprietary business data.

Power BI Service (usually known simply as Power BI) is the full version of Power BI, and is hosted on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. There are two ways to license Power BI Service; Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium.

Power BI Pro isn’t hugely different to Power BI Desktop. They have the same visualization options, the same limits on storage and file upload size, and the same report refresh allowance. The key difference is that with Pro, you can share your data, reports, and dashboards with others privately—provided they also have a Power BI Pro license.

Power BI Premium is an alternative way to get access to Power BI. Rather than purchasing licenses for individual users like you would with Power BI Pro, with Premium, you pay for the amount of space and processing capacity you want to carve out for your business. There are six capacity models, each one with varying amounts of memory so users can choose the amount they need to run their Power BI platform.

Premium isn’t a license as such; instead, you’re paying for exclusive use of a predetermined amount of computing power. For those users who need to create and publish reports, share their dashboards, and collaborate with other users in app workspaces, a Power BI license is required in addition to Power BI Premium. For those who just need to access and consume Power BI content, though, no additional license is required; Power BI Premium will cover read-only use.

There are a few other features exclusive to Premium too, such as the ability to store BI assets on-premises using Power BI Report Server (more on Report Server later), up to 100 TB of data storage, and a 50GB cap on dataset size.

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises server product that ships with Power BI Premium. Report Server allows users to take advantage of Power BI on-premise. For some businesses, uploading their data to the cloud isn’t an option. This could be because there are data regulation laws applying to their particular industry, or maybe they don’t have the necessary infrastructure or connectivity where they are to be able to reliably access SaaS platforms.

Power BI Report Server can be deployed behind a firewall, and is compatible with Power BI in the cloud so that businesses have the freedom to move a cloud-based version of Power BI when they’re ready.

Report Server packs has similar functionality to Power BI Service, though it’s largely focused on report generation, and there are a number of key features that are exclusive to its cloud-based sibling. Report Server users must use the Power BI Desktop app, and cannot work in a web browser. They also don’t get access to dashboards, real-time streaming, content packs, app workspaces, natural language queries, the ability to analyze data in Excel, email subscriptions, or data alerts.

Power BI Embedded allows Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and developers to embed the functionality and capabilities of Power BI into their own apps on a pay-as-you-go, “white-label” basis. So, rather than building their own reporting features, they can simply add Power BI into their products, and Power BI will take care of all the reporting and data analysis needed. End users of the app won’t even know that the app’s analytics are powered by Power BI; it will just look like part of the app.

Azure Data Services enables users to quickly build intuitive apps with artificial intelligence built-in, using a range of tools, technologies, and deployment options.

Microsoft Machine Learning Server is a flexible service for analyzing big chunks of data, creating AI-powered apps, and surfacing insights using Python and R.

Microsoft Analytics Platform System is a data platform built for data warehousing and Big Data analytics. The service offers users extensive data integration, super-fast query processing, scalable storage, and easy-to-use maintenance tools through SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse.

Powered by Dynamics 365’s Common Data Service for Apps, PowerApps allows organizations to create their own responsive business applications with the click of a button. Employee engagement surveys, cost estimators, budget trackers, to-do lists, booking apps; these can all be created for web and mobile without the need for coding knowledge or input from developers.

PowerApps’ drag-and-drop interface enables anyone to build and launch richly functional, professional apps without writing a single line of code. The apps can be easily integrated with Office 365 and Dynamics 365 to gather and utilize business data, and help engage customers.

A sister-service to PowerApps, Microsoft Flow uses the same Common Data Service for Apps to help users build automated workflows that take care of repetitive administrative tasks.

The Power BI service isn’t available as a private, internal cloud service. However, Power BI Report Server is the on-premise solution for reporting today, with the flexibility to move to the cloud tomorrow. It’s included with Power BI Premium so you have the ability to move to the cloud on your terms.

Yes. Power BI has native apps for Android phones and tablets, iOS devices, and Windows 10 devices. Download one of the Power BI mobile apps from its respective store:

In 2018’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms report, Gartner mentioned Power BI’s significant user base growth in the past year, attributing high levels of customer adoption to Microsoft’s “clear and visionary product roadmap that includes vertical industry content.”

Power BI users cited the product’s reasonable licensing cost, ease of use and visual appeal, customer experience, and product vision as some of its strengths.

With businesses now fully acknowledging the importance of a great data analysis strategy, demand for business intelligence professionals on the rise. Here are a few of the exciting, lucrative roles on offer working with Power BI.

A BI Developer is like any other kind of software developer, in that they design and developing tools and solutions for apps and services. They translate business needs into specifications, and work to improve and extend business intelligence platforms to help them better meet the needs of their users.

If you’re looking to add some value to your resume, a certification is a great place to start. Getting certified can even bump up your salary. Techies looking to become Power BI certified should kick off with either the MCSA: BI Reporting certification or the MCSA: SQL 2016 BI Development.

The MCSA: BI Reporting validates skills in using, modeling and visualizing data, as well as configuring dashboards using Excel and Power BI. The MCSA: SQL 2016 BI Development certification validates extract, transform, and load (ETL) and data warehouse skills, along with those for implementing BI solutions using multidimensional and tabular data models and online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes.

To earn the MCSA: BI Reporting, entrants must pass two exams. The first one is Exam 70-778—Analyzing and dVisualizing Data with Power BI. Candidates for this exam should have a good understanding of how to use Power BI to perform data analysis. Candidates should be proficient in connecting to data sources and performing data transformations, modeling and visualizing data by using Microsoft Power BI Desktop, and configuring dashboards using the Power BI service. Candidates should also be proficient in implementing direct connectivity to Microsoft SQL Azure and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and implementing data analysis in Microsoft Excel. Candidates may include BI professionals, data analysts, and other roles responsible for creating reports by using Power BI.

Candidates must also pass Exam 70-779—Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Excel. Candidates for this exam should have a strong understanding of how to use Microsoft Excel to perform data analysis. Candidates should be able to consume, transform, model, and visualize data in Excel. Candidates should also be able to configure and manipulate data in PowerPivot, PivotTables, and PivotCharts. Candidates may include BI professionals, data analysts, and other roles responsible for analyzing data with Excel.

Due to the wide range of versions and plans available for Power BI, there’s a price point for every user. Power BI Desktop and Power BI Mobile are free, Power BI Embedded is a pay-as-you-go service, and Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium are priced according to how many users will be accessing the platform, and how much they’ll use it.

Power BI Premium gives you a dedicated resource for your organization, and as such, is priced by capacity. The minimum capacity level available is “P1”, which costs $4,995 per month.

This model will appear largely to bigger organizations with more users and greater analytical needs. Premium is really only a sensible option for businesses with more than 500 active Power BI users.

Unlike Power BI Pro, which is costed by user, or Premium, which is costed by capacity, Power BI Embedded is priced by “render”. A render is any kind of activity within Power BI Embedded. So, if an app’s end user loads a page with Power BI visuals on it, refreshes that page, or interacts with the reports in any way, that counts as a render.

How much Power BI Embedded costs on a pay-as-you-go basis depends on which “node” you choose to use. A node is a connection point between a system or device and the network it’s connected to. Power BI Embedded’s pricing structure offers a range of nodes, each with a different level of processing power; the more power the node has, the more expensive it is to use.

For a node with a little more power and capacity, you’ll pay a little more; an A4 node has 25GB of RAM, can process 4,800 renders, and costs $16.13 per hour.

Windows Display settings: If your display settings are set to change the size of text, apps, and other items to more than 100%, you may not be able to see certain dialogs that must be closed or responded to in order to proceed using Power BI Desktop. If you encounter this issue, check your Display settings by going to Settings > System > Display in Windows, and use the slider to return display settings to 100%.

Some popular Microsoft solutions you can connect Power BI to include Exchange, Office 365, Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Excel, Cortana, and Teams. Users can extend Power BI’s native connectivity to new data sources using Custom Connectors for Power BI, or Microsoft Flow.

Some of Power BI’s components can be used directly within Excel, bringing the analytical power of the app to your spreadsheets. Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View’s availability with Excel mean users can merge and prepare data sources, create reports, and generate visualizations within the traditional Excel interface.

Power BI can also be connected to other services, such as Salesforce, GitHub, QuickBooks, ZenDesk, Marketo, Facebook, and Google Analytics, with more connections being added all the time.

Power BI is highly customizable, with users able to personalize dashboards and interfaces. Custom reports are also easy to create. Visualize data your way, with our rich library of fully-customizable, open-source data visualizations. With the custom visuals SDK, you can create stunning visualizations, based on well-known JavaScript libraries such as D3, jQuery, and even R-language scripts. Test and debug on the fly, and package into redistributable custom visuals that can be used across all Power BI products. You can share custom visuals you’ve created within your organization, deliver them to your clients and customers, or share them with the world on AppSource.

Are you looking for ways to help you gain key insights for your business? Convert your business insights into actionable data with Power BI. As a leading Cloud Solution Provider, Apps4Rent can create powerful dashboards on Power BI which can be integrated from various databases, apps, and services. We are also available to you 24/7/365 with our free support over the phone, chat, and email.

Power BI is a Business Intelligence platform that simplifies data analytics using powerful visualization methods. Users can fuse data from many sources to generate and share insights using live dashboards and reports. With Power BI, you can connect disproportional data sets, transform and organize the data into a proper model to create charts/graphs that will offer visual data insights.

When you buy Power BI from Apps4Rent, a Tier-1 Microsoft Office 365 Partner, you get more than the product itself. To start with, our dedicated team of Microsoft-certified experts will help you smoothly and safely setup Power BI for you. Post the setup, our technical team remains available to you 24/7/365 via phone, live chat, and email to help you with any issues that you may run in to. The best part, our Power BI setup assistance, and end-user support come totally free!

Monitoring data has never been easier. Power BI requires virtually no setup. You get inbuilt dashboards for most of the popular tools and applications. Now you have all the insights at your fingertips without any training or additional information.

Be it Excel spreadsheets, on-premise data sources, Hadoop datasets, streaming data, or cloud services, Power BI can quickly connect all your data together in one place. It takes just minutes to analyze and collect insights from data.

With Power BI gateways, you can connect to on-premises data sources and keep your data refreshed regularly. The gateways provide the flexibility you need to meet the needs of individuals as well as the organization.

Creating customized dashboards in Power BI allows you to understand data reports using natural language and drag-and-drop in a matter of five minutes. You can quickly find visual answers to your most business-critical questions.

Experience data visually on a free-form drag-and-drop canvas combined with a broad range of modern data visualizations. Combine it with an easy-to-use report authoring experience to enhance the potential of Power BI.

Power BI gives the most effective ROI by pointing out business opportunities to be discovered and worked on. Its reporting and analytical capabilities allow you to easily identify and target your most profitable customers.

With Power BI, get complete control over sharing your insights with others. Get personalized views allowing users to include dashboards, reports, and datasets of the relevant metrics. All information can be accessed on the go with Power BI mobile apps.

Power BI is available at various price points. The difference between the plans lies in the number of users that can be supported as well as the capabilities of the application.

Power BI Desktop is the base version of the business analytics application. The license applies to a single user. Users can clean and prepare data, design custom visualizations and publish insights using the Power BI service.

Power BI Pro includes app integration and embedded API controls in addition to all free functionalities. Pro users can share dashboards and content with peers. Users can also collaborate using Workspaces, Excel sheets, and emails.

Power BI Embedded is specifically developed for coders who want to include the powerful visualizations and interactive reports generated using Power BI on their websites without having to create new controls.

Power BI Premium is designed for enterprises that work with large data sets. I can be deployed both on the cloud as well as on-premises with Power BI Report Server. Get dedicated resources to process data in addition to AI-based capabilities.

We provide you free migration to Office 365 with the assurance of zero downtime and no data loss, using sophisticated tools, which make sure that all data and attributes are transferred seamlessly.

Power BI is a business analytics service that is based in the cloud. It helps users analyze and understand data quickly and easily through visualizations. Power BI features several dashboards and reports that are interactive, in order to make otherwise dull data interesting and alive.

Excel is primarily a spreadsheet while Power BI is a powerful visualization tool. It can help users make sense of large quantities of data often in GBs and TBs. Besides, not only can Power BI be integrated with Excel to bolster the range of functions that can be performed on Excel, but it also can be easily connected to third-party applications and services for generating insights on a centralized platform.

Upgrading to Power BI Pro allows users to share data and analysis with other employees in the organization. With Power BI Pro, users can publish information and analysis on workspaces and shared dashboards. Similarly, reports and dashboards are made available for subscription.

Yes. Power BI can be used on mobile devices through apps that are available for different operating systems such as Android, iOS, and Windows on their respective stores: App Store, Google Play, and Windows Store.

Power BI is very flexible and can be well-integrated with other Microsoft services and products like Excel. Power BI can also be configured to your apps/services with use of REST APIs, which makes it easier to embed analytics of your website on it. In the latest update with the use of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can now pull your data into Power BI to access the data from LinkedIn’s powerful network. You’ll need to have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator Enterprise for that.

Power BI is your first step to explore data analysis in an interesting way. It has several essential features to help you visualize data for quick and easy understanding. Power BI Pro includes all of those essential features and then some more like greater storage capacity, refresh on hourly schedules, live data sources with support for total interactivity, groups, and others.

Apps4Rent offers you end-to-end services in setting up Power BI as well as 24 x 7 x 365 end-user support totally free. We will also help you connect to services with content packs for Power BI such as Salesforce, Azure Audit Logs, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and more. We also assist in creating customized dashboards and dashboard tiles for meeting your specific needs.