How Much is Power BI? Complete Pricing Breakdown

Power BI is a business intelligence tool by Microsoft that has become increasingly popular among businesses for turning their data into insights.

It draws interactive visualizations out of large datasets, offers seamless integrations, and is the go-to tool for organizations that want to make the best out of their data.

Microsoft offers different pricing tiers for different users starting from individuals to small businesses to enterprises. As different price brackets offer room for every kind of user, they can also be very confusing at times 😵

In this tutorial, I will take you through a pricing breakdown to help you choose the right plan for you.

Table of Contents

What is Power BI

Before I tour you through the pricing plans for Microsoft Power BI, let’s quickly see what Power BI is 👀

Microsoft defines it as:

“Power BI is a unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI). Connect to and visualize any data, and seamlessly infuse the visuals into the apps you use every day.”

In other words, Power BI is a business intelligence cloud-based solution that helps data analytics and visualization.

Power BI offers three main products:

• Power BI Desktop
• Power BI Service
• Power BI Mobile

Power BI Desktop is the software installed on your computer. The free desktop app (like Excel, Word, and all other Microsoft apps).

Power BI Service is the cloud-based or online version of the app ☁

Power BI Mobile is a mobile application that you can run on your phone (with limited features) 📱

Pro Tip!

Then we also have Power BI Report Server and Power BI Embedded.

Power BI Report Server is an on-premise solution for enterprises looking to safeguard their data by keeping it within their infrastructure and sharing it on their local servers rather than on the cloud.

Similarly, Power BI Embedded allows developers to embed Power BI Reports and Power BI dashboards within their applications so users can use Power BI features without having to switch to Power BI.

Both are versions meant for technical deployment teams at an organizational level.

Power BI Pricing Plans

Here’s what the pricing plan for Power BI looks like 💸

In general, Power BI has four basic plans.

• Power BI Free
• Power BI Pro
• Power BI Premium
• Power BI in Microsoft Fabric

Free Account

Yes, you heard that right. You can have access to Power BI Desktop and Power BI Mobile for free.

You can download and install it to your PC and use it for free 😎

Here’s what you can do on the free Power BI Desktop version:

• Create rich and interactive reports with a variety of data visualization features
• Suits personal use (especially as a beginner)
• Allows connecting to various data sources to import data

But this is what you don’t get on the free license ❌

• Limited sharing and collaboration features
• Inability to publish reports

The free Power BI plan enables you to use all analytics features. But the biggest drawback is that you don’t get to enjoy any collaborative or sharing features.

You can publish dashboards to the web but that may not suit you in most cases as it hampers data privacy.

Power BI Pro

The next plan, the Power BI Pro plan costs $10 per month per user.

Power BI Pro users:

• Get complete access to all the Power BI features for report sharing and collaboration.
• Can collaborate and share reports and dashboards.

The Pro version hence licenses individuals to leverage Power BI’s full capability starting from analytics to publishing to collaboration 🥂

Power BI Pro enables users to create and collaborate. So you create your content and also use the content created by others.

Power BI Premium

The Power BI Premium user (PPU) licenses Premium features on an individual user basis for $20.0 per user per month.

Power BI Premium is a higher-tier offering that brings you all the goodness of the Power BI Pro license model together with features such as XMLA endpoints, AI, and other Premium features 🎁

Some of the highlights of Power BI Premium per user license include the following:

• Asynchronous data refresh
• Automatically add compute capability depending on capacity overload
• XMLA endpoints
• Model size limit of 100GB
• Refresh rate of up to 48 times per day

And much more 🚀

The Power BI Premium per-user license works with Power BI embedded in the same manner as the Power BI Pro license does. It is designed to support enterprise-level workloads.

Power BI in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is introduced by Microsoft only recently. It is an integrated platform that brings together multiple data-related aspects starting from data engineering, data science, analytics, and integration to business intelligence 🧵

It is built on top of Azure and Power BI and combines the best abilities of Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Power BI in one place as a unified SaaS platform.

Pro Tip!

As Microsoft says, Microsoft Fabric brings together six experiences:

• a Data Factory-powered data integration experience
• Synapse-powered data engineering
• data warehouse
• data science, and
• real-time analytics experiences Power BI business intelligence

all hosted on a Saas.

This centralizes data workflows and reduces the need for multiple tools. All data experts can now work within a single Microsoft ecosystem 🌐

In addition to the Power BI functionalities, Microsoft Fabric provides you with a unified platform to 👇

• Connect to various structured and unstructured data sources
• Create Data pipelines using Data Factory and ETL
• Use Spark and SQL to build large datasets
• Perform real-time data analytics
• Integration of advanced AI technologies
• Data warehousing functionality

And much more. Moreover, as a Fabric customer, you get access toAzure-only features including:

• trusted workspace access for OneLake shortcuts
• managed private endpoints for Spark

This is not something you’d get as a Power BI Premium capacity user 🤯

Until Microsoft Fabric was introduced, Microsoft offered Power BI Premium per Capacity which offered a dedicated capacity for a variable price starting from $4,995.

But with the launch of Microsoft Fabric under free, pay-as-you-go, and reservation options, the Power BI Premium capacity SKUs retired.

The pay-as-you-go facility option for Microsoft Fabric allows you to scale up, down, and even pause capacity as needed. It also enables users to use smaller compute SKUs.

Under the pay-as-you-go model, users only pay for the resources they use like data storage, computing power, and processing time ⌚

Or, with the Reservation model, you can save money by committing to a reservation for your Fabric capacity usage for a year.

For your tailored pricing structure, refer to Microsoft’s pricing calculator.

Since the pricing is highly variable, the calculator will help you sort it out better.

Which Power BI plan suits you

The answer to which Power BI plan suits you the best will come by seeing what you need from your Power BI package 📦

Here’s how I summarize the licensing options to help you make an informed decision:

• For Beginners or Personal Use: A Power BI free license type does best.
• For Small Teams or Collaboration: Power BI Pro works best as it offers sufficient features for sharing and collaboration for not a very big price tag.
• For Advanced Analytics and Large-Scale Needs: Power BI Premium Per User offers more powerful and advanced features.
• For organizational-level integration: To integrate Power BI with other data-related tools, Microsoft Fabric is a unified solution. The pricing is highly variable though.

The right plan for you depends on how collaborative your needs are, the complexity of functions you’re looking for, and your organization’s size 👩‍💻

Conclusion

Choosing the right Power BI license for yourself, that’s not heavy on your pocket and meets all your needs is very important.

You can start with the free version if you’re an individual or scale up to the Premium version if that sits well with you, Microsoft has a flexible solution to accommodate them all.

But you can only make the right choice for yourself when you understand your requirements and what each option has to offer you.

• The above tutorial is designed to help you learn the features and pricing of each tier. And if you enjoyed learning about different Power BI plans and their pricing models, you’ll surely love the following Spreadsheeto tutorials for Power BI too.
• Top 10 Alternatives to Power BI: Free and Paid
• Top 20 Power BI Blogs in the World You Must Follow
• How to Export Power BI Data to Excel (Step-by-Step)