Microsoft Power BI puts data analytics and visualization at your fingertips with its self-service reporting capability. Its ability to pull data from a broad range of sources enables you to make smarter data-driven decisions. It can help you solve business problems, from managing poor performance and streamlining report compilation to allowing your staff to generate their reports as needed.
Depending on your needs, various licenses are available for you, which leads to a question most frequently asked - which is right for your business? Here in this blog, we provide some answers to help you with this decision.
What Power BI licenses are available?
Power BI has three types of licenses, and the differences lie in where data is stored, how the users interact with that data, and if what you need will require premium features. At a high level, these are the differences:
Desktop. This is a free license that you can download here. You can analyse data and create and publish reports to a dedicated workspace in Power BI. However, you cannot share your content or see others' content.
Pro. This standard per-user subscription expands the functionalities available in Power BI Desktop. You can collaborate with other Pro license users on reports published in a shared capacity.
Premium. This premium subscription allows for per-user or per-capacity (assigned to the entire organization) licensing. You can collaborate with other users on reports published to a shared capacity and get premium features such as AI and paginated reports.
Power BI Desktop vs Pro vs Premium
Properties | Power BI Desktop | Power BI Pro | Power BI Premium |
Target Users | Individual users for personal use. | Small to mid-size businesses. | Large enterprises. |
Licensing | Free for download. | Included in your Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5 license and is licensed per user. | Licensed per user or per capacity (dedicated cloud compute and storage resources). |
Capabilities |
|
| PER USER
PER CAPACITY
|
Price* | Free | $12.80/user/month | $25.60/user/month |
| | | $6,393.60/capacity/ month |
*Subject to change without prior notice. Please check with us for the updated price.
Which is right for you?
If you are just starting your Power BI journey and have no intention to share or collaborate on reports with your employees, then Power BI Desktop is more suitable. That way, you can explore it for free and familiarise yourself with its functionalities before investing.
If you are a small or mid-sized organization that wants to enable a data-driven culture within a small number of users, Power BI Pro would be a cost-effective license for you.
If you are a small or mid-sized organization with a limited number of users and you're looking to access high data processing and storing capabilities, then we recommend Power BI Premium per-user license. It is ideal for organizations that rapidly process and consume huge amounts of data and require immediate access to it.
If you are a large organization that needs huge cloud storage capacity or extensive processing power, we recommend Power BI Premium (per capacity) licensing.
Interested to learn more about Power BI?
Visit this page to book your complimentary discovery call or comment below your questions and we'd be happy to answer them for you.