Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics service that connects to all of your data sources and provides data evaluation and sharing with scalable dashboards, interactive reports, embedded visuals, and more.
The Power BI app can be downloaded on your personal computer as well as on mobile. The apps are called Power BI Desktop and Power BI Mobile.
Power BI Desktop is an on-premise solution that connects to a cloud-based service to easily upload and share data and information. Power BI Mobile has the same capabilities, but in an app, so you can have an entire view of your company anytime, anywhere.
Power BI has two additional solutions with advanced features.
Power BI Pro
Power BI Pro allows you to share insights with collaborators. You can analyze data by using Q&A visualization and get insights from pre-built visualization and reporting templates.
Power BI Premium
Power BI Premium enables an organization’s internal or external users to view Power BI reports without a license. It also empowers users to prepare and transform big datasets. Power BI Premium is for use in large organizations with a great number of users that need to collaborate in real-time.
Pricing of Power BI
- Power BI Desktop: Power BI Desktop is a free application that can be installed on your PC. You can also use this service on the web. You don't need to install this application, but if you want to install then it will be downloaded free from the Microsoft Store or directly from the web.
- Power BI Pro: The per month cost of using Pro is $9.99/user. It includes data collaboration, data governance, building dashboards with a 360-degree real-time view, and the ability to publish reports anywhere. A free trial is also available for the users. You can use this free for 60 days before purchasing the subscription.
- Power BI Premium: The Premium plan starts at $4,995 a month per dedicated cloud computing and storage resource.
Difference between Free and Paid version of Power BI (Free vs. Pro)
| Features |
Free |
Pro |
| Storage Limit per User |
10 GB |
10 GB |
| 70+ Data Sources |
Yes |
Yes |
| Publish to Web |
Yes |
Yes |
| Peer-to-peer sharing |
No |
Yes |
| Enterprise Distribution |
| Apps |
No |
Yes |
| Email Subscription |
No |
Yes |
| Embed APIs and Controls |
No |
Yes |
| Collaboration |
| App workspace |
No |
Yes |
| Analyze in Excel analyze in Power BI Desktop |
No |
Yes |
Summary
I hope this will help you to choose which application is required for you. Now you are able to understand what features Power BI has according to its cost. As Power BI desktop is a free application, it is used widely. Thanks for reading and have a good day.