Power BI Desktop vs Power BI Pro vs Power BI Premium

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

The Power BI platform offers three difference licencing options, Desktop (formerly called free), Pro and Premium. Which type your business requires depends on how you interact with your data and features you need and where data is stored.

What is Power BI Desktop?

A free download from Microsoft, you can install this on your local device with no licence required. It enables you to connect to external Power BI reports and data sources. The limitation with this free version is that you can't share your reports and dashboards to other 'workspaces'. Fortunately it still has plenty of capabilities for your business reporting and analytic insight needs.

Connect and import data from over many (50+) cloud-based and/or on-premise sources
The same visualisations and filters as in Power BI Pro
Export your reports to CVS, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and PDF
Publish to the web
Auto-detect finds and creates data relationships between tables and formats
Storage limit of 10GB per user

There are functionality limitations with the free one that might be needed by your business, they are:

No app workspaces
No API embedding
No email subscriptions
No peer-to-peer sharing
Cannot share created reports with users without a Power BI Pro licence
No support to analyse in Excel within Power BI Desktop

What is Power BI Pro?

When you purchase Power BI Pro, you gain the ability to use the platform for building dashboards and reports, plus unlimiting sharing it with your organisation, providing your departments with easy access to your business insights.

Power BI is licenced on an individual users basis, any user with the Pro licence can create and share reports with unlimited viewing of content. As of June 2022, the pricing for a Pro licence is £7.50/$9.99 per month.

By purchasing Power BI Pro you will be able to use benefit from:

Connect to over 100 data sources
Ability to embed Power BI visuals in apps such as PowerApps, SharePoint and Teams
Mobile app
1GB model size limit
8 Data refreshes daily
Embedded APIs and controls
AI visuals
Data security and encryption
Metrics with content creation and publishing
Native integration with other Microsoft solutions
Share dashboards, datasets and reports with other Power BI users
Create app work and peer-to-peer sharing

What is Power BI Premium?

Power BI Premium is the most expensive option, designed for organisations with the most complex data and reporting requirements. Premium addresses challenges faced by enterprise organisations with large data workloads and deployments. On top of the Pro and Desktop features, Premium licences can benefit from:

The pricing for Power BI premium on an individual licencing basis is £15.10 per month, however there is an option to purchase per organisation capacity from £3,766.70 per month.

100GB model size limit
100TB of storage
Access to one API surface
XMLA endpoint read/write connectivity
Data flows
Analyse data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage
Application lifecycle management
Ability to embed Power BI visuals into apps such as PowerApps, SharePoint and Teams
Larger storage size for extended deployment
Advanced AI features
48 data refreshes daily
Geo distribution, pin to memory and read-only replicas

Which Power BI subscription should I choose?

Microsoft Power BI offers plenty of scalability and flexibility. Paying per month is manageable and convenient for businesses who need consistency. What option you need ultimately depends on the size and requirements for your business. If you need help understanding which one suits your specific needs, please get in touch with us.