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.

 

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