What is the cost of Power BI? The different licenses at a glance

Accurate Power BI reporting is hugely valuable to your business. It enables your company to critically review the real situation at any time and take appropriate actions. This allows you to respond to identified opportunities in a timely manner, or mitigate risks as soon as they arise.

Power BI reporting requires a Power BI license. But which licenses can you choose from, what are the differences between these Power BI licenses, and which license fits your company best?  

• Power BI Free: to try out Power BI for free.  

Using Power BI Desktop, you get to explore Power BI on your own and experiment with its various visuals. This free desktop version allows you to connect to your various data sources, and easily turn them into charts.  

However, it is not possible to share your created reports with others online. Therefore, the free desktop version is more for building your reports or dashboards by your external consultant, internal analyst or IT person.  

• Power BI Pro: to share reports within your organization.  

After setting up your reporting in the Power BI Desktop version, you want to publish the Power BI dashboards in Power BI Service (Power BI Online). This makes your data report viewable by the various stakeholders in your company. The availability of these indicators forms the basis for informed decisions.

To share dashboards within your organization, you must have the Power BI Pro license. This applies to all persons who wish to consult the report. The cost of this license is €13,10/month per user. The 60-day trial period offered by Microsoft allows you to try these functionalities free of charge.  

• Power BI Premium per user: to make your reports perform better.  

Power BI Premium per user is a new license since early 2021. In addition to Premium licenses per capacity (see below), Microsoft now also offers user licenses. Consequently, it is now possible to purchase a Premium license for just a few users.  

This license lets individual users take full advantage of premium capabilities. For example, you enjoy better response time of reporting in Power BI through the use of advanced artificial intelligence, and the ability to share Power BI content with anyone (even outside your organization). The license cost is €22,50/month per user. You can enjoy another 60-day trial period.  

Whether or not to purchase a Premium per user license depends on the size of your company and the underlying datasets from your IT system.

For the average SME, a Power BI Pro license is sufficient to share a performant report on Power BI Service.  

• Power BI Premium by capacity: to have far-reaching analysis capabilities as a large enterprise.

As a large enterprise with very extensive data sets, you wish to purchase your own server space from Microsoft Power BI so that the entire organization, not just users, can access accelerated reporting in Power BI. The data capacity or “computing power” is managed by Microsoft.  

You do this by purchasing the “Power BI Premium per capacity” license. This license entails a cost of +- €4,700 per month. Microsoft's price calculator calculates how much this formula would cost your company.

The possibilities of Power BI Premium are endless. Your enterprise can work with Power BI both on-premises and in the cloud. You have the Power BI Report Server for accessing reports with your own business layout, and have the capacity to analyze huge data sets.  Setting up Power BI reporting requires the right expertise in addition to a license. This is because it is crucial that your data model is correctly designed and your reporting produces accurate KPIs. If not, you run the risk that your decisions are based on incomplete information or faulty analysis.