Power BI Pricing – Affordable Data Analysis and Visualization

Today’s corporations are looking to harvest riches from a goldmine they have in-house: Their business data. Microsoft Power BI is the greatest multi-use data analysis tool you will find for obtaining business insights that drive solid business decisions.

Are you unsure of what Power BI actually does? We tackle that topic in detail in this article. Right now, though, we’re going to dig into the numbers game: Power BI pricing. By the end of the article, you’ll have a good understanding of the pricing structure and how you can perfectly balance price and functionality.

Power BI has several service levels, and the highest one is further divided into capacity nodes.

·      Power BI Free

·      Power BI Pro

·      Power BI Embedded

·      Power BI Premium Per-User

·      Power BI Premium Dedicated

Power BI Free

‘Free’ says it all – this is a great way to get started with the product without spending a dime. You don’t even need a Microsoft 365 subscription because the tools are available as a free download. From your desktop, you can analyze large data sets, work with the data model, and create reports and charts. However, the only way to share the content with others at this tier is to publish it on the web – where anyone can see it. If you’re dealing with sensitive data – or at the very least, information you don’t want your competitors to see – then those reports stay with just one user.

In short: You can do a lot with the Free plan, but sharing with others will cost you.

Power BI Pro

Next up is Power BI Pro, the least expensive way to produce content to share with others. It adds extra features and sharing methods to the Free offering. Pro is priced per user, making it simple math to determine your monthly costs.

Each person in your company that creates content, or views it, needs a Pro license. That’s right – Free users can’t see what Pro users create. (If you’re an enterprise-level customer, check out Premium Dedicated plans that remove this restriction and reduce costs when working at scale.)

Pro offers a lot of features, but isn’t unlimited. Each user can only work with 1 GB of data, and will only be able to refresh the data set 8 times a day.

Pro users can share their content with other Pro users, create app workspaces, and embed Power BI content in other Microsoft 365 applications. Not to be forgotten are the integrations with other Microsoft Business Apps, such as SharePoint and Teams.

Pro is offered at $9.99 per user, per month – with a 60-day free trial before you commit.

Power BI Embedded

This is a license that primarily benefits Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), enabling them to embed Power BI in their applications and display the content and visualization directly, without the need for a separate login or license.

This license is billed according to usage. You select the hardware capacity you need and pay by the hour for usage. What is more, you can pause the service at any time to reduce expenses and restart it again when you need it. Here’s how the pricing breaks down:

Power BI Premium Per User

Moving up to Premium nets you greatly increased limits and several additional features. You’ll receive data storage up to 100 TB, and a data model limit of 100 GB – plenty for all but the most advanced cases. Rather than only 8 times a day, you’ll be able to refresh your data set up to 48 times a day, keeping your reports up-to-the-minute accurate.

One small catch: Premium users can’t share content with Pro users. Premium reports are only visible to Premium users (sorry!) With a smaller user base, however, having everyone on Premium can still be a viable option for those with high-performance data analysis needs. It’s offered at $20 per user, per month, with the same 60-day free trial that Pro offers.

Power BI Premium (Dedicated Capacity)

At the enterprise level, thousands of user licenses can be costly. Microsoft provides another schema that charges by the capacity consumed, which brings big savings when working at scale.

The Dedicated plans have “Capacity Nodes”, that is to say, a virtual machine with a specified number of processing cores and RAM, so you can select the level of processing power you need. All plans come with 100 TB of storage, but with a four-fold increase in the data model limit: 400 GB. You’ll get up to 48 refreshes a day, just like the Premium Per User plan. With it comes the ability to extend the on-premises version with Power BI Report Server. You also get Incremental Refresh, conserving bandwidth and processing power for requests involving huge data sets.

The Dedicated plans decouple the storage and data processing from the reporting tools. All users assigned to the organization account can consume Power BI content without an additional license – but content creators will need a Pro license to get their work done.

Like the previously mentioned Embedded plans, the Premium level has Embedded plans that allow you to share Power BI content within your applications, providing a cost-effective way to share and test the services on a large scale before moving up to the P-level offerings. These are billed monthly (without the option to pause services like the A-levels.) You can only acquire these with a volume-licensing plan.

The P-level offerings are the most feature-complete of the whole set. At this level, Microsoft allows all users to view reports, apps, and shared content without a separate license fee. The P-level plans are billed monthly and easily purchased through the Microsoft 365 administrative console.

Most smaller companies will do well with the Pro and Premium Per User licenses, allowing them the ability to scale with the number of users. But when would the Capacity plans be beneficial?

Here’s a scenario:

Say your company has 15,000 users that need to consume Power BI content. 150 are developers, creating and manipulating content for others to use. The rest are a mix of users that use the content either daily, or only once in a while.

Perhaps 2 P3 nodes would cover your capacity needs, and you’ll need 150 Pro licenses for your devs. Let’s add it up:

P3 Node @ $19,995 x 2 = $39,990

Pro License @ $9.95 x 150 = $1498.50

So that’s a total of $41,488.50 per month. Sounds like a lot, right? But what if everyone were on a Pro plan? You wouldn’t have anywhere near the capacity available under the Premium Dedicated plans, nor the features, and you’d be paying $149,850.00 per month. Now the cost benefits of Premium Dedicated become clear.

Next Steps

No matter the size of your organization, or the data analysis needs you have, Microsoft Power BI has a cost-effective solution to help you harvest business insights from your data.

Would you like to know how Power BI can best be configured for your use case? Talk to our experts today and make the first steps toward data-driven decision-making.

By Chandra Subramanian, CogentNext Technologies