Free Vs. Paid Power BI: Which One Should You Choose?

Updated: July 6, 2021

In a related blog post, we outline and describe a comprehensive guide to understand the Power Platform licensing and make it more approachable.

Original Post: February 17, 2016

Innovative business leaders know that data analysis is critical to staying ahead of the competition. After all, understanding current internal and external trends and then basing your decisions on actual evidence is the most effective method of influencing your organization’s future.

Microsoft Power BI is taking analytics to the next level, democratizing access to information so that users don’t have to possess specialized technical skill sets to make the most available data. However, transitioning to the Power BI tool does require an understanding of the differences between the numerous editions of Power BI.

When Power BI was launched in the summer of 2015, it was available in 2 editions. Free and professional. The free edition was used to become familiar with Power BI and allow single users to create and publish dashboards and reports for their own use. The professional edition allowed sharing reports with others, connecting to numerous on-premises datasets and setting automatic refresh for these datasets.

Fast forward six years, Power BI has evolved in many ways. Both cloud and on-premises editions are now available with varying levels of capacity to meet several use cases from personal dashboarding to enterprise-wide data warehousing scenarios.

There are specific features for the various editions of Power BI, summarized in the table below. While a few years back, Microsoft was advertising a free version, it isn’t advertised as such in the present day. Resources on the free version can still be found on the Power BI licensing page.

Licensing Microsoft products are often complex, with many options and bundles. The good news is, if your organization is licensed for Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5, Power BI Pro is included. Otherwise, it depends on what you are trying to do.

So let’s analyze some scenarios.

Just starting with Power BI, you can use the Power BI “free” service to develop reports and dashboards and publish them for yourself. But if you are looking to connect to on-premises data or require a gateway, you are out of luck and will need to upgrade to the Pro edition.

Suppose your organization has a medium user base, i.e., less than 500. In that case, you have two options. First, you can start with Power BI Pro to publish and share dashboards and reports, and in the event, you need to increase capacity, or your reports are too slow, you can upgrade to the Power BI Premium per user (this is a new option that was launched in 2021). In addition, with Power BI Premium (Per user or capacity), you get access to the new exciting Power BI Goals and Scorecard (more to come in a future blog).

If your organization has more than 500 users, your best option is to license on a capacity basis. Capacity means you have a dedicated back-end capacity at a determined level, and it starts at $4,995/month. This is adequate for an organization with model and extensive dashboards, users exceeding 500 or an organization looking at premium features such as real-time dashboards, extensive dataset support, on-premises deployment or advanced AI capabilities.