Microsoft Power BI review covering Pro, Premium Per User and Fabric pricing, dashboards, data modeling, and how it compares to Tableau and Looker.
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform for building interactive reports and dashboards. It began as Power BI for Office 365, previewed in July 2013, before the standalone product most people know today, including Power BI Desktop, the Power BI Service, and mobile apps, launched on July 24, 2015.
Power BI connects to hundreds of data sources and lets users model relationships and build visuals using DAX, Microsoft's formula language for data analysis. As of 2026, it is used by over 350,000 organizations, reflecting its position as one of the most widely adopted BI platforms.
Power BI Desktop, a free Windows application, is where most report-building happens: connecting to data sources, modeling relationships between tables, and designing report visuals. Finished reports publish to the Power BI Service, the cloud platform used to share dashboards, schedule data refreshes, and collaborate with colleagues.
Higher tiers unlock larger dataset limits, more frequent data refreshes, paginated (pixel-perfect, print-ready) reports, deployment pipelines for managing report versions across development and production, and advanced AI-powered analytics features built into the report canvas.
Power BI Desktop is free for building reports individually. Power BI Pro costs $14 per user per month (paid annually), following an April 2025 price increase from $10, and is required for sharing and collaborating on reports inside an organization.
Power BI Premium Per User costs $24 per user per month, up from $20, and raises the dataset size limit to 100 GB, increases refreshes to 48 per day, and unlocks paginated reports and advanced AI features. Larger organizations can also license capacity-based Premium or Fabric SKUs, with Microsoft gradually shifting customers toward Fabric capacity at renewal as its long-term large-scale analytics offering.
Power BI Desktop, the report-building application, is free; sharing and collaborating on published reports inside an organization requires a paid Pro or Premium Per User license.
Power BI Pro costs $14 per user per month paid annually, following an April 2025 increase from the previous $10 price.
Premium Per User ($24/user/month) raises the dataset size limit to 100 GB versus Pro's 1 GB, increases daily refreshes to 48 from 8, and adds paginated reports and advanced AI features.
Power BI began as Power BI for Office 365 in 2013, with the standalone product most people use today launching on July 24, 2015.
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's newer, broader analytics platform, and Power BI capacity licensing is gradually being shifted toward Fabric capacity SKUs at renewal for large-scale deployments.
The main competitors are Tableau, Google Looker, and Qlik Sense.