The quick answer is “YES” for single users wanting to prepare and clean data ready for custom visualizations you can install Power BI Desktop FREE. If, on the other hand, you need data collaboration, governance, 360-degree real-time views, and the ability to publish reports anywhere, Power BI Pro is the choice for you. In need of a dedicated resource for cloud compute and storage? Microsoft has you covered with Power BI Premium.
What is Microsoft Power BI?
It’s a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics service that simplifies data evaluation — through the sharing of scalable interactive dashboards and reports utilizing embedded visuals (plus more) — providing fast and efficient insights into your key data points by seamlessly connecting to all of your data sources.
Which of these three versions is right for you?
The decision is dependant on what you want to do or achieve using Power BI. Having used all three versions personally over the past three years. Here are my insights to help you make your decision and get the most out of the option you choose;
Power BI Desktop
This version is excellent for personal use or small businesses (and FREE). You can author reports, prepare, model, and create your data visualizations, helping you to gain quick insights into your personal or professional data. As an example, I created a personal finance dashboard to help me keep track of where my money was going across a particular month, quarter, or year.
Power BI Pro
The main benefits of Power BI Pro versus Power BI desktop are the ability to collaborate with colleagues, share your dashboards, publish reports, perform ad hoc analysis, and implement governance. All available as Self-service hosted in the cloud and fully managed by Microsoft. This version is particularly useful for medium and larger-scale operations that want to share data insights across a wider audience. Having used Power BI Pro on a project, I supported two years ago. I can honestly say it added value to the project and helped move the business forward. Having access to dynamic data in Power BI during daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual meetings was vastly superior versus viewing static data in PowerPoint.
Power BI Premium
If you are a large Enterprise in need of advanced analytics, administration, and deployment controls, dedicated cloud compute and storage controls. Couple that with BIG data support and on-premise and cloud reporting Power BI Premium is the choice for you. Allowing any user in your Enterprise to consume Power BI content created by you or your organization is effortless with Power BI Premium. In my current role as ‘Operations Lead Nearshore,’ I support 20+ different projects across five countries. Having data in quick, easy, interactive dashboards and reports is critical to success. Providing access to dedicated project-specific dashboards and reports for each country and team as aswell as a Regional overview has proved to be invaluable. We created dashboards and reports focusing on daily, weekly, and monthly operational aspects that are critical to making the right decisions and smooth running of a business.
3 Key Features of Power BI
Microsoft Power BI functions are ALL built for these three main features;
- Datasets: By reducing time-consuming tasks associated with data capture, access, and evaluation, Power BI connects to all your Enterprise/Organization’s data sources. Making it easy to access insights, stops trends, and ultimately make the ‘Right’ business decisions. As defined by Microsoft, “a dataset is something you can import or connect to’.
- Dashboards: Linked to each data set for evaluation and comparison purposes, these can be shared with colleagues to foster collaboration and secure exchange of ideas. Dashboards bring together your data into interactive views utilizing smaller displays called tiles.
- Reports: Customizable and built from scratch, reports can be created to display what’s important to your Enterprise, Organization, Business, or Team. Quick and easy to import into any dashboard and sharing with colleagues.
Additional Features:
- Navigation Pane: Effortlessly move through your reports, dashboards, and datasets.
- Q&A question box: Enables you to explore and ask questions to your data in natural language. Utilizing the latest technology to autofill, rephrase, recommended questions, and more to help provide the correct answer first time every time.
- Office 365 app launcher: Quickly and seamlessly open the Office 365 apps you need.
- Help & Feedback Buttons: For receiving support or providing feedback to the Power BI team for downloads and settings.
Power BI Pricing
Follow this link to the official Microsoft Pricing Table
Power BI Features comparison Pro vs. Premium
Follow this link to the official Microsoft Comparison Table
4 Important things to know:
A Power BI Pro license is required to do the following:
- For peer-to-peer sharing and collaboration and distribute content to other users.
- Publish content to Power BI Premium.
- Receive content from other users unless the user is associated with a dedicated capacity in Power BI Premium.
- Publish content to Power BI Report Server.
Customer Support & Service
An easy to access online resource containing FAQs, guides, and the option to search for specific information directly in Microsoft Power BI.
Can’t find the answer? Microsoft offers a live chat feature on its website. Support staff can be reached quickly anytime; alternatively, you are welcome to ask the Power BI Community.
What are the alternatives to Power BI?
Below I have listed 5 of the most popular business intelligence platform and service alternatives to Power BI currently on the market.
Tableau: Collaboration through connection. Their end-to-end analytics platform provides the most secure, flexible, and powerful platform for your business data. It is turning your data insights into drivable actions empowering people in your business with its business intelligence platform. Scalable for enterprise-level, designed for individuals, according to their official site.
Three options available:
- Creator: Access to Tableau Desktop and Tableau Pep it’s intended for individual users. Also providing access to Tableau Server or Tableau Online.
- Explorer: Offers self-service analytics without the need for data-prepping and cleaning. With the option for On-premise or Cloud-based services.
- Viewer: For users who want to access already created content and or visualizations. As with explorer, you can select between On-premise or cloud-based services.
Please refer to Tableau’s official pricing page for more details on pricing.
Note: Tableau viewer requires at least 100 viewers for companies to purchase this plan.
QlikSense: Setting the benchmark for new generations of analytics. With a powerful one-of-a-kind platform offering end-to-end secure and flexible analytics. They intend to empower everyone in your organization to make better decisions daily, creating a truly data-driven enterprise according to their official site.
Four options available:
- Desktop: It is FREE to download and has unlimited access to data sources and Qlik features.
- Enterprise: Multi-cloud solution to scale and extend analytics across departments and organizations, it also has the same unlimited access to source data and Qlik features as Desktop.
- Cloud Basic: Is FREE Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for use with max. Five users.
- Cloud Business: Extended version of Cloud Basic, this version can be shared with an unlimited amount of users.
Please refer to the QlikSense official pricing page for more details.
InsightSquared: Powered by AI, their revenue intelligence software shortens the distance between data. They are helping business leaders involved in generating revenue to make informed decisions for the benefit of the business. With deep-rooted expertise and industry best-practice, they align your go-to-market teams to maximize revenue with a uniformed view. It’s like having an “operating system” for your revenue operations according to their official website.
Three options available: (all with unlimited logins)
- Starter: Offering fast, templated configuration, goals, company bookings, and historical trending.
- Professional: On top of the starter package offerings, Professional adds, Subgoals, and Employee goals, TV Leaderboard, Forecast entry, Multicurrency: Company level, and Dated exchange rates.
- Enterprise: Includes everything from Starter and Professional. As well as a Sandbox portal, Custom alternatives, Access permissions system, Personalized multicurrency, Employee Subgoals, and log in as another User.
Please refer to the InsightSquared official pricing page for a quote or more details.
Domo: The quickest, easiest, and most secure way to drive your business with data “With Domo, our data is transparent and accessible. Instead of waiting for month-end reports, we look at current and relevant data every day to make real-time decisions.” According to their official website.
Custom offerings available: For more details, please refer to the Domo official site.
How Domo pricing works: Pricing based on several components related to your usage of the platform. Including data storage, data refresh rates, the volume of data queries, and the number of users. We offer packages with specific features to meet your needs in different stages of digital transformation.
For more details on pricing or to arrange a demo, please refer to the Domo official pricing page.
Looker: Drive better outcomes through smarter, data-driven experiences. Committed to a multi-cloud strategy, they will continue to support multiple data sources and deployment methods to provide customers, choice without compromising on transparency, security, and privacy according to their official website.
Custom offerings available: For more details, please refer to the Looker official site.
Looker pricing: Designed to fit businesses from large to small. Looker’s pricing specialists will work directly with you to ensure pricing is customized for you. Based on factors such as the number of users and the scale of your deployment, they will develop the ideal pricing structure for your business.
Please refer to the Looker official pricing page for more information on pricing or a demo.