Power BI Pricing Plans & Costs Guide

Empowering teams with actionable insights is a key competitive advantage, especially in today’s data-driven landscape. Microsoft Power BI has established itself as a leader in business analytics, enabling organizations to connect to any data source, visualize information intuitively, and share discoveries seamlessly. Recognized in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, Power BI transforms raw data into interactive dashboards and compelling reports that drive informed decision-making across all levels of an organization.

Its scalable ecosystem ranges from a robust free tier for individual analysts to advanced enterprise solutions within Microsoft Fabric, making it an ideal choice for organizations of all sizes seeking to transform raw data into actionable intelligence. This guide provides a clear breakdown of the updated Power BI pricing plans and their features to help you select the ideal solution for your organization’s specific data intelligence requirements.

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How Much Does Power BI Cost?

Power BI offers a tiered pricing model designed to meet the diverse needs of individuals, collaborative teams, and large enterprises. Its plans provide robust features and flexibility, scaling from self-service visualization to enterprise-grade analytics with dedicated capacity. The updated core Power BI pricing plans are as follows:

• Power BI (Free Account): For individuals to explore and create rich, interactive reports with visual analytics. This plan is included with a Microsoft Fabric free account and requires no credit card to start.
• Power BI Pro ($14.00 user/month, paid yearly): For professionals and teams who need to publish, share, and collaborate on interactive reports and dashboards across the organization. This plan is included in Microsoft 365 E5.
• Power BI Premium Per User ($24.00 user/month, paid yearly): For data professionals requiring enterprise-scale features like larger data models, more frequent refreshes, and paginated reports, without the need for organization-wide capacity licensing.
• Power BI in Microsoft Fabric (Variable Cost): A unified platform offering that includes Power BI alongside data engineering and warehousing capabilities, billed through a single, scalable capacity model for comprehensive data analytics.

Power BI Free Account ($0)

Designed for individual exploration, this plan provides the essential tools to begin transforming data into personal visual reports without any cost. It is integrated into the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, offering a foundational entry point to discover insights before scaling to team collaboration, though sharing capabilities require an upgraded license for broader distribution.

• Create Reports with Power BI Desktop: Build data models and design interactive visual reports using the free, standalone Power BI Desktop application, which is included for all users regardless of their service plan tier.
• Data Security and Encryption: Benefit from foundational, enterprise-grade security measures that protect your data at rest and in transit, ensuring your personal analytics projects are safeguarded within the Microsoft cloud.
• 1 GB Model Memory Size Limit: Build and host semantic models within the service with a memory limit suitable for small to medium datasets. This supports foundational data modeling for personal analytics and introductory report development.
• Create Interactive Reports: Build rich, personalized reports with a wide array of visual analytics tools at your fingertips. Transform raw data into compelling charts and dashboards for individual analysis and personal insight discovery without any financial commitment.
• Included in Fabric Free Account: Access core Power BI capabilities as part of the unified Microsoft Fabric platform’s free tier. This provides a gateway to a broader analytics ecosystem, including trial capacities for data engineering and warehousing workloads.
• No Credit Card Required: Start your data analytics journey immediately with zero financial obligation or setup barrier. The free account offers a complete, risk-free environment to learn the platform and evaluate its potential value for your specific needs.
• Upgrade to Share: Unlock organizational collaboration and content distribution by upgrading to a Pro or Premium Per User license. The free account is for creation and personal use; sharing reports with colleagues requires a paid subscription tier.

Power BI Pro Plan ($14.00/User/Month Paid Yearly)

Empowering collaborative business intelligence, this plan enables professionals to publish, share, and consume interactive reports across an organization. It is the standard for team-based analytics, facilitating a data-driven culture, and is included within comprehensive Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions for integrated productivity and insights.

• Create Reports with Power BI Desktop: Utilize the full capabilities of the free Power BI Desktop application for professional data modeling and report authoring before publishing content to the cloud service for team collaboration.
• Publish Reports to Share and Collaborate: Distribute your insights broadly by publishing interactive reports to the Power BI service. Share dashboards and apps with colleagues to enable organization-wide access to live data.
• Data Security and Encryption: Leverage comprehensive security, including sensitivity labeling, row-level security, and compliance with major certifications to protect organizational data across all published reports and shared dashboards.
• 1 GB Model Memory Size Limit: Utilize a standard memory allocation for semantic models published to the service. This supports collaborative report development and sharing for typical business datasets used across teams and departments.
• 8 Daily Dataset Refreshes: Keep your shared reports current by scheduling data updates up to eight times each day. This ensures teams are working with timely information for daily operational decisions and analysis.
• 10 GB Maximum Storage (Per License): Store datasets, reports, and dashboards with a generous per-user storage allowance. This capacity accommodates the cumulative analytical content created and shared by an active Pro user.
• Access Shared Content: Consume and interact with reports and dashboards shared by other Pro users across your organization. This ensures seamless collaboration, keeping all teams aligned and making decisions based on the same unified, trusted datasets.
• Included in Microsoft 365 E5: Acquire the Power BI Pro license seamlessly as part of the Microsoft 365 E5 or Office 365 E5 suite. This bundles advanced analytics with premium productivity, security, and compliance tools in a single, integrated offering.

Power BI Premium Per User Plan ($24.00/User/Month Paid Yearly)

Providing enterprise-scale features on a per-user basis, this plan is for data professionals who build complex content. It delivers larger model sizes, more frequent refreshes, and advanced capabilities like paginated reports, offering premium performance without a full organizational capacity commitment.

• Create Reports with Power BI Desktop: Access the full, professional authoring experience of Power BI Desktop to build complex data models and sophisticated reports that leverage Premium’s enhanced performance and scale.
• Publish Reports to Share and Collaborate: Distribute enterprise-scale reports and apps, leveraging enhanced performance and management features to serve content efficiently to both Pro and free users within your organization.
• Advanced AI: Utilize powerful AI features like Copilot in Power BI to accelerate report creation, generate narratives, and uncover deeper insights automatically from your data.
• Advanced Dataflows: Create and manage large-scale, reusable data transformation logic with enhanced compute capabilities, enabling complex data preparation and ETL processes directly within the Power BI service.
• Advanced Datamarts: Enable self-service analytics through low-code datamarts that automatically generate datasets, simplifying data discovery and exploration for business users while maintaining IT governance.
• XMLA Endpoint Read/Write: Connect external applications (like SSMS or Tabular Editor) directly to datasets for advanced management, monitoring, and programmatic interaction, enabling enterprise development lifecycles.
• Data Security and Encryption: Implement the highest standards of data protection with advanced security controls, encryption, and compliance features tailored for sensitive enterprise data and regulatory requirements.
• 100 GB Model Memory Size Limit: Host very large and complex semantic models with a significantly expanded memory capacity. Enables intricate data models supporting advanced analytics, detailed calculations, and integration of massive datasets.
• 48 Daily Dataset Refreshes: Support near real-time analytics with the ability to refresh data up to 48 times per day. Essential for operational reports and dashboards that must reflect the most current business data available.
• 100 TB Maximum Storage (Aggregate): Access vast, pooled native storage for datasets across all Premium workspaces. Provides virtually unlimited scale for enterprise data analytics initiatives and large-scale BI deployments.

Power BI Embedded Plan (Variable)

This Azure-based service is for developers embedding fully interactive analytics into custom, customer-facing applications. It separates report rendering from user licensing, offering white-label branding and flexible capacity pricing ideal for commercial software products and scalable SaaS solutions.

• Create Reports with Power BI Desktop: Author the reports and dashboards that will be embedded into your applications using the standard, free Power BI Desktop tool, ensuring a consistent and powerful design experience.
• Publish Reports to Share and Collaborate: Publish and manage reports within dedicated workspaces designed for embedding, preparing them for secure integration into your custom applications and portals.
• Advanced AI: Embed AI-powered analytics experiences, such as Q&A and smart narratives, directly into your application to provide intelligent, interactive insights to your end-users.
• Advanced Dataflows: Utilize scalable data preparation pipelines to transform and shape data before it is visualized in your embedded reports, ensuring performance and consistency for your customers.
• Advanced Datamarts: Offer embedded, self-service data exploration capabilities by exposing datamarts within your application, allowing users to create their own analyses on governed data.
• XMLA Endpoint Read/Write: Programmatically manage and update embedded analytics assets at scale, enabling automation and advanced lifecycle management for your application’s data models.
• Consume Power BI Content Without a Paid Per-User License: Embed interactive reports for unlimited end-users within your commercial applications using the “App Owns Data” model, eliminating the need for viewer licensing.
• Data Security and Encryption: Rely on Microsoft’s enterprise-grade security infrastructure to protect customer data within embedded analytics, including your own authentication integration and data isolation.
• Variable Model & Storage Limits: Scale resources dynamically based on the purchased Azure capacity SKU (A1 and above). Memory and storage limits are determined by your selected tier, offering flexibility from development to high-volume production.
• 48 Daily Dataset Refreshes (on P1/A1+ SKUs): Maintain high data freshness for customer-facing applications with support for up to 48 daily refreshes on equivalent Premium (P1) or Fabric (F64) capacity SKUs and above.
• App Owns Data Licensing: Embed reports for unlimited end-users without requiring each consumer to have a paid Power BI license. Your application manages authentication and access, ideal for commercial SaaS offerings and customer portals.
• White-Label Branding: Maintain complete application brand identity by fully customizing the embedded analytics experience. Remove all Microsoft branding to deliver a seamless, cohesive, and professionally branded user journey within your own product.
• Flexible Capacity-Based Pricing: Align costs directly with usage by purchasing dedicated Azure compute capacity. This model scales independently of your end-user count, providing predictable costs and operational control for commercial application development.

Power BI Mobile

Power BI Mobile lets users securely access live Power BI dashboards and reports on any device (iOS and Android phones/tablets). It connects to company data stored on-premises or in the cloud (Microsoft Fabric OneLake). Users can track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and view a comprehensive overview of their business from anywhere. 

Key updates and features include:

• AI-Powered Insights (Copilot): A standalone Copilot experience in the mobile app allows users to ask questions about their data using natural language, receiving instant answers and interactive visuals. iOS devices also support voice dictation for queries.
• Mobile Layout Auto-Create: This generally available feature allows report creators to automatically generate an optimized mobile layout with a single click, saving significant design time.
• NFC Tag Support: Users can tap their phone on an NFC tag to instantly open a specific report, app, or scorecard, seamlessly linking physical locations to relevant data for frontline workers.
• Enhanced Navigation: The home screen has been reorganized with unified strips for recent and frequent items and a dedicated Favorites section for quick access to key content.
• Offline Access: The app caches up to 250 MB of data, allowing users to view recent reports even without an internet connection (though live data connections are not available offline).
• Collaboration Tools: Users can add notes to reports to highlight insights to the team and receive push notifications when they are mentioned or assigned a goal. 

Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is a free, interactive data visualization and reporting tool used primarily for data modeling and report creation. It is a core part of the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, integrating deeply with other services. 

Key updates and features include:

• Extensive Data Connectivity: Users can connect to hundreds of data sources, including on-premises, cloud-based, and Excel. Recent enhancements include faster, more secure connections for Spark and Impala connectors using the open-source ADBC driver.
• AI and Copilot Capabilities:
  • Report Creation: Copilot can help users create entire report pages in seconds, offering better visual recommendations and improved context awareness based on the data’s structure.
  • Data Modeling (Preview): The Power BI Modeling Model Context Protocol (MCP) server preview allows AI agents to interact with and modify data models using natural language, enabling bulk operations and the application of best practices without manual coding.
• Advanced Modeling Tools: Features like Semantic Model Version History and the Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL) Visual Studio Code extension are now generally available, enabling programmatic management and source control for data models.
• Direct Lake Mode Integration: Users can live-edit Direct Lake semantic models directly in the Desktop application, with processing occurring in the Fabric workspace for enhanced performance.
• Modern Visualizations: New features such as the generally available “new card” visual, enhanced image visuals with styling options, and the ability to automatically expand matrix columns to fill available space provide more flexibility in report design.
• Embed into Existing Apps: Reports can be published to the Power BI service or on-premises (via Power BI Report Server) and embedded into existing applications. Note that R and Python visuals in the “Embed for your customers” solution will be deprecated in May 2026.

Conclusion

Microsoft Power BI delivers a comprehensive, scalable solution for organizations seeking to transform data into actionable insights. From the free tier enabling individual exploration to enterprise-grade features within Microsoft Fabric, Power BI’s flexible pricing structure accommodates diverse analytical needs and budgets. When selecting your ideal plan, carefully evaluate factors such as user count, storage requirements, refresh frequency, and advanced feature demands. Power BI Pro offers excellent value for collaborative teams, while Premium suits organizations requiring enterprise-scale performance and capacity.

The platform’s unified ecosystem, extensive connectivity options, and AI-powered capabilities make it a compelling choice for modern business intelligence initiatives. However, it’s essential to consider its limitations and disadvantages when comparing it to other BI tools. For a comprehensive understanding of the platform’s trade-offs, including potential cost concerns, data preparation challenges, and learning curve considerations for new users, explore our detailed analysis in the Top 10 Cons & Disadvantages of using Power BI guide.

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