Power BI Cost

If you’re interested in buying Power BI, different packages are currently available with different costs. Power BI Desktop is offered as a free download; Users can purchase Power BI Pro for $9.99/user/month; Power BI Premium costs $20/user/month. In addition, Microsoft also offers a free Power BI trial for those who want to learn a little bit more about this software before purchasing it. 

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a group of BI (business intelligence) services and products that converts data from various sources into reports, visualizations, and interactive dashboards. This allows users to share data insights with others who work at their organization or to embed them onto a website or application. Power BI offers effective business solutions with each of its individual elements and provides users with even more capabilities when these components work together.

One of the main benefits of working with Power BI is that it can integrate with other Microsoft services and products and third-party platforms. Users can connect Power BI to Excel, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange, among others. Whether your data is stored in an on-premises data warehouse, a cloud-based warehouse, or an Excel spreadsheet, Power BI can easily connect to these data sources, provide visualizations based on the data they contain, and offer insights that you can then share with other stakeholders. There are several Power BI products, each of which has different uses; Power BI Desktop creates reports, Power BI Services publishes the reports, and the Power BI mobile app provides users with a way to view each dashboard or report.

Read more about what Power BI is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Power BI?

Power BI is a valuable tool for illustrating what’s happening within an organization in the present. It also has applications for helping to anticipate what may transpire in the future. Because it relies on machine learning capabilities, Power BI can locate patterns in data, then draw from these patterns to predict various “what-if” scenarios. Based on these predictions, Power BI users can create forecasts and work to prepare for different demand patterns that may emerge. They can then communicate this information through data visualizations, which impart key data findings to stakeholders to make more educated business predictions.

Power BI is a go-to for those who work with data because it can be used to input huge stores of data that would be a struggle for other platforms to process. Because this intelligence suite is cloud-based, it provides users with regularly updated algorithms and intelligence capabilities. Those who use Power BI can personalize their experience by creating dashboards that allow them to quickly and easily access necessary data. In addition, it’s possible to create alerts in Power BI, which provide users with up-to-date measurements. Best of all, because this platform can integrate with other business management tools, such as Office 365, SharePoint, SAP, Google Analytics, and Hadoop, it remains a hugely popular tool for those working with data across platforms. 

In-Depth Review of the Cost

Three primary packages are offered from Microsoft for purchasing Power BI:

• Power BI Pro costs $9.99/user/month. This version is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and includes mobile app access. It also provides users with the ability to publish and share reports. The model size limit for Power BI Pro is 1GB, and the refresh rate is 8/day. The maximum storage is 10GB/user.
• Power BI Premium is available for $20/user/month. This version includes mobile app access and the capacity for publishing and sharing reports and paginated reports. The model size limit for Power BI Premium is 100GB, and its refresh rate is 48/day. The maximum storage rate for this version is 100TB. 

• Power BI Premium is also available starting at $4,995/capacity/month. This licensing version is designed for organizations. It does not require per-user licenses. However, this version requires a Power BI Pro license to publish content into Power BI Premium capacity. It also enables autoscale of the buyer’s Azure subscription to scale Power BI Premium capacity automatically. This version of Power BI Premium includes mobile app access, paginated reports, and on-premises reporting via Power BI’s Reporter Service. It has a 400GB model size limit and a refresh rate of 48/day. The maximum storage capacity for this version is 100TB.

For those who may not be ready to invest in a paid Power BI subscription, Power BI Desktop is available for free. This tool has applications for helping users create their own interactive visual analytics reports. In addition, a free Power BI trial is also available from Microsoft, which is an excellent option for anyone who wants to learn more about Power BI before purchasing the software. 

Why Learn Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI has over 115 million users and is considered the industry-leading BI platform. Companies worldwide rely on this data solution, and the demand is expected to grow as more organizations see the value in collecting data. This versatile tool is relied on by Developers, Administrators, Designers, Marketers, and Accountants, among others, to cut down on risk and errors and facilitate intelligent decision-making. Many professional benefits await those with a background in using Power BI, and knowledge of this suite of tools can open many professional doors.

Power BI’s drag-and-drop system can quickly and easily transform data into meaningful visualizations. Power BI users can create dashboards or reports that present their findings in mere minutes from inputting data. Professionals can easily share these reports with both internal and external stakeholders. In addition, Power BI provides a way for users to monitor and control data usage, providing access only to those who should have it. When using Power BI, users can view real-time data at any time and from any location, making it a popular tool for those on the go.

Read more about why you should learn Power BI. 

Free Introductory Power BI Course Online 

If you’re not ready to invest in a lengthy course, you can still start learning how to work with data for free online. In Noble Desktop’s free Data Science Webinar, you’ll receive instruction on core data science concepts, such as how professionals can use data science in the business sector and the different tools Data Scientists use when handling data. This 80-minute webinar is a great way to familiarize yourself with the field of data science and learn more about how professionals manage and analyze large volumes of data.

In addition to Noble Desktop’s business intelligence and data science resources, other top educational providers also offer free Power BI instruction. Udemy’s Power BI Quick Start is a free, two-hour course containing helpful video content on creating your own interactive Power BI dashboard. Students also receive instruction on creating full reports and publishing them on the Power BI service. Udemy also has another free Power BI course, Learn Power BI Fast, in which users learn how to create a professional Power BI report in under two hours. Participants also receive instruction and both basic and advanced data visualization concepts.

In addition, Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI is free from edX. This course teaches students how to use Microsoft Power BI in approximately four weeks. Certification is available for those who pay for the course, or students can elect to simply explore the free content. 

Read more about free Power BI videos and online tutorials. 

Learn Power BI with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Power BI Bootcamp is an excellent option if you want to learn more about using Power BI. This project-based course prepares students to use Power Query for data querying, Power BI’s data model for connecting to datasets, and its report view for designing interactive data visualizations and dashboards. Students work with different case studies to learn how to work with various Power BI capabilities and this tool’s DAX language for creating visualizations based on their data. All students have the option of a free retake for up to one year to revisit the material and gain additional practice.

Another excellent learning option for individuals who are interested in working with Power BI is Noble Desktop’s Data Analytics Certificate. This intensive course is offered in the in-person and live online format and provides participants with hands-on instruction with core data analytics and business intelligence tools and programs. Those enrolled complete real-world projects using Microsoft Excel, Python, SQL, and Tableau and have the option of also taking the Power BI Bootcamp free of charge. All students receive instruction from an expert instructor and one-on-one mentoring.