Updated: December 20, 2024 (October 28, 2024)

Power BI and Fabric Licensing Options – Nov. 2024

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Power BI is marketed as part of Fabric; however, one Power BI licensing option is being absorbed by Fabric, while the other options are still available separately. The illustration shows the Power BI licensing options.

Power BI Licensing Options

Power BI is Microsoft’s primary data visualization offering. It contains several integrated software and Microsoft cloud components, which are used collectively to build datasets (also called semantic data models), data pipelines, and data marts, and to create and share reports, dashboards, and other business-intelligence (BI) content.

Power BI offers several back-end deployment options, enterprise security, and a collection of development tools and client options that provide a unified BI platform that will appeal to organizations of any size. The back-end deployment options are also the basis for purchasing and licensing:

Power BI Free is designed for individual users and occasional report consumers. It lacks security controls, provides limited data storage capacity and refresh rates, and has other significant shortcomings that typically make it unsuitable for most organizations.

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Get access to this and thousands of other unbiased analyses, roadmaps, decision kits, infographics, reference guides, and more, all included with membership. Comprehensive access to the most in-depth and unbiased expertise for Microsoft enterprise decision-making is waiting.

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