Power BI Packaging

Power BI received a major update in July 2015 and is now offered as a stand-alone subscription and in some Office 365 plans. The new offering separates the service into a paid professional tier, Power BI Pro, and a limited free tier, Power BI.

Power BI Pro (Paid)

Power BI Pro requires a paid subscription, either stand-alone or as part of the Office 365 E5 plan that is scheduled for release in 2015. It allows reports to contain 10GB of data per report, hourly data refreshes, and 1 million rows of streaming data per hour from Azure Stream Analytics service to deliver real-time data.

Features exclusive to Power BI Pro subscriptions include access to reports in Office 365 Groups, access to on-premises data through the data gateways and connectors, team dashboards, Web portal-based report design and publishing, and sharing queries in the data catalog.

Power BI Pro will most likely appeal to organizations, as it is the only tier that provides access to on-premises data and data refreshes. It also provides more interactive and self-service analysis features in the Web portal and mobile applications.