BI & dashboard platforms · Microsoft

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft's cloud and on-premises business intelligence platform for interactive reports, dashboards, and self-service analytics.

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Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence platform for building interactive reports, dashboards, and self-service data visualizations. It connects to a wide range of cloud and on-premises data sources, models data with DAX formulas, and publishes reports for sharing across an organization. Copilot, Microsoft's generative-AI assistant, is built into Power BI for natural-language querying and automated report creation. Power BI integrates closely with Microsoft 365 apps such as Excel, Teams, and SharePoint, with Azure services, and with Microsoft Fabric and OneLake for centralized data governance. Reports authored in the free desktop tool can be shared through Power BI Pro or Premium subscriptions, or embedded in custom applications through Power BI Embedded. An on-premises option, Power BI Report Server, is available for organizations that need to keep reports off the cloud.

At a glance

Vendor Microsoft
Pricing model Free tier + paid plans
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source No
Best for Organizations standardized on Microsoft 365 that need self-service BI and reporting.

Pricing

Free tier for individual report authoring; Pro and Premium Per User are priced per user per month; Embedded requires contacting sales.

Plan Price Notes
Free Free No credit card required; create interactive reports; sharing requires Pro or Premium
Power BI Pro $14.00 USD user/month, paid yearly Publish and share reports; included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5
Power BI Premium Per User $24.00 USD user/month, paid yearly Includes all Pro features, 100 GB model sizes, refreshes up to 48 times/day
Power BI Embedded Variable Requires contacting sales; for branding Power BI as your own within another app

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 19, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Interactive data visualization and dashboards
  • Copilot natural-language querying
  • Self-service report authoring
  • Data connectivity across cloud and on-premises sources
  • DAX-based data modeling
  • Integration with Microsoft Fabric and OneLake
  • Row-level security and governance
  • Embedded analytics via Power BI Embedded

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 19, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

Tableau Salesforce-owned visual analytics platform for interactive dashboards, data exploration, and governed self-hosted or cloud BI. Looker Google Cloud's BI and embedded-analytics platform built on a governed LookML semantic layer with natural-language querying. Metabase Open-source business intelligence tool for self-service dashboards, SQL and no-code queries, and embedded analytics.

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Terms to know

Business intelligence (BI) The practice of turning company data into dashboards, reports and metrics that guide business decisions. Dashboard A visual display of the metrics a team needs to monitor, usually updated on a schedule or in real time. KPI (key performance indicator) A measurable value tracked over time to show whether a team or process is on track toward a goal. Self-service BI BI tooling that lets business users build their own reports and explore data without waiting on IT or analytics teams. Data visualization Representing data graphically so that patterns, trends and outliers are easier to see than in a table of numbers. Data governance The policies, roles and processes that determine how data is defined, owned, accessed and kept compliant.

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How to become a data analyst The skills that actually get tested, a portfolio that proves them, and a realistic learning path into a first data analyst role. How to build a dashboard people use Design a dashboard around its audience and the decision it supports, keep it maintained, and retire it when nobody opens it anymore. How to build a modern data stack Ingestion, warehouse, transformation, BI and activation — what a data stack needs at each company stage, and what to defer. How to choose a BI tool Pick a BI tool by who builds, who reads, where metrics are defined and what viewers cost, not by the chart gallery in the demo.