Get alerts
All products/BI & dashboards/Power BI

Power BI pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Power BI (powerbi.microsoft.com) is a BI and dashboard tool. Per-user licenses (Pro or Premium Per User) for anyone who publishes or views shared content, or Fabric capacity priced by compute.. Free plan: Free account for personal reports in Power BI Desktop and the service; sharing requires Pro or Premium..

What Power BI costs

  • 2 builders + 8 viewers: $140/mo (Pro $14/user x 10: viewers of shared Pro-workspace content also need a Pro license (free viewers only on F64+ capacity, about $5k+/mo))
  • 1 builder: $14/mo (One Pro license at $14/user/mo)
  • 5 builders + 20 viewers: $350/mo (Pro $14/user x 25)

Plan compared: Power BI Pro. Prices are total USD per month on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12) for the vendor's hosted plan: a team where 2 people build dashboards and 8 view them (or 5 and 20), or one builder on the cheapest paid plan. A free plan counts as $0 only if it connects a SQL database, refreshes daily and shares privately with every viewer; free self-hosted editions are not priced.

What Power BI does

Core: Dashboard builder, Spreadsheet and file analysis, Built-in data prep and storage, Semantic layer and metrics.

Important: No-code self-service exploration, Database and warehouse connectors, Business app data connectors (partly), AI data analyst, Scheduled report delivery, Native mobile apps, Embedded customer-facing analytics, Row-level permissions, SSO, audit and compliance.

Also has: SQL query editor (partly), Python and R notebooks (partly), Real-time collaboration (partly), KPI goals and scorecards, TV wall dashboards (partly), Open source and self-hosting (partly), Version control and BI as code.

Power BI price hikes

Cheaper alternatives to Power BI

At a 10-person team (2 builders, 8 viewers), Power BI costs $140/mo. 1 BI and dashboard tool costs less:

  • Metabase: $130/mo (Starter (cloud)), covers 91% of Power BI; missing or partial: Business app data connectors, Native mobile apps (partly), KPI goals and scorecards (partly)

Power BI alternatives: 2 BI and dashboard tools compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • Apr 1, 2025 · Price increase: Microsoft raised Power BI Pro from $10 to $14 per user/month and Premium Per User from $20 to $24, effective April 1, 2025, its first Pro increase since launch in 2015.

Sources

Pricing page: microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-bi/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices come from Microsoft's US pricing page, which lists Pro and PPU only as 'paid yearly'. The April 2025 increase comes from Microsoft's announcement and coverage in The Register. PricingSaaS had no Power BI entries.