Microsoft Power BI

Turns spreadsheets and connected business systems into interactive dashboards, with Copilot answering questions about the data in plain English instead of a formula.

Records & databases Apps

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Open app.powerbi.com

What you'd use it for

Turning a spreadsheet or a handful of connected business systems into a live dashboard a whole team can watch update, instead of rebuilding the same Excel charts by hand every month.

Ask a plain-English question about your data and get a chart or a number back, no formula required
Import an Excel workbook and have Power BI auto-generate an interactive report from the columns you select
Pin report visuals onto a dashboard that keeps updating as the underlying data refreshes
Schedule automatic data refreshes so a published report does not go stale between manual updates
Connect to databases, Azure services and other business systems beyond spreadsheets

The verdict

Power BI earns its place once more than one person needs to watch the same live numbers, and it is genuinely strong at that if the business already runs on Microsoft 365 — Copilot and Q&A turn a plain-English question into a chart without anyone learning DAX. The catch is licensing, not capability, the free tier is a real sandbox for one person exploring alone, but the moment a colleague needs to see the dashboard, that colleague needs their own Pro seat too. For a solo operator or a small team outside the Microsoft ecosystem already, that per-viewer cost is a real tax a standalone BI tool without the same seat gate would not charge. It suits a team already inside Microsoft's stack more than one shopping for a BI tool on its own merits.

What it costs

Tier	Price	For	Includes
Free	$0, no credit card required	One person building and exploring reports for themselves.	Rich interactive reports and visual analytics; reports cannot be shared without upgrading.
Power BI Pro	$14/user/month, paid yearly	A team that needs to publish and share reports with each other.	Publishing and sharing reports; also bundled into Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5 subscriptions.
Power BI Premium Per User	$24/user/month, paid yearly	Users working with larger, more frequently refreshed datasets.	Everything in Pro, plus larger model sizes (up to 100 GB) and refreshes up to 48 times a day.
Fabric Capacity	Variable, based on capacity reserved or consumed	Organisations running analytics at a scale where per-user licensing stops making sense.	Shared analytics capacity across a whole organisation, with usage-based or reserved pricing.

Read from Microsoft Power BI's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.

What you need to start

A work or school email address to sign up — personal Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook.com accounts cannot register directly
Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 or later to install Power BI Desktop, the full report-building app (the browser-based service itself works on any OS)
A Power BI Pro or Premium Per User licence for every person a report is shared with, not just for the person building it, unless the workspace sits on Premium or Fabric capacity

A licence is a few minutes away with a work or school email and no credit card required; a first chart from an imported spreadsheet happens in the same sitting, directly in the browser.

Your first run Signing in at app.powerbi.com and importing an Excel file into My workspace gets you an automatic chart in the same sitting, just by ticking a couple of fields — no desktop install needed to see a first result.

Where it breaks

Fabric Capacity pricing is genuinely variable and was not resolvable to a single figure — it scales with the compute and storage an organisation reserves or consumes, and needs an actual usage estimate to price, not a fetch of the pricing page. Power BI Embedded, for reselling reports inside your own product, is priced separately again and not covered here.

Browser-based, with a Windows desktop app (Power BI Desktop) for building reports and mobile apps for viewing them. Deep integration with the rest of Microsoft's stack — Excel, SharePoint, Azure — is the main reason to pick this over a standalone BI tool.

First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.

When not to use it

Not for sending a single dashboard to one external client or contractor without buying them a licence too, every viewer needs their own Pro seat unless the report sits on separately-purchased Premium or Fabric capacity. Also not the natural first stop for a Mac-only shop wanting to build reports locally, since Power BI Desktop, the full report-building app, is Windows-only.

Power BI’s argument to a small business is usually indirect: if you’re already paying for Microsoft 365, a Pro license is a small add-on for something that would otherwise mean building dashboards by hand in Excel every month. The free tier is a genuine way to learn the tool — build reports, explore visuals — but the moment you want to share a dashboard with a colleague instead of screen-sharing it, Pro becomes a requirement, not a nice-to-have.

What Copilot changes

Ask a plain-English question — “which region’s sales dropped last quarter” — and Copilot writes the query against your model and returns an answer, sometimes with a chart attached. That removes the DAX-formula barrier that has historically kept Power BI’s more advanced features out of reach for anyone without dedicated analytics training. It does not replace understanding what the data actually represents; a wrong question still gets a confidently wrong answer.

Pro versus Premium Per User

The difference is dataset size and refresh frequency, not features you’d notice day to day. Most small businesses will never approach the 100GB model size or need 48 daily refreshes that justify Premium Per User — Pro covers the actual job for the overwhelming majority of use cases.

Against a spreadsheet

The honest baseline comparison isn’t another BI tool, it’s an Excel workbook someone maintains by hand. Power BI earns its subscription the moment more than one person needs to see the same live numbers, or the data changes often enough that a static spreadsheet is stale before anyone reads it.

Alternatives

Records & databasesApps

Metabase

Self-serve dashboards over your business data that let anyone on the team ask a question in plain English and get a chart back, built on the most widely used open-source BI tool.

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Records & databasesApps

Airtable

A database that looks like a spreadsheet, with an API, forms, views and AI fields on top — the place most small businesses end up keeping the records an automation needs to read and write.

Checked 15 Sep 2026