Selecting the Power BI Version for Your Business
Microsoft’s Power BI is their flagship product for data visualization. It enables businesses to connect to hundreds of data sources, build and deliver dashboards, and share content with others in your organization. Since it is cloud based, users can view the information from inside their network or on mobile devices from outside the network. Understanding with Power BI Version you should select and how they interact can be difficult. There are two core versions of the product, Power BI Desktop Free and Power BI Professional. Power BI Premium creates a dedicated cloud environment for your users to access the content.
Power BI Desktop Free
The Power BI version: Desktop edition is free for use and it great for people that want to try the product on your own data. You can build fully functional reports and dashboards, however, you cannot share your creations within your organization. Data is limited to 10 GB of storage total this include data sets, Excel, or data files. Publishing reports is limited to the public Power BI website. When testing the free edition, be careful not to post sensitive information when you publish content.
Power BI desktop should be used by individuals when testing Power BI.
Power BI Professional
The Power BI version: professional edition is currently priced at $10 per user per month, it is also included in some Office 365 editions. Professional edition unlocks all features of Power BI. Users of the professional edition can share content between each other on PowerBI.com using workspaces. Data is limited to 10 GB of storage total this include datasets, Excel, or data files. If other users share their workspaces with you, then the size of their workspace counts against your storage limit. Data can be refreshed throughout the day but is limited to 8 times per day. Security can be added to the workspaces to enable or disable who can access the reports or dashboards. In addition, auditing can be done to see who is accessing the reports. Content is published to a dedicated site on shared servers.
For departments within organizations that want to enhance their ability to leverage data and share visualizations Power BI Professional is a good starting point. When necessary you can add on Power BI Premium to further enhance how your organization leverages Power BI.
Power BI Premium
The Power BI version: Premium edition creates a dedicated virtual node for your organization. This is an additional license that unlocks Power BI for your organization. All users that create content must have Power BI Professional edition. However, anyone in the organization can view the content without an additional license. The Premium service also includes more storage and lifts the limit of 8 data refreshes per day. In addition, data sets can be up to 50 GB in size and the total data storage for the license is 100 TB.
For organizations that want to limit who can create content but want all users to be able to access the content. Power BI Premium can be a great option.
We have experience implementing all versions of Power BI. Contact us if you need assistance.
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