Microsoft Power BI is one of the market’s leading business intelligence suites. It includes a range of tools that enable you to ingest, process, analyse and visualise data.
Using Power BI, you can aggregate sales, web analytics, customer touchpoints and other business-critical data, then turn it into insights that drive revenue.
In this article, we cover Power BI in greater detail, including how it helps achieve your business goals and the different licensing options available to you.
As a part of Microsoft Power Platform, Power BI is a business intelligence tool that enables you to take data from a range of sources and turn it into information and visualisations.
The core tools and features of Microsoft Power BI include:
Microsoft Power BI has the tools and insights you need to quickly identify opportunities, respond effectively, and understand long-term trends to drive continuous optimisation.
The benefits of Power BI include:
There is a free version of Power BI, but it only allows you to create visualisations without all the extra features, such as publishing and collaboration, advanced AI, etc.
Along with the free version, there is a range of licence options, from Pro to the embedded version, allowing you to incorporate analytics into your applications.
Power BI pricing depends on your licence type. As of April 2026, these were the starting prices of the two most common licences:
Power BI Pro is also included in the Microsoft 365 E5 enterprise licence. If you already have the E5 licence, you can get started with Power BI today.
A £10.80 per user/month add-on is available for users with Power BI Pro, Microsoft 365 E5, and Office 365 E5 licences to upgrade to Power BI Premium per user.
The Power BI Pro licence allows you to create the full range of reports and visualisations. It has the data storage and tools required to collaborate on these within small teams. It doesn’t have the advanced AI tools and data storage, and the number of times data can be refreshed each day is lower.
Power BI Pro is ideal for smaller teams with just one or two data analysts. With it, your users can create compelling analyses and visualisations based on the data imported from connected data sources. They can refresh that data, updating it from the source up to eight times a day.
The Power BI Premium licence has higher storage and data refresh limits. It also comes with advanced AI capabilities. Ask natural-language questions with Microsoft Copilot and Azure Machine learning for enhanced pattern discovery and data analysis.
Whereas Power BI Pro comes with 10GB of data storage per user, there is no per-user data cap. Users with a premium licence get 100TB of data storage shared among all users. Premium users can also refresh data up to 48 times a day.
This allows Power BI Premium users to process far more significant amounts of data. Organisations working with large, continuously refreshing datasets will find these capabilities invaluable. For instance, if you’re optimising real-time digital sales, production facilities with thousands of data points, you’ll be better served by the sophistication and power of Power BI Premium.
Given the many different uses you can put business data to, there are almost limitless uses for Power BI dashboards. Here are some of the most common.
Texaport is one of the UK’s leading Microsoft 365 experts. Our consultants will help you work out which Power BI licence is right for you. We’ll help you configure Power BI for your use case to maximise your return on your investment.
Find out how we can help you achieve your business goals with Microsoft Power BI. Or contact us today to speak to one of our Microsoft experts.