Power BI currently comes in three versions:
- Microsoft Power BI Free/Desktop – This version is for users who want to get business insights from their data with visualizations.
- Microsoft Power BI Pro – This is the full version of Power BI. It allows users unlimited reporting, sharing, and viewing of reports.
- Microsoft Power BI Premium – This version provides a license for all users in an organization.
Power BI Desktop is basically the version of Power BI that you install on to your local system / computer to access the basic features of Power BI and act as a companion to the main, cloud based application.
It is the ideal version to start with no matter your skill level Power BI Free enables you to connect to 70+ data sources, analyse data, publish to the web, export to excel and much more.
Power BI Pro is the full version of Power BI, which means it comes complete with the ability to use Power BI for both building dashboards, reports and unlimited viewing, sharing and consumption of your created reports (and reports shared by others) which is not possible with Power BI Desktop.
The biggest difference of Power BI Pro vs. Free is the fact that with Pro you have the option and the ability to share the data, reports, and dashboards with a large number of other users that also have a Power BI Pro license while also being able to create an app based workspace.
The Power BI Premium licence is not a per-user licence like a Free or Pro Licence. Instead, Power BI Premium licence provides a dedicated unit of capacity for all users in the organisation.
This dedicated capacity (aka Premium Workspace) can be used to host large datasets up to 50GB while offering a total storage of 100TB in the cloud.
This might help: https://go.christiansteven.com/bi-blog/power-bi/comparing-different-versions-of-power-bi
BR,
Sahir
