Do I Need to pay for Office 365 to use Power BI?

[KalpaniHt]

Hi,

We are on progress of implementing power BI reporting solution in our company. We are currently using a few Pro trial accounts. And we don't use anything on Office 365 so far and this is the 1st time we encounter it.

My question is when we finally going to pay for Power BI Pro licenses (we'll buy around 10) do we need to pay for O365 as well?

Thanks in advance

[Burningsuit · Accepted solution]

The short answer is "No, you don't need Office 365 licences for Power BI".

The "Pro" Power BI licence can be stand-alone, and provides all the features and facilities for sharing Dashboards, Reports and Excel files. Office 365 is a "nice to have" option, integrating Power BI with Sharepoint and Groups/Teams, but it's not mandatory.

Stuart

[P_Crane31]

Sorry to revive shuch an old thread, but easily digestable information is hard to come by.

Is the above still true? Or is it that I can make .pbix's and reports on PBI desktop for free, but if I want to publish to the PBI cloud service, I need a license? I have a potential freelance client that wants PBI reporting but doesn't use a shred of MS365. 

[Burningsuit]

Hi @P_Crane31 

Yep, still true. You don't need Office 365 to run Power BI. You can use Power BI desktop for free, but if you want to publish reports, to share them securely without giving access to the underlying data amongst other things, you'll need a Power BI licence.

hope this helps

Stuart

[P_Crane31]

Thank you, yes, very helpful!  👍