At the time of writing this book, Microsoft has three variants of Power BI, namely a free cloud service model, a monthly subscription model per user (PRO), and a model for enterprise scale usage (PREMIUM).

Power BI PREMIUM is capacity based pricing per node per month or it can be purchased based on the number of virtual cores. It is billed monthly on an annual commitment. Organizations can choose to apply their dedicated capacity broadly or allocate it to assigned workspaces based on the number of users, workload needs, and other factors, and scale up or down as the requirements change. This service is expected to be available in the late Q2 of 2017 for all geographies currently supported by the Power BI service.

We would like to share a comparative analysis of the two variants, FREE and PRO, as your quick reference guide in the next subsections.