»» Power BI Mobile: Intended to be a complementary product to manage

reports, dashboards, and KPIs on the go, Power BI Mobile has limited, if any,
authoring capabilities. Your ability to collaborate on Mobile varies depending
on your license authorization.

»» Power BI Embedded: This version offers a way to integrate real-time reports

on public- or private-facing products using the Power BI API service in
Microsoft Azure,

»» Power BI Report Server: A server-based Power BI product intended to

produce reporting output offline, its users store their reports on a server, not
online. Note that you must still procure some form of Premium license, either
stand-alone or using a Software Assurance subscription (an enterprise-based
software plan).

Core functionality, data processing, and handling capacity differ among the four
licensing options for Power BI. When it comes to data handling capacity, think of
free as a filing cabinet worth of data versus Pro and Premium managing several
hundred filing cabinets. Even among the two paid versions, Premium has the
most capacity available. Similarly, each version has more reporting options and
improved collaboration quality.

Even if you have a small set of users, the Premium license supplies more storage
capacity and higher data limits — which include refresh rates and data isolation
options— than the Pro version. The significant difference in price between Pro
and Premium is more than justified.

Looking at Desktop versus Services options

The beauty of Software as a Service (SaaS) is that anytime a vendor such as Micro-
soft wants to add a new feature to a product, it can do so with little effort — a user
will see the magic of the new feature instantly and will start using it. That isn’t
the case with downloadable software. Once an application is configured for the
desktop, it’s up to the end user to keep track of the updates. Vendors also update
downloadable software less often. Whereas cloud-based solutions may be updated
daily, a software release for a significant product happens monthly with Power BI.

Power Bi Desktop is a complete authoring tool for analytics and business intelli-
gence designers. You can download Power BI Desktop for free and install it on
your local computer. The desktop version allows a user to connect to more than
70 data source types and then transform those sources into data models. You can
take the reports you’ve created and add visuals based on the data models using
Desktop. Because Power BI Desktop exists as an application, it’s updated each
month cumulatively with all the features and functionality made available for
consumption on the Services platform.

36 PART 1 Put Your BI Thinking Caps On