What is Power BI?

Power BI is Microsoft's business analytics platform. It connects to data sources, transforms and models that data, builds interactive reports and dashboards from it, and lets people share those reports across the organisation through the browser, Teams, or mobile apps.

The pieces of Power BI

• Power BI Desktop — a free Windows authoring tool where you build reports. You import or connect to data, write transformations in Power Query, model relationships, define DAX measures, and design visuals.
• Power BI Service — the cloud service (app.powerbi.com) where published reports live. Users browse reports, refresh data, share dashboards, and manage workspaces here.
• Power BI Mobile — iOS and Android apps for reading reports on the go.
• Power BI Embedded — APIs for embedding reports in your own applications.
• Power BI Report Server — an on-premises option for organisations that can't put data in the cloud.

How it connects to data

Power BI ships with hundreds of connectors — SQL Server, Snowflake, Azure, Dataverse, SharePoint, Excel, Salesforce, Google BigQuery, and many more. Data can either be imported into Power BI's in-memory engine (fast, refresh-driven) or queried live via DirectQuery (real-time, slower per-query). Larger organisations centralise their model layer in semantic models (formerly datasets) so multiple reports share one source of truth.

Licensing in 2026

The main options:

• Power BI Free — personal use only, can't share with others.
• Power BI Pro — included in Microsoft 365 E5 and sold standalone. Required to share reports.
• Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) — adds larger model sizes, paginated reports, and AI features per user.
• Microsoft Fabric capacity — the modern shared-capacity tier. Fabric subsumes Power BI Premium capacities and adds the rest of the Microsoft data platform (Data Factory, lakehouses, Synapse-style warehouses, real-time analytics).

Where it fits

Inside Microsoft 365, Power BI is the analytics surface. Reports embed cleanly into Teams tabs and SharePoint pages, and the audit and security model is shared with the rest of the tenant. For most organisations starting with self-service BI on Microsoft 365 data, Power BI is the default choice.