Power BI is part of the Microsoft Power Platform and is a Data visualization and Business analytics tool collating and combining various data sources to build interactive dashboards and Business Intelligence reports.

Power BI helps in integrating with different data sources (Excel Workbook, SharePoint Online, Relational Databases, etc.) using various available connectors and services –

1. Power BI Desktop Application: To load and transform data and build interactive dashboards.
2. Power BI Service: Cloud based service (SaaS (Software as a Service)) to publish Power BI reports to cloud.
3. Power BI Gateway: Helps to refresh report either in On-Prem environment or in a cloud without manual intervention.
4. Power BI Mobile Apps: Power BI Apps available on IOS, Android and Windows platform to access and stay connected with the data on the go.

Features –

• Row Level Security (RLS): Ensuring report security concerned with the audience developers filter the data relevant to the users.
• Cognitive Services: Power BI natively integrates with Azure services and provide AI functionalities
  1. Text Analytics – this includes functions that enable sentiment scoring and key phrase extraction on text data. For e.g., Social Media Feedbacks, User Reviews etc.
  2. Azure Machine Learning – This feature of Power BI enables user to create, train and call machine learning models.

Power BI Products –

1. Power BI Free
2. Power BI Desktop
3. Publish to Web
4. Connect to 70+ Data sources

Power BI Free suite provide certain features at an individual level where one can create and build dashboards and reports using connectivity options such as DirectQuery, live connection, and the use of the gateway but cannot share it with any other user. Also, the visual that are available in Power BI Pro are available in Power BI Free.

2. Power BI Pro

Most important benefit of Power BI Pro is that users can share the reports and dashboards with their colleagues irrespective of organization who must have BI Pro licenses. Pro license users have 10 GB user storage data limit.

3. Power BI Premium

This is designed to manage the Power BI requirements for a large organization and their workloads. This is further allotted as user capacity and dedicated capacity in an organization. To understand this better check out this  Microsoft blog about Power BI Pro vs. Power BI Premium.

For Pricing follow Power BI pricing