Is Your Business Ready for Power BI’s New Pricing?

If you’re a Power BI user, when your contract is next due for renewal, you’re going to be in for a surprise. Power BI Pro licenses are increasing from $10 to $14 per user per month and Power BI Premium is going up from $20 to $24 per user per month, that’s a 40% and 20% increase respectively.

Microsoft is justifying the increases because it says there hasn’t been a price rise like this for many years and that it reflects the work they’ve done to improve Power BI. It could be that Microsoft is trying to push organizations to use different subscriptions, like Microsoft Fabric, which is an enterprise data analytics platform. Or move customers to a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription, where Power BI Pro is bundled in.

Large price rises like this always come with a risk. It could force organizations to look for business intelligence app (BI) alternatives. But if an organization has invested a lot in Power BI, then migrating to a different solution could be painful.

When businesses base large parts of their operations on solutions like Microsoft 365, there’s always a certain amount of lock-in. While some of the services bundled with Microsoft 365 can be more easily migrated to competing solutions than others, Power BI relies heavily on data sources and rules contained in Microsoft’s ecosystem, and migration can be complex.

Unlike Exchange and SharePoint, it’s not common to find people with Power BI migration experience. But there are third-party services, like Xeomatrix, that can assist organizations with analytics platform migrations.

Migrating away from Power BI would require organizations to identify data models, reports, dashboards, data sources, reports, user permissions, integrations, and more before starting. Plus, the differences in data modeling and calculation languages between platforms can bring challenges.

The complexities of migration, and the fact many organizations have all or most of their data stored in Microsoft 365, could mean that Microsoft’s bet pays off as businesses decide to absorb the price rises instead of a risky migration project. At least, that’s what Microsoft is likely gambling on.

But whatever path existing Power BI customers decide to take, new business could be more difficult to get as the price increases could make other popular BI platforms, like Tableau, look more attractive.