Compare Microsoft Power BI and Evidence on pricing, features, platforms, and ratings — both Business Intelligence tools, Subscription vs Open Source /…
At a Glance
Microsoft Power BI
Evidence
Primary category
Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence
Rating
Not documented
Not documented
Pricing model
Subscription
Open Source / Freemium
Starting price
Free (Power BI Desktop); $14/user/month for Pro
Free (self-hosted); Evidence Cloud from $15/user/month
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Free trial
Not documented
Not documented
Platforms
Web, Windows
Web
Team collaboration
Not documented
Not documented
AI features
Yes
Yes
Public API
Not documented
Yes
Pricing Compared
Starting price reflects the lowest paid tier, not the full cost for every team size or usage level.
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI Desktop — Free N/A
Power BI Pro — $14/user/month Annual
Power BI Premium Per User — $24/user/month Annual
Evidence
Open Source (Self-Hosted) — Free N/A
Team — $15/user/month monthly
Pro — $25/user/month monthly
Enterprise — Custom annual (quote-based)
Pros & Cons
Microsoft Power BI
Pros
Power BI Desktop is free for individual report building
Tight integration with Excel and the broader Microsoft 365/Azure ecosystem
Used by over 350,000 organizations, indicating a mature ecosystem and community
Scales from a single Pro seat to enterprise-wide capacity or Fabric licensing
Frequent feature updates, with over 1,500 shipped since its 2015 launch
Cons
Pro and Premium Per User prices increased significantly in April 2025 ($10 to $14 and $20 to $24)
Sharing and collaborating on reports requires a paid Pro or Premium license even for viewers in some configurations
Capacity-based Premium licensing is being phased toward Fabric, adding complexity for long-term planning
DAX and data modeling have a real learning curve for non-technical users
Reports are version-controlled as code, enabling Git-based review, diffing, and deployment workflows familiar to engineering teams
Free and open source to self-host with no artificial feature limits on the core framework
Templated pages eliminate manual duplication when building many similar reports across regions, products, or customers
Designed for embedding analytics into customer-facing products, not just internal dashboards
Cons
Requires comfort writing SQL and Markdown; not accessible to non-technical business users who want pure drag-and-drop reporting
Smaller ecosystem and community than established BI incumbents like Tableau, Looker, or Power BI
Evidence Cloud pricing is per-user, which can add up for larger analytics teams
AI features are metered via credits, adding a variable cost dimension beyond the base subscription
Use Cases
Microsoft Power BI
Business reporting and dashboards — Analysts build interactive dashboards that let stakeholders explore sales, marketing, or operations data without needing a dedicated analyst for every question.
Enterprise data governance and self-service BI — IT and data platform teams create governed datasets that business users can safely build their own reports on top of.
Excel-integrated financial and operational analysis — Finance and operations teams already working in Excel extend their analysis into interactive Power BI reports using the same underlying data.
Evidence
Internal analytics for lean data teams — A small analytics engineering team builds and maintains a full internal reporting suite using the same Git workflow they already use for data pipeline code.
Customer-facing embedded analytics — A SaaS company embeds Evidence-built reports directly into its product to give customers self-service analytics without building a custom dashboard from scratch.
Automated multi-entity reporting — An organization uses templated pages to automatically generate a separate performance report for every region, store, or account from a single report definition.