There's no native Mac version of Power BI Desktop, though the community idea is Under Review (being considered) by the Power BI team. You could add your votes there. Until that happens, are you able to run Windows on your Mac and install it that way? Yes, you need to have either work or school email address to sign up Power BI. Where you cannot sign up using email address provided consumer email service or telecommunication providers such as outlook.com, Hotmail.com, gmail.com and others. For more details, you can refer this article: Signing up for Power BI as an individual.
- Tableau for Mac. 4,908 downloads Updated: December 15, 2020 Trial. Review Free Download specifications 100% CLEAN report malware.
- Download Tableau Desktop today and start visualizing your data. Start a 14-day free trial and discover the power of fast and easy data visualization.
- Microsoft Power BI Desktop is built for the analyst. It combines state-of-the-art interactive visualizations, with industry-leading data query and modeling built-in. Create and publish your reports to Power BI. Power BI Desktop helps you empower others with timely critical insights, anytime, anywhere.
Power BI is the leader of the pack when it comes to Business Intelligence tools. It has several different licence types, depending on how users want to use and interact with it.
If you’re thinking about using Power BI business analytics tools to deliver insights throughout your organisation, or if you’ve been provided a licence by your company, you’ll need to understand what these licences are, how they work and what facilities each offer.
Update: In December 2020 Microsoft Announced their new 'Premium Per User' Licence I've written about it here Power BI Licences, what is Premium Per User ?
Update: We cover licencing in our Youtube Video,
Comparison table
Power BI Licence | Free | Pro | Premium |
---|---|---|---|
Cost | Free | £7.50/u/m | > £3100/m/Licenced by Capacity |
Data Capacity Limit | 10GB | 10GB | 100TB (102,400GB) |
Maximum size of a DataModel | 1GB | 1GB | 10GB |
Create and View Dashboards & Reports | Y | Y | View Only |
Share Dashboards & reports with other BI Users | N | Y | |
Power BI Desktop | Y | Y | |
Access via mobile Devices | Y | Y | |
Consume Curated Content Packs (Dynamics, Salesforce, Google Analytics) | Y | Y | |
Import from Excel, CSV, and Power BI desktop Files | Y | Y | |
Publish to Web | Y | Y | |
Export to PowerPoint/CSV | N | Y | |
Publish to Sharepoint | N | Y | |
Publish to Premium | N | Y | |
Power BI Report Server (On Premise Server) | N | Premium | Y |
Data Refresh | |||
Scheduled Refresh | 8 per day | 8 Per Day | 48 Per Day |
Minimum Time Between Refreshes | 30min | 30min | 1min |
Streaming Data (per hour) | 1M Rows/hour | 1M rows/hour | |
Live Data Sources | N | Y | |
Access on-premises data via Gateways (Personal & Enterprise) | Y | Y | |
Collaboration | |||
Use Office 365 Groups in Power BI | N | Y | |
Create & Publish Apps | N | Y | N |
Consume Apps | N | Y | Y |
Manage access control through Active Directory Groups | N | Y | N |
Our in depth look at each shows exactly how they differ and will help you make the right decision:
Power BI desktop – free software
Before getting in to licence detail, it’s worth mentioning one element of Power BI that does not need a licence. The Power BI desktop application is a free download from Microsoft, you can get it here.
Power BI Desktop lets you create Data Models and build Reports, but does not need a Power BI licence. However, once you’ve built your Report, in order to share it with others, export it to PowerPoint or simply print the Report you’ll need a Power BI account in the cloud. To access Power BI in the cloud you’ll need a licence, either Free or Pro.
Power BI Free Licence
The Power BI Free licence is the entry-level licence for Power BI. Users can sign up for one simply by registering here. A Power BI Free licence gives the user 10GB of storage in the cloud that can be used for hosting Power BI reports, or Excel workbooks.
The maximum size of a Power BI report that can be hosted in the cloud is 1GB. These reports can be refreshed up to 8 times a day, with a minimum of 30 minutes between each refresh.
Power BI Free Limitations
Although powerful, the Power BI free licence has several limitations. The most obvious is that Free licences cannot share Reports or Dashboards with other users, neither can they view Reports or Dashboards shared from other Pro licence users.
The only method of sharing a Report open to Free licence users is to publish the Report to the Web. This makes the report publicly available on app.powerbi.com. This publish to web is great for sharing reports with everybody on the internet, but remember it’s not secure and should not be used for data you don’t want to make public, which is pretty much any corporate data, which should be kept confidential.
Other limitations mean you cannot integrate with Office 365 or export reports to PowerPoint or report data to CSV’s.
Best for
- Small businesses and start-ups
- Businesses with less data to analyse
- Businesses without a budget for intelligence tools
Power BI Pro
The Pro licence is a chargeable, per user licence which is currently £7.50 per user per month. It is usually bought as a standalone or add-on licence to office 365. The office 365 E5 licence is the only office 365 licence that includes a Power BI Pro licence as part of it, all others need an add-on licence.
A Pro licence has all the feature of the free licence, 10GB of storage, maximum 1GB report size, 8 automated refreshes per day, with a minimum 30 minutes between refreshes etc. But the big difference is that Pro users can share Reports and Dashboards with other Pro users.
Pro licence holders can also integrate with Office 365 Groups and Teams, use collaborative workspaces and set up email subscriptions to Reports and Dashboards. Often called a “Creator” or “Author” licence, the Pro licence is the most common Power BI licence and in small to medium sized enterprises is it common to have a Pro licence for each user that wants to use Power BI.
Best for
- Medium to larger businesses
- Corporations with big data
- Multi-site businesses
Power BI Premium
The Power BI Premium licence is not a per-user licence like a Free or Pro Licence. Instead a Premium licence provides a dedicated capacity for all users in the organisation. This dedicated capacity, a “Premium Workspace” can be used to host large datasets, up to 50GB in size and offers a total of 100TB of data storage.
It allows Reports and Dashboards to be wrapped up in an “app” and shared with users. These users then only need a free licence to view the app. It also allows Reports and Dashboards on a Premium Workspace to be shared with users having a free licence.
Multiple workspaces can be marked as “Premium” and each can be use to create apps or share with free licence users. A Power BI Premium licence is very much a “consumer” licence, allowing users with only a free licence the ability to view and interact with Reports and Dashboards hosted on a Premium workspace. To create these reports and dashboards in the first place you need a “Pro” licence.
How do you know what Licence you have?
If you want to know what licence you have for Power BI, from your Power BI Workspace on the web, click on the “Gearwheel” on the menu top right. From there click on “Manage Personal Storage” Power BI will show your login name and the licence type at the top of the screen.
To find out if you have a Premium licence, look at the Workspaces available to you. Premium workspaces have a diamond icon next to them. Alternatively, when creating a Workspace you can designate it as “Dedicated Capacity”, which is only available with a Premium licence.
Figure 1 Diamond Icon signifying Premium Workspace
Things to note
- There is no anonymous secure viewer for Power BI, if you publish a report to the Web, it is made public, and anyone on the internet can potentially search and find the data. Try putting “site:app.powerbi.com burningsuit” into google to find our public reports, or worse still try “site:app.powerbi.com confidential”!
- To securely share a Report, a Pro user can share with another Pro user, or place the Report on a Premium Workspace and share it with Free licence users.
- Emailing Power BI Desktop files around is not secure, the recipient gets ALL the data in the data model and can edit the resulting report. Of course, the recipient also needs a copy of PowerBI Desktop to open the .pbix file.
- When you first sign up for Power BI free you have the option of trialling a Pro licence for 30 days without charge.
- Internal Administrators can block signup to Power BI Free or Pro, so that they can administer the licences for the organisation.
Training for all versions
Whether you choose to go with the free or pro version of Power BI, or update to premium, we can help you get the most out of it for your business in our Power BI Training courses.
Our team of experts are at the cutting edge of all things Power BI, due to our close partnership with Microsoft, giving you the most up-to-date training and information of the platform.
Get in contact with our expert team to find out more or, visit our Power BI page to book your place on one of our courses.
Power BI is a powerful BI tool, but it sadly doesn't support Mac devices.
A couple of years ago, I was working for a company where 90% of our staff had a MacBook and loved it, but there was no way for our Data Team to work with Power BI to build out reporting. Then we turned into another tool named Holistics, a cloud-based one.
![Desktop Desktop](/uploads/1/1/1/8/111884545/912042347.png)
In this post, I will share my experiences implementing Power BI on Mac OS, which I hope is helpful to you if you are looking for a solution.
Disclaimer: I fell in love with Holistics at the previous company, and am now working for Holistics!
Since Power BI can't run on a Mac, here are our recommendations to run Power BI on Macintosh Devices.
- Install and run Power BI on a Virtual Machine, then remote in to that Virtual Machine.
- Install and run Power BI on a PC, then use a remote viewer to control that PC.
- Use an alternative BI solution.
- Install Windows on Mac using Boot Camp
To give you a little context about Microsoft's plan on supporting Power BI on Mac devices, they are not considering developing Power BI desktop for Mac devices anytime soon.
You can also visit this link to keep track of their upcoming plans.
You can set-up a Windows Virtual Machine on Azure, Google Cloud or AWS.
- Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/ (starting from $61/month)
- AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/launch-windows-vm/
Then you install and run Power BI on that Virtual Machine.
Finally, install Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac on each device to give your team access to that VM.
There are a couple of disadvantages to this approach, however:
- It's difficult to control permission access and version history.
- You can only have one person working on a machine at a time, since Power BI for desktop is not a collaborative tool.
It's a little bit the same with the first method, however, this time, you use a physical machine.
You set-up a Windows PC, install and run Power BI on that PC.
Install TeamViewer, AnyDesk, or MS Remote Desktop to give people access to that PC and use Power BI from their Macs.
Cons: same with the first method, and you have to maintain a physical PC.
Power BI is powerful — it helps your team consolidate data and build dashboards and reports with a powerful data modeling layer. It's not easy to find a great tool in the market to replace Power BI, but here are two alternative solutions I recommend which is 100% cloud-based, can replicate its functionalities, and in some cases do even more.
1. Holistics
Holistics is a powerful full-stack data platform that allows companies to set up an end-to-end, reusable, and scalable data analytics stack with minimal engineering resources.
It not only gives data analysts a powerful SQL-based data modeling approach, but it also helps them build a data warehouse and automate reporting. Holistics is also designed to empowers non-technical users to get insights with a strong self-service analytics offering.
Holistics vs Power BI: https://www.holistics.io/compare/holistics-vs-powerbi/
2. Looker + StitchData
Looker is a business intelligence and big data analytics platform that helps you explore, analyze and share real-time business analytics easily.
Looker is also a powerful server-based Data Modeling BI tool, however, they don't support Data Transforms and Data Imports, so you will need another tool for that called StitchData. Together, you get all the power of Power BI with none of the Windows lock-in.
Boot Camp is a utility that helps you install Microsoft Windows 10 on your Mac, then switch between macOS and Windows when restarting your Mac.
Power Bi Desktop For Mac Free Download Windows 10
You can learn more about how to use it here
Free Power Bi Desktop Download
I like Power BI's product, but it is difficult to keep using Power BI given that the tool is built exclusively for the Windows Desktop. Instead of allowing your data team to work collaboratively, your data pipeline will depend on Windows. This is difficult and restrictive if your organization works primarily on Mac.
The upshot here is that if you do not use a Microsoft-stack at your organization, a 100% cloud-based solution would be a better fit for your needs.