Power BI vs Tableau vs Looker pricing 2027: $14 to $115 a user, US and UK

Summary. For 20 report builders and 200 readers, Power BI Pro is the cheapest full BI platform at list price on 13 November 2026: all 220 users at $14.00 a month (£10.80 before VAT), paid yearly, cost $3,080 or £2,376 a month. Tableau Cloud Standard costs $4,500 a month for the same team ($75 per Creator, $15 per Viewer) and Enterprise $9,300 ($115 and $35), on annual contracts only. Google renamed its free Looker Studio to Data Studio on 16 April 2026; Data Studio Pro is $9 per user per project per month, and the separate Looker (Google Cloud core) platform is quote-only. Fabric capacity changes the Power BI sums only at F64, where free users with the Viewer role can open reports. F64 reserved costs $5,002.67 a month in US East or £4,386.80 in UK South, so it beats Pro only from about 358 view-only users in the US or 407 in the UK. On AI, Copilot needs paid Fabric capacity from F2 ($156.33 a month reserved), Tableau Agent sits in quote-only Cloud+ and the Tableau+ Bundle, and Looker bills Conversational Analytics beyond its token pool from 1 February 2027.

About this article. It is written for finance, IT and data leads in the US and UK comparing BI licences before a 2027 renewal. We checked every price, plan and limit against vendor pricing pages, documentation, release notes and the Azure Retail Prices API on 13 November 2026, and recomputed every total. List prices exclude tax and discounts and change often, so re-check before you sign. No vendor paid for inclusion; this is not financial advice. Researched with AI assistance and reviewed by our editorial team.

What changed in 2026, and what to decide before a 2027 renewal

Looker Studio is Data Studio again. Google's release notes for 16 April 2026 record the rebrand, plus a home page that also surfaces BigQuery conversational agents and Colab data apps. The old Looker Studio page now redirects to Data Studio, whose paid tier is Data Studio Pro. Looker (Google Cloud core) keeps its name. If a quote or RFP says Looker, confirm which product it means: one is free and the other is quote-only.

Power BI capacity now means Fabric. Microsoft sells capacity only as Fabric F SKUs, reserved or pay-as-you-go. It is retiring the Power BI Premium per-capacity (P) SKUs, now available only on an active Enterprise Agreement. Our Power BI consulting guide covers the P SKU migration clock.

Power BI Q&A retires in February 2027. Microsoft moved the retirement of Q&A, its older natural-language feature, to February 2027; from then Q&A visuals show an error and users are pointed to Copilot, which needs capacity.

Tableau's AI sits in the top editions. Tableau Agent and Tableau Knowledge are listed only in Tableau Cloud+ and the Tableau+ Bundle, both quote-only. Tableau Next, Salesforce's agentic analytics product, starts at $40 (£32) per user per month, billed annually.

Looker now has a billing date for AI. Conversational Analytics in Looker has no allocation limits, within fair use, until 31 January 2027; from 1 February 2027, usage beyond a monthly token pool is billed.

Before renewing, count three things: people who build content, people who only read it, and whether anyone will use a natural-language assistant in 2027. Those decide the cheapest option more than any headline price.

Price list at a glance (USD and GBP)

List prices on each vendor's pricing page on 13 November 2026:

Fabric capacity is priced per capacity unit (CU) by Azure region. From the Azure Retail Prices API on 13 November 2026:

Pay-as-you-go months assume 730 hours (64 × $0.18 × 730 = $8,409.60); reserved months divide the yearly rate by 12 (64 × $938 ÷ 12 = $5,002.67). The reserved rate is 40.5% below pay-as-you-go, the saving Microsoft quotes. A three-year reservation costs exactly three times the one-year price, so it buys no extra list discount.

Power BI: per user until F64, then capacity

Power BI Pro costs $14.00 per user per month paid yearly in the US and £10.80 in the UK, where Microsoft notes the price excludes VAT. Pro lets a user publish and share reports, with a 1 GB model limit, 8 scheduled refreshes a day and 10 GB of storage per licence. It is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5, which our Business Premium vs E3 vs E5 comparison covers.

Premium Per User costs $24.00 (£18.50). It raises the model limit to 100 GB and refreshes to 48 a day, and adds XMLA endpoint read/write, advanced dataflows and other Premium features. Microsoft Learn calls PPU more cost-effective when fewer than 250 users need Premium features, but it provisions no Fabric capacity. A $14.00 (£10.80) step-up add-on is listed for Pro and E5 users. It suits E5 users; for a standalone Pro user, Pro plus the add-on ($28) costs more than PPU outright ($24).

Fabric capacity matters for three reasons:

1. Free viewers at F64 and above. Below F64, every user who views Power BI content needs Pro, PPU or an individual trial; on F64 or larger, users with a free licence and the Viewer role can view it. Authors need Pro or PPU on any capacity.

1. Copilot. Copilot needs paid Fabric capacity at F2 or above, or Premium at P1 or above; trial capacities do not qualify, and a Pro or PPU licence alone is not enough.

1. Other Fabric workloads. Lakehouses, warehouses and notebooks need an F capacity, which PPU does not provide.

F capacity is billed through Azure per second with a one-minute minimum, and pay-as-you-go capacity can be scaled or paused. Watch capacity overage: Microsoft's documentation says it is enabled by default on new capacities and pays for usage that would otherwise be throttled at three times the pay-as-you-go rate, up to an admin-set 24-hour threshold that is not a hard cap. The meter is $0.54 per CU hour in US East and £0.4737 in UK South.

Because creators need Pro on any capacity, the break-even compares F64 with Pro for view-only users. $5,002.67 ÷ $14 = 357.3, so F64 is cheaper from 358 viewers in US East; £4,386.80 ÷ £10.80 = 406.2, so from 407 in UK South. Below those counts, per-user licences win unless you need Fabric workloads anyway.

Best for: organisations already on Microsoft 365 and Azure, finance teams that live in Excel, and anyone who wants the lowest per-seat price for a full authoring tool.

Tableau: three roles, two published editions, annual only

Tableau prices by role. A Creator builds data sources, workbooks and Prep flows and gets Tableau Desktop and Prep Builder. An Explorer edits workbooks and builds from published data sources. A Viewer interacts with dashboards, receives subscriptions and alerts, and sees Pulse metrics.

On Tableau Cloud Standard, Creator costs $75, Explorer $42 and Viewer $15 per user per month, billed annually. Enterprise costs $115, $70 and $35, and adds Data Management, Advanced Management, eLearning and up to 10 sites (Standard allows 3). Tableau's FAQ says there are no monthly plans, and every deployment needs at least one Creator.

The UK page shows starting prices of £12 for Standard and £28 for Enterprise, matching the $15 and $35 Viewer prices, but no sterling Creator or Explorer prices on 13 November 2026. Ask for a sterling quote rather than convert.

Two alternatives to role-based pricing exist, both quote-only. Capacity-based pricing on Tableau Cloud replaces Viewer licences with Viewer capacity blocks and cannot be mixed with role-based Viewers in the same deployment or tenant. Compute-based pricing on Tableau Server licenses 8-core units instead of Explorers and Viewers.

Tableau Pulse and Tableau MCP are included in every Cloud edition. Tableau Desktop Free Edition covers individual analysis of files stored on your own machine.

Best for: analyst-heavy teams that value Tableau's visual exploration, Salesforce customers, and organisations whose data sits across several clouds and warehouses.

Looker vs Data Studio: two different products

Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) is free for creators and report viewers. It connects to more than 1,400 data sources, including Google Sheets, Google Ads, BigQuery and Google Analytics. Data Studio Pro costs $9 per user per project per month and adds Google Cloud support, team content management and customer-managed encryption keys.

Looker (Google Cloud core) is the governed semantic-layer platform built on LookML. Google sells three editions, each priced through sales on annual subscriptions of one, two or three years:

• Standard, for small organisations or teams with fewer than 50 users, with up to 1,000 query-based API calls a month.

• Enterprise, with enhanced security features and up to 100,000 query-based API calls a month.

• Embed, for external analytics and custom applications, with up to 500,000 query-based API calls a month.

Each edition includes one production instance, 10 Standard users and 2 Developer users. Extra users cost more, at unpublished prices, and Google may invoice in arrears if use exceeds the subscription. If your data already sits in BigQuery, our Snowflake vs Databricks vs BigQuery pricing guide covers the warehouse side of the bill.

Best for: Data Studio suits marketing and Google-centred reporting on a tight budget. Looker suits teams that want one governed metric layer on BigQuery, or embedded analytics in their own product.

AI features and what they cost

Each vendor's assistant as documented on 13 November 2026:

Looker pools tokens per instance: each internal user adds 1 million input and 20,000 output data tokens a month, each embed user 250,000 and 5,000, with a floor of 60 million and 1.2 million per production instance. Pools reset monthly. From 1 February 2027, usage beyond the pool costs $3.00 per million input and $20.00 per million output tokens. Our 220 users would get 220 million input and 4.4 million output tokens a month.

The cheapest Copilot route for a Pro-licensed team is an F2 ($156.33 a month reserved in US East, £137.09 in UK South), which Microsoft now allows as a Fabric Copilot Capacity that bills Copilot use from Pro and PPU workspaces. An F2 is small. Copilot uses 100 CU seconds per 1,000 input tokens and 400 per 1,000 output tokens, so Microsoft's example request (2,000 in, 500 out) costs 400 CU seconds. An F2 holds 2 × 86,400 = 172,800 CU seconds a day, about 432 such requests if it ran nothing else. Pilot with the Capacity Metrics app first.

Head-to-head comparison

Power BI Report Server is licensed through F64 or larger reservations or qualifying SQL Server licences. Our SQL Server 2017 end-of-support guide explains why Reporting Services moves to it from SQL Server 2025.

Worked cost: 20 creators and 200 viewers

Twenty analysts build reports and 200 staff read them. List prices, annual billing, US East for USD Fabric figures and UK South for GBP, no discounts, GBP before VAT.

The arithmetic: Power BI Pro is 220 × $14 = $3,080 (220 × £10.80 = £2,376); adding an F2 gives $3,236.33 (£2,513.09). The F64 route is $5,002.67 + 20 × $14 = $5,282.67 (£4,386.80 + 20 × £10.80 = £4,602.80). Tableau Standard is 20 × $75 + 200 × $15 = $4,500; Enterprise is 20 × $115 + 200 × $35 = $9,300. If the readers must edit workbooks, Standard Explorers raise it to 20 × $75 + 200 × $42 = $9,900. A second Data Studio Pro project doubles those seats.

Three readings of the table:

• Power BI Pro wins at this size. 200 viewers is well under the 358 (US) or 407 (UK) line for F64, so capacity only pays if you also want Fabric workloads.

• Tableau Standard costs about 46% more ($4,500 ÷ $3,080 = 1.46), and Enterprise about three times as much ($9,300 ÷ $3,080 = 3.02). Capacity-based Viewer blocks are the lever to ask about.

• Data Studio Pro costs a fraction but is a reporting tool, not a governed BI platform; free Data Studio already covers report viewers, so confirm which readers need Pro seats.

UK prices exclude VAT, and the standard rate is 20%, so 220 Pro licences come to £2,376 × 1.2 = £2,851.20 a month including VAT.

Which one to choose

US and UK buying notes

Currency. Microsoft publishes Power BI prices in USD and GBP (UK ex VAT); Tableau shows GBP for starting prices only. Google says non-USD payers get the prices on its Cloud Platform SKUs page, and shows Data Studio Pro in USD only.

Procurement routes. Fabric reservations and pay-as-you-go both count towards a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). Every Looker instance bills to an attached Google Cloud billing account. Tableau is an annual contract with Tableau or Salesforce.

Data location. Fabric capacities are created in an Azure region you choose, and UK South is priced in the Azure list. Neither Tableau's nor Google's pricing page states a hosting region, so confirm it in the order form.

Implementation and migration checklist

1. Count roles, not people. List builders, editors and readers separately; readers drive every pricing model here.

1. Run the F64 test. Above 358 (US) or 407 (UK) view-only users, price an F64 reservation, and review its overage threshold before the first bill.

1. Decide on AI now. Copilot needs F2 or above, Q&A stops working in February 2027, Tableau Agent needs Cloud+, and Looker bills tokens beyond the pool from 1 February 2027. Budget for the assistant you will use.

1. Check existing entitlements. Microsoft 365 E5 includes Power BI Pro; Salesforce Foundations brings Tableau Semantics and Data 360 to Cloud+.

1. Pilot on real data. Rebuild three high-traffic reports in the candidate tool and measure refresh time and capacity use before you sign.

1. Plan the semantic layer. Moving between DAX models, Tableau data sources and LookML is a rewrite, not an export; give it an owner.

1. Confirm currency and tax in the order form. Lock GBP pricing where it is published and agree VAT treatment with finance.

How eCorpIT can help

eCorpIT is a Gurugram-based technology organisation, founded in 2021, assessed at CMMI Level 5 and MSME certified, with senior-led engineering teams working across AWS, Microsoft and Google platforms. Our data and analytics services team models BI licence and capacity costs from your real creator and viewer counts, pilots the shortlisted tools on your data, and builds the semantic models and pipelines underneath the one you choose. Talk to us at /contact-us/.

Last updated: 13 November 2026.

References

1. Power BI: Pricing Plan (United States) — Microsoft

1. Power BI: Pricing Plan (United Kingdom) — Microsoft

1. Tableau Cloud Pricing (US) — Tableau

1. Data Studio release notes, 16 April 2026 entry — Google Cloud

1. Data Studio: Business Insights Visualizations — Google Cloud

1. Looker pricing — Google Cloud

1. Understand Microsoft Fabric licenses and capacity — Microsoft Learn

1. Azure Retail Prices API: Microsoft Fabric capacity meters, US East (USD) — Microsoft

1. Azure Retail Prices API: Microsoft Fabric meters, UK South (GBP) — Microsoft

1. Copilot for Power BI overview — Microsoft Learn

1. Power BI Q&A retirement reminder: February 2027 timeline update, 10 September 2026 — Microsoft Fabric Community

1. Pricing for data people — Tableau

1. Tableau Cloud Pricing (UK) — Tableau

1. Capacity overage in Microsoft Fabric — Microsoft Learn

1. Copilot consumption, usage, and billing in Fabric — Microsoft Learn

1. What is Power BI Report Server? — Microsoft Learn

1. VAT rates — GOV.UK