The Power BI Desktop is a free, Windows-based application that's installed on a local desktop or laptop computer. The Power BI Desktop is the primary tool that's used to ingest, cleanse, and transform various sources of data, combine the data into models, and then analyze and visualize the data through the creation of calculations, visualizations, and reports. Once reports have been created in Power BI Desktop, they are often published to the Power BI Service for sharing and collaboration.

The Power BI Service is a cloud-based, software as a service (SaaS) online platform. Originally known as Power BI for Office 365, today it is often referred to as powerbi.com or simply Power BI. The Power BI Service can be used for light report editing as well as sharing, collaborating, and viewing reports. Some data sources can be connected directly from the Power BI Service, but the ability to model and analyze that data is limited.