Power BI Licensing
With a variety of Power BI licenses available, deciding which option best fits your organization’s size, budget, and data reporting needs can be challenging.
As you seek an alternative to traditional Excel-based reporting, selecting the appropriate license is crucial to meet your requirements. In this comparative analysis of Power BI licenses, we explore all currently available options to help you choose the most suitable one to drive your business results.
Power BI Free License: A Viable Option?
Although the Power BI Free License comes at no cost, its resource and storage limitations make it impractical for most businesses. Designed for personal use, this license may be useful for individual entrepreneurs or managing personal finances.
The personal nature of the Power BI Free License, combined with the inability to share reports, a restriction to one daily refresh, and the absence of critical features such as Direct Query, limits its usefulness. To fully leverage Power BI’s capabilities, transitioning to a paid license is essential — even small teams may struggle with the limitations of the free version.
Key Differences Between Power BI Free and Pro
Power BI Pro, the most popular licensing option, bridges the gap between Power BI Free and Power BI Premium. This paid license offers more storage and essential functionality. Crucially, it enables report sharing and collaboration with all end users covered under your organization’s Power BI license.
If sharing reports is a requirement, Power BI Pro is indispensable. Increased storage capacity and easier refresh capabilities significantly enhance team productivity when working with Power BI.
Choosing Between Pro and Premium: A Detailed View
Power BI Premium further enhances the capabilities offered by Power BI Pro by providing additional features and expanded storage capacity. These added benefits become essential for large or rapidly growing organizations. Within the Premium category, multiple licenses are available, requiring careful evaluation to determine the version best suited to your organization’s unique data management needs.
What Does Power BI Pro Offer?
Power BI Pro provides a maximum dataset size of 1GB and up to 10GB of storage per user. This allows your team to manage significantly larger volumes of data than the free version. Additionally, Power BI Pro allows up to 8 data refreshes per day, in 30-minute intervals, streamlining work with constantly evolving datasets.
To publish and share reports, an upgrade from the Free version to Power BI Pro is required. It’s important to note that users you wish to share with must also have a Power BI Pro license. Many organizations already have access to Power BI Pro through the Office 365 Enterprise E5 license, simplifying immediate adoption and enabling a future upgrade to Premium as the organization grows.
Power BI Pro is an excellent option for small to mid-sized businesses and entrepreneurs beginning their Power BI journey. However, as your organization grows, migrating to the advanced capabilities and expanded storage of a Power BI Premium license may become necessary.
What Does Power BI Premium Offer?
There are two categories of Power BI Premium licenses – P SKUs and EM SKUs. This section focuses on the P SKUs, with EM SKUs covered later. P SKUs range from P1 to P5, offering increasing computing power and performance at higher price tiers.
When viewing a report using a Premium license, you’ll see a diamond icon. Microsoft recently enhanced the P SKUs to support auto-scaling performance, power, and speed. For example, if an organization hits the P1 capacity limit during peak times, it automatically scales up to P2, avoiding performance issues, then scales back down when demand decreases.
We recommend Power BI Premium for organizations with over 500 users, especially those who access reports at different times of the day and require continuous data updates. Premium licenses offer up to 100 TB of dedicated storage capacity, ideal for handling large datasets not shared with other organizations.
Power BI Premium licenses also include a wide range of advanced features not available in Free or Pro versions. These include AI and machine learning capabilities. Some of the most notable Premium-exclusive features include:
Datamarts: A low-code data storage solution that allows users to manage multiple data sources and generate reports quickly.
Dataflow Direct Query: Pulls data directly from the dataflow at query time.
Deployment Pipelines: Automates report and model deployments across development, test, and production workspaces.
Automatic Page Refresh: Automatically refreshes report pages based on scheduled intervals or triggers.
Exploring Embedded Power BI Licenses (EM and A SKUs)
Embedded Power BI licenses (EM SKUs), categorized under Premium, enable the embedding of Power BI reports into Microsoft Teams or SharePoint sites. This approach eliminates the need for Power BI licenses for end users viewing the reports.
It’s important to note that publishing and maintaining reports in the Power BI Service still requires a Power BI Pro license, even when using EM SKUs. There are three EM SKU levels, following the same logic as P SKUs — increasing in both cost and capacity.
Large enterprises that need to share reports with a wide array of clients and partners benefit from EM SKUs, which allow Power BI content to be shared regardless of the end user’s license status.
Alternatively, A SKUs — another Premium category — empower independent software vendors to embed Power BI reports into existing web applications via Microsoft Azure. This effectively customizes Power BI for a specific application.
For developers looking to integrate Power BI features into their apps, an A SKU license is essential. In many cases, Azure Analysis Services complements the A SKU Premium license — though that’s a topic for another discussion.
Power BI Premium Per User (PPU): An Interesting Alternative
Power BI Pro is priced at R$64 per user/month, while Power BI Premium Per User is R$128 per user/month. The complexity of Power BI Premium pricing can be summarized as follows:
Although more expensive than the Pro license, it grants access to most of the Premium features. PPU license holders can create, access, and share reports within PPU workspaces.
However, it’s worth noting that this option includes fewer advanced capabilities than full Premium capacity licenses — for example, Power BI Report Server (for on-premises reports) is not included. Nonetheless, it is a valuable intermediate alternative for organizations not yet ready for full capacity Premium but requiring access to some premium features.
Evaluating Suitability for Power BI Premium: Key Considerations
While the general recommendation is that Power BI Premium suits organizations with at least 500 users, this is not a strict rule. There are specific scenarios where Power BI Premium is beneficial even for organizations with fewer users.
If you’re working with large datasets, require dedicated capacity, or need higher storage limits, Power BI Premium might be the right choice regardless of user count. Additionally, if your needs exceed 8 data refreshes per day, the added capacity becomes critical.
Access to Power BI Report Server is another exclusive benefit of Power BI Premium. This functionality is crucial for organizations that manage sensitive information needing to remain on-premises. Some companies choose to purchase Power BI Report Server separately via SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance — approximately $40,000 for two years.
Finally, even when choosing Power BI Premium or Embedded licenses, having a Power BI Pro license is still required to publish reports. This condition ensures secure and efficient report management.
When considering Power BI Premium, it’s essential to evaluate your specific needs — not just by user count, but also by storage, refresh frequency, and local access requirements — to ensure effective Power BI implementation across your organization.
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