This is a document on Microsoft Power BI licensing features created for general understanding of our customers and users, by Present Value Analytics and Consulting.

This document may help you understand features and workflow under different licenses of Power BI. Since Microsoft brings significant updates to Power BI each month, the features mentioned here may have changed to some extent at the time you read this.

For more updated information, please read Microsoft documentation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/

Licensing in Power BI is simple, however, understanding which features are included in which licensing plan is always a question from users. Here, you will know about different licensing plans in Power BI, the scenarios to use the licensing for, and scenarios that you may need to change your licensing.

This intention is to help you to decide the most cost-effective licensing plan for your requirement.

• Power BI Free (Desktop and Service in cloud)
• Power BI Pro (Service in cloud for sharing and some other features)
• Power BI Embedded (For Software Product Developers and Vendors)
• Power BI Premium (Capacity Plan that works with Pro and Desktop)
• Power BI Report Server Only licensing (On premise installation)

POWER BI – FREE

If you are new to Power BI, and you’ve heard that Power BI is free, then probably one of your first questions is that; “What features do I get with the free Power BI account?”. Let’s start with answering that question. With Power BI free you get features such as below;

POWER BI DESKTOP. Download the Power BI App from Microsoft Store.

Power BI Desktop is the developer tool for creating and authoring reports. This tool is free to use, and no licensing is needed for that. You can build Power BI solutions with Power BI Desktop as much as you want with any size of data you want as long as it is on the Desktop. Licensing charges usually starts when you start sharing from the service.

PUBLISHING TO POWER BI (To Power BI Service in Cloud)

Create your account on https://powerbi.com with your Organizational Microsoft Credentials.

You can use the same Free license of Power BI to publish your reports into Power BI. In the other words; if you want to create a Power BI report yourself, and just publish it in the Power BI service and view it from a web browser, it doesn’t cost you anything!

The report, which you have published or created in Free account, can be published on the web through a link. Any one with the link can view the report. This is not a secured way to share a report.

POWER BI PRO (or a per user license)

POWER BI PRO is a paid account in cloud / service. It costs USD 9.99 per month per user. POWER BI PRO is also bundled with O365 E5 license or you can purchase it separately through Microsoft Office 365 Administrator portal.             https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/licenses

The Reports or Dashboards which you designed and created in Power BI Desktop, are shared to ‘AppWorkspaces’ in POWER BI PRO in the cloud.

‘App Workspaces’ are like sharable folders, through which you can share your datasets, dashboards and reports with other developers in your Organization.

Power BI Desktop is a strong development platform, but you cannot work collaboratively with other developers in Power BI desktop.

POWER BI PRO has sharable Workspaces (called App Workspaces) AND you can share your work and design dashboards collaboratively. However, the development features are limited as compared to Power BI desktop.

(For example, there is no Power Query available in POWER BI PRO but yes, there is similar feature for transformation called Data Flows).

SHARING WITH PRO LICENSE.

You can share the Apps, Reports, Dashboards with final users, consumers of dashboards. Such final users or consumers of your reports/dashboards too need to have POWER BI PRO license.

Simple Report Sharing: You can share a dashboard through simple sharing. You allow access to the report to final users, report consumers and share the link with them.

Sharing App Workspace:  Workspaces is another way of sharing Power BI content with other people. The benefit of this approach of sharing is that you can share content with a group of people and create a development environment with that which everyone has edit access to it. (we discussed this earlier).

Creating and Sharing PowerBI Apps.

You as a Power BI report designer and developer, can bundle different reports and dashboards together and create a Power BI App and then share these Apps with the end user by sharing the link or by installing these Apps directly in user’s workspaces.

Embed in Share Point On line

Embedding in SharePoint online is an excellent method to share Power BI content through a SharePoint portal. Because Power BI and Office 365 accounts are bound to each other, this method of sharing is prevalent for SharePoint users. You can use SharePoint as a portal for users to refer to it. Power BI content then can be easily shared through that portal with Office 365 users. In this case the end users won’t need a Power BI Pro subscription but they can view the reports only on Share Point online portal.

POWER BI EMBEDDED

 https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi-embedded/

Power BI Embedded is for ISVs and developers

You help your customers access the data they need to make better decisions—from within the app. When you use Power BI Embedded on Azure, Power BI API set makes it easy to embed analytics, even if the APP is already designed. This is not a per-user license. This is Azure Capacity License and has a separate billing plan.

Quickly and easily provide customer-facing reports, dashboards, and analytics in your own applications by using and branding Power BI as your own.

With embedded reports you don’t use any Power BI logo or branding, it is your own brand in your own application.

Reduce developer resources by automating the monitoring, management, and deployment of analytics, while getting full control of Power BI features and intelligent analytics.

Set Up Embedded Capacity. A general guideline.

Pre-requisites for an Embedded Capacity License.

• • Open an Azure Subscription (free).
  • Set Up your own Azure Active Directory (AAD) tenant.
  • Install Visual Studio (2015 or later).
  • Obtain a Power BI Pro License. (This is optional)

Step 1: Set Up Your Development Environment.

First, make sure your development environment allows for embedding with Power BI.

Step 2: Set Up Your Power BI Environment.

• • Create a Power BI report in Power BI desktop.
  • Publish it to ‘App Workspace’, if you are using Power BI Pro Master Account. But if you are using ‘Service Principal (app only token)’ then you must use Power BI REST APIs.

Step 3: Create and Publish Content – Reports and Dashboards.

Connect to data, Create a data model by transforming and cleaning that data, Turn your data into visual representations like charts and graphs, Collect those visuals into reports, Publish the reports to your Power BI app workspace.

Step 4: Embed Your Content for Testing

Embed your content within your application with the Power BI REST APIs using “app owns the data” options, or through .NET SDK. Embedding within your application requires an access token for your master account from Azure Active Directory (AAD).

You must get an Azure AD access token for your Power BI application before you make calls to the Power BI REST APIs.

Step 5: Move to Production.

Acquire a dedicated capacity. Now that you’ve developed your application, purchase dedicated capacity within the Microsoft Azure portal to back your workspace. Dedicated capacity is available through Power BI Embedded and is required to move to production.

Assign your Power BI App Workspace to the dedicated capacity.

This licensing plan is not per user because there is no Power BI user required for embedding with a token. This licensing plan is based on page renders.

Every refresh on the page that has Power BI content in it is a page render, if you select a slicer, that causes another page render, if you click on a column in a column chart and that cause interactivity of other charts, then that is another page render.

Pricing of Power BI embedded:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/power-bi-embedded/

Some features such as Power BI Arc GIS MAP Visualization with ESRI’s subscription plan is not available with Power BI Embedded.

POWER BI PREMIUM

Power BI Pro will be expensive for a large user base and embedded needs a constant maintenance by a web developer.

If you have a large user base (let’s say 10,000 users), then Power BI Premium is the best licensing option for you. Power BI Premium is designed for large user base scenario where the size of data is huge.

Power BI Premium is not per user, it is per node. In Power BI premium you pay for nodes which have dedicated capacity and resources. Pricing starts at P1 nodes costing $5K USD per month.

Power BI Report Server which an On-Premise license is included in with Power BI Premium.

Premium will give you some extra features.

• Dedicated Power BI Resources
• Huge dataset storage and no user quotas: 100TB storage rather than 10GB per user.
• More frequent dataset refresh: 48 times a day, rather than 8 times a day
• Power BI report server: Power BI on-premises.
• Larger Datasets supported (not available at the time of writing this post)
• Incremental Refresh (not available at the time of writing this post)
• Pin Dataset to memory (not available at the time of writing this post)
• Dedicated data refresh Nodes (not available at the time of writing this post)
• Geo-replica and read-only replicas (not available at the time of writing this post)
• Geographic distribution (not available at the time of writing this post)

Power BI Report Server is an ON-PREMISE license bundled with Premium and SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises report server with a web portal in which you display and manage reports and KPIs. Along with it come the tools to create Power BI reports, paginated reports, mobile reports, and KPIs. The Power BI report consumers do not really have to use Power BI Pro license.

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To summarize, Power BI desktop is a free development tool. Power BI Pro is a paid service account in cloud. It is necessary for sharing the development with co-developers and sharing the dashboards with final users. Power BI service costs less but all who share the content, need a pro license.

Power BI embedded is for application developers to embedded Power BI dashboards in the application and it is charged based on Page Renders. You need at least one Power BI Pro subscription with Embedded license. A quick calculation shows that minimum pricing would be USD $ 750 per month for an embedded service of Power BI.

Power BI Premium is a capacity license with a dedicated tenant on Azure. It is useful when number of Users of Power BI Pro has crossed say 450, you need some features of Premium such as Dataset Storage or more frequent refreshes.

Present Value Analytics and Consulting is a Pune (India) based Power BI Consultancy firm. We provide a free demo of Power BI and help our customers to understand Power BI architecture before they decide to purchase it. We provide customized Training on Power BI and help our customer to deploy Power BI successfully.

Please connect with us and schedule a free demo of Power BI.