Making Sense of Power BI Licenses: Your Roadmap to the Right Choice - Power BI Administration and Licensing
- Nived Varma
- Jul 30, 2024
- 4 min read
There are different types of licensing options offered by Microsoft for Power BI. Broadly there are two broad categories of licenses:
Shared Capacity
Dedicated Capacity
What does "capacity" means?
Capacity is nothing but the amount of compute (CPU + RAM + Storage) available for running the Power BI software your workloads (queries, reports, visualization, DAX etc). In a layman's term - when you buy a computer you decide the combination of CPU, RAM, and Storage which will be able to meet your requirement and you have to pay for it accordingly. In cloud computing, the CSP (Cloud Service Providers) like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, rent-out the compute available in their data centers to customers.
Shared Capacity License Options
Each tenant (customer) in Power BI service shares the compute with other customers. In Power BI terms - each tenant has its own area for publishing data and reporting assets but infrastructure such as memory and processing capacity are shared among the tenants.
Two licensing options exist for using shared capacity within the Power BI service:
Free
Pro
Let us understand the difference between the two.
Free License of Power BI
Do you know that you, can use Power BI entirely for free. As you may be aware that Power BI development (creation of report, semantic model, visualization) can be done by using a Power BI for Desktop application - which is a free to download and use.
Important thing to remember - you can use the Power BI for desktop for offline development for as long as you want. The Power BI licensing does not come in to picture until you desire to use Power BI service. Microsoft offers a free version of Power BI service license. The free license allows the reports to be published to Power BI service but with several significant limitations.
Power BI Developer can use Power BI desktop to create datasets and reports and publish these assets to Power Bi Service. Power BI license is good for aspirants who want to learn Power BI without paying for license but not for any enterprise or small company due to following limitations:
Datasets can only be refreshed from cloud sources (which means the with Free license, you can only publish static data from on-premises data sources).
There is only one workspace called as My Workspace for each user.
The contents can only be shared with internal or external users via Publish to web feature- which does not provide any kind of security or authentication. Anyone having link to published report can access the report anonymously.
There are several features of Power BI which cannot be used in the Power BI services - like subscriptions, comments etc.
Pro License
It removes the limitations of free license. With pro license you can
Share Reports with both internal and external users
The internal and external users require Pro License to access the views, reports, dashboards, datasets.
Subscriptions, comment , create and use apps, and be able to use analyze in Excel Feature (it exports the report's underlying data to Excel)
Cost - $10.00 / user (pls refer to Microsoft documentation for exact plan)
Dedicated Capacity License
Dedicated capacity ensure that your Power BI service subscription runs on compute that is dedicated for your workload. If you subscribe to these licenses the capacity (memory and processing capacity) will be solely for the use of your tenancy.
Features of these licenses
You get larger data sets
increased user quotas
paginated reports
goals
scorecards
frequent data set refresh
pipeline
content embedding into application
3 licensing options exist
Premium
Premium per user
Embedded
Premium License
It is purchased in capacity units / month.
The capacity units range from P1 to P5. P1 capacity unit provides 25 GB of RAM and 8 virtual cores for $5,000.00/month whereas P5 capacity unit offers 400GB RAM and 128 cores for $80,000/month. The cost is per month not PAYG (Pay-as-You-Go) , which means irrespective of how much capacity you use - you will be paying entire month cost to Microsoft.
Significant Advantage of Premium License
Power BI premium license includes on-premises Power BI Report Server
The reports can be distributed to read-only users without per user license cost.
Suitable for large enterprise (starting with $5,000/month is somewhat cost prohibitive for small and mid-size organization).
Premium Per User License (PPU)
This license offers the same capability and features a Premium except that all users of a PPU workspace must have a PPU license ($20.00/month/user).
Power BI License Scenario
When choosing between shared and dedicated Power BI licenses, consider your organization's size, budget, performance needs, and future growth plans. Power BI Pro is ideal for smaller teams with standard BI needs, while Power BI Premium offers advanced features and dedicated resources suitable for larger organizations with more complex requirements. Analyzing these factors will help you make an informed decision that aligns with your business goals.
Let us try to look into one of these scenarios to understand it better.
Feature Comparison for different Power BI licenses
Summary
Power BI offers different licenses, this post may be helpful to you for understanding the feature vs cost vs feasibility of different licenses. If you are planning to purchase Power BI licenses and on-board your team and want to know more about Power BI implementation you can reach out to me nived@nivednotes.com .
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