Power BI License Comparison

Daryl Wenman-Bateson, 3rd April 2021

Your business is impressed with Power BI as a data visualisation and analytics tool and wants to start using it in anger. However, when faced with the possible licensing options, all with different features and benefits, it can be overwhelming understanding which Power BI license suits your business needs. I hope to make that journey a little more straight forward for you with this article.

Here’s a Power BI workflow that should help you get started:

Let’s take the pain out of licensing by breaking down the most common options and relating them to the typical business use case scenarios. We are going to look at:

• Power BI Desktop / Free
• Power BI Pro
• Power BI Premium (Per Capacity)
• Power BI Premium (Per User)
• Power BI Embedded
• Power BI On-Premises Reporting Server

Power BI Desktop / Free

Power BI Desktop is a free authoring tool that can be downloaded to build attractive Power BI reports. The tool is the primary component used to connect to data sources, model data and design the visual elements of your dashboards. Once you have finished building your dashboards, you can then publish them to the cloud-based Power BI service.

Power BI Desktop Use Case

Power BI Desktop is a great tool for exploring the capabilities of Power BI reports from a single developer or analyst’s perspective. On its own, Power BI Desktop, enables you to build, test, view and filter a report locally, pretty much how you would with the Power BI Service.

You can publish Power BI reports on the service for free if you intend to provide public (worldwide!) access, but you cannot use Desktop to securely share the built report with others in the organisation without the Power BI Pro or Premium service.

You can get started by downloading desktop either from the Microsoft Store or from Power BI Desktop Download.

Power BI Pro

Power BI Pro user-based subscription manages and shares reports within Microsoft’s cloud environment. Power BI Pro takes the developed desktop files and provides a shared area for secured report access for team collaborations (workspaces) and organisation (apps) access. This is Microsoft’s standard offering that securely (via Azure Active Directory) provides a shared environment for users to publish and view reports within Microsoft’s Power BI cloud environment.

Power BI Pro, at time of writing, costs £7.50 / $9.99 / €8.40 per user per month, is included within Microsoft Office 365 E5 subscription. The licenses are per user basis, with everyone accessing reports requiring a license, therefore when the user volumes top ~500 users, premium can become more cost effective on a per server basis.

The main difference between Power BI Pro and Premium, is that Pro is using shared resource, whereas Premium uses dedicated resource. Power BI Pro has most of the features of Power BI Premium, but there are a few notable exceptions. Pro lacks On Premise deployment, multi region support, Paginated Reports and AI powered data modelling. There is a limit of 1Gb per dataset / 10 GB per user and 8 refreshes a day.

Power BI Pro Use Case

When engaging in a cloud-based solution, most small to medium businesses tend to engage with Power BI through Power BI Pro. As a per user license, pro provides the capacity to start small and expand the user base on a per user basis.

Providing your models can survive within the shared resource limitations of 1GB per dataset and 8 refreshes a day, Power BI Pro proves to be a very cost-efficient way to license an analytical service.

Power BI Premium (Per User)

A 2021 addition to the Power BI license options is Power BI Premium Per User which provides all the Pro features for sharing reports and most of the additional premium features, but on a per user basis. Premium per user opens the benefits of Premium environment to the small and medium size organisations, that don’t have enough users to warrant dedicated capacity. Typically, the breakeven point for dedicated resource, depending on usage is around 250 users. With an increased data model size to 100GB and up to 48 refreshes per day providing near real time analysis, Power BI Premium covers most business use cases.

Premium per user provides Paginated reports, Advanced AI and Dataflows which expands the functionality of Power BI. Paginated reports provide per page reporting and printing ideal for individually paged customer centric data like orders or invoices, providing the ability to replace paged reports from packages like SQL Server Reporting Services. The Advanced AI provides the ability to include automated machine learning inside of Power BI enabling users to utilise business data at scale to drive insight.

There are however some exclusions with Power BI Premium per user, mainly dedicated server resource, multi region deployment and on-premises installation.

Power BI Premium (Per User) Use Case

Aimed at small to medium business, up to 250 users, that need regular refreshing throughout the day, but don’t necessarily have the number of users (over 250) to warrant the Power BI Premium Capacity offering.

On occasion, individual business needs around Artificial Intelligence analytics and / or Paginated reports will a lead SME business to Power BI Premium.

Power BI Premium (Capacity)

Power BI Premium Capacity is Microsoft’s gold standard for Power BI. Premium Capacity assigns dedicated resource based on the number users and capacity. The offering builds on all the features of Pro and Premium Per User by adding dedicated server resource, the ability to utilise a Power BI On-Premises environment and Multi Geo deployment capability. Premium Capacity has the largest model size capacity of 400GB, with up to 48 refreshes daily.

Power BI Premium starts at £3766.70 / $4995 / €4212.30 per month for a P1 node, at the time of writing. These can grow as your usage grows, or on an Auto scale basis, that adds additional Core during heavy usage periods on a 24h basis. All viewing users are included within this license. There is however an additional cost for publishing or collaborating users, who need to purchase a Power BI Pro license.

Power BI Premium per Capacity Use Case

Larger organisations that typically have at least 250 users or a particularly demanding data model. Businesses that have many report viewers (as opposed to publishers).

Some businesses that want to move to Power BI, but wish to remain On Premise, make use of the Power BI Premium Capacity offering to house Power BI on Premise, often replacing SQL Server Reporting Services.

Power BI Embedded Use Case

Companies that want to embed Power BI into their own application, to manage, brand and distribute through a company-built application, but incorporating Microsoft’s analytics functionality. Typically, the application will be exposed to external users as opposed to internal enterprise users, and will manage its own logon, data access and users experience. Removing the need for per user licenses, apart from for publishing which requires Power BI Pro, makes the licensing cost model simpler and easier to manage than per user licensing, especially when the quantity of users is unknown or variable.

Power BI On-Premises Report Server

This is not really an option to purchase in the same way as all those above, however for some businesses this is the starting point. Power BI is primarily defined as a cloud based, Software as a Service offering, however, Microsoft have provided two options to acquire a on-premises, or self-hosted license. Both the options below are typically purchased for overriding business reasons over and above Report Server due to their significant investment.

The first option for licensing Power BI On-Premises is if you already own or plan to purchase Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise with Software Assurance, then you can use the same number of cores for Power BI On-Premises install as have been purchased within your Software Assurance license agreement. The second option comes via Power BI Premium Capacity, which in addition to the default cloud platform, includes a license to install Power BI Report Server On-Premises. SQL Server Enterprise with Software Assurance with 4 Cores is approximately £30,368.33 per year, whereas Power BI Premium Capacity £3766.70 / $4995 / €4212.30 per month.

Power BI Report Server Use Case

When the business wants to utilise the Power BI analytics suite, but are not ready for a cloud-based solution, and must maintain their data on site, then Power BI Report Server provides that option. Setup and administrative control are maintained by internal IT team and data does not leave the business’s intranet.

 

At WB Data Focus we enjoy nothing more than seeing a well-planned Power BI implementation bring data and actionable analytics to life within a company. If you are at the beginning of your Power BI journey or wanting to take make better use of Power BI, feel free to contact us to discuss the next steps.