10 min read
How do Power BI Licenses work?
Power BI was recently named by Gartner as one of the best BI tools currently available. But despite all the positive feedback about Microsoft's program, the licensing structure still causes some confusion. In this blog we therefore explain which licenses there are.
Update!
In 2024, Microsoft Fabric was launched. The Power BI service will increasingly be integrated with this new service, and this page has been updated with these new developments and the current Fabric licenses.
First of all, it's important to know what the basic components of Power BI are before we move on to how the licenses work. Below we give you a concise explanation.
The basics of Power BI
When we talk about Power BI, we're talking about various components, think of software, apps, and connectors.
Power BI Desktop is a free application you can install on your computer. Once you've installed the software on your computer, you can get straight to work creating reports. You can use a wide range of data sources for this. This software is therefore mainly used offline on a computer. You only start using the Power BI service when you want to share your report with other people.
The Microsoft Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), also known as Power BI Online, is part of Power BI's SaaS (Software as a Service) offering. Here the software is used entirely online via the browser. The Power BI service is used for sharing reports and dashboards. In addition, it's possible to open reports in the service from Power BI mobile (available on iOS and Android).
With Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft has gathered all its data analytics solutions under one big umbrella. Under this umbrella you'll find various Azure and Power BI tools, with the Power BI service environment as the foundation.
Power BI Licenses
Within the Power BI service, a distinction is made between the following licenses: Power BI Desktop, Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium, Power BI Embedded, and the Power BI Report Server. Each of these licenses comes with different functionalities and costs. Below, we explain per license what you can and can't do with it.
Power BI Desktop
The free Desktop version of Power BI naturally comes with a free license. Signing up takes little time, and after that you can get straight to work. With this free license you get 10 GB of storage in the Cloud. You can use this storage to host Power BI reports or Excel workbooks. There is, however, a maximum to the size of reports you can host with a free license, which is 1GB. In addition, you also have the option to automatically refresh your reports up to 8 times a day.
The free license of Power BI also has a number of limitations. The most obvious of these is that you don't have the ability to share your reports or dashboards with other users. In addition, it's also not possible to view reports or dashboards that have been shared. The only two ways to share a report for and by free users is to send the Power BI Desktop file (if the data has been imported or the recipient has access to the source data) or to publish the report to the web as an embedded report. The latter is a handy feature if you want to share your dashboard or report with anyone on the worldwide web, but not a safe option when it comes to reliable information. A final limitation is that with a free license you don't have the ability to integrate with Office 365 (SharePoint and Teams), export reports to PowerPoint, or export data to CSVs.
Power BI Pro Per User
Power BI Pro is the full version of Power BI. When you purchase a Power BI Pro license, you currently pay around €9.40 per month, per user. These licenses can be purchased standalone or in combination with an Office 365 package. The Office (& Microsoft) 365 E5 license is, incidentally, the only one that includes a Power BI Pro license.
In addition, the Pro license has all the options the free license also has: 10 GB storage, a maximum of 1GB in report size, and 8 automatic refreshes of your data. But there's 1 big difference: Pro users can share their reports and dashboards with other Pro users, whereas users with a free license are limited to uploading and viewing only their own content.
Because reports can be shared, the Pro license also brings the ability to integrate with Office 365 and Teams, use shared workspaces, and subscribe to reports and dashboards. The Pro license is the most common license, and in small to large companies it's often the case that every user who wants to use Power BI has a Pro license.
Power BI Premium Per User
The Premium license offers more technical capabilities: 48 daily refreshes, XMLA endpoints (which allow data to be pushed directly from a data warehouse), options for incremental refresh, and certain AI capabilities (Auto-ML, Impact Analysis, and Cognitive Services).
Content from users with a Premium Per User license can be shared in a Premium Per User workspace, and then the content is not accessible to users with a free or pro account, unless there is a Premium Capacity of F64 or higher.
Fabric Premium Capacity
For a scalable Power BI environment for companies with a lot of data or employees, there's the Premium Capacity, which isn't a license per user but a company license. It therefore also offers a special capacity, also known as a "Premium Workspace". Simply put, this means you get a kind of reserved container of space on Microsoft's Cloud (Azure) where all of Microsoft's online services are stored. This can be used for hosting large datasets, ranging from 25 up to 400 GB in size. It also offers the option to store up to a total of 100 TB of data.
A feature you get with the Premium Capacity is Power BI Report Server. With Report Server, you get the option to keep all your data on an on-premises environment. So your data stays local and doesn't go to the Cloud. The report server is comparable to what used to be SQL Server Reporting Services, but built for Power BI reports, and although the cloud service offers more capabilities, they're equally easy to use.
More information
You can also install Power BI Report Server without a Premium Capacity if you have SQL Enterprise + Software Assurance. When this is the case, all users who share reports on the Report Server still need to have a Power BI Pro license (even when everything runs on-premises), but users who only open reports don't need one.
An advantage of the large Premium Capacities (F64 or higher) is that users no longer need a paid license to be able to open content. However, a Pro or Premium Per User license is always needed to create and share content, so when you purchase a Premium Capacity license, you always do this in combination with Pro licenses. Users with a Pro license create the dashboards and reports, and users with, for example, only a Free license can view and use the dashboards and reports. For Capacities smaller than F64, users always need a Pro license to create or view shared content.
Update!
See the Microsoft website for the full overview of the Fabric Premium Capacities for all prices, options, and limitations. As of January 1, 2025, it's no longer possible to purchase a Power BI Premium Capacity, only a Fabric Capacity.
Power BI Embedded
A license you don't get included with Power BI Premium is Power BI Embedded. Power BI Embedded is a Microsoft Azure service that lets you quickly embed data visualizations, reports, and dashboards in an app. This embedding takes place via a capacity-based model for which costs are charged per hour. This app can then be shared with users who only have a free license. Power BI Embedded is also used by ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to build Power BI capacity into an application.
Power BI Licenses |
Power BI Desktop |
Power BI Pro |
Power BI Premium |
Cost |
Free | €9.40
Price per month per user |
€18.70
Price per month per allocated compute and storage resource in the cloud with annual subscription |
Included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5 |
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License per user |
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On-premises reporting via Power BI Report Server |
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Advanced functionalities such as XMLA connectivity, incremental data refresh, and AI applications |
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Wide distribution of content without requiring a Power BI Pro license for content users |
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Maximum size of an individual dataset |
1GB | 1GB | 1GB |
Maximum storage |
10GB | 10GB | 10GB |
Maximum number of automatic refreshes per day |
8 | 8 | 48 |
Publish reports to share them |
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Subscribe to reports for notifications about changes |
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Wide distribution of content without requiring a Power BI Pro license for content users |
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Access via mobile devices |
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Cloud service |
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Import from Excel, CSV, and Power BI Desktop documents |
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Publish to the web |
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Export to PowerPoint/CSV |
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Embed content in other interfaces, such as Teams, SharePoint, and other SaaS applications |
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Getting started with data
Now that we've discussed the various Power BI licenses, the next step in the process is to get started with importing data. There are various ways to do this; one of those ways is to manually import your data yourself via Power BI. An advantage of Power BI is that it has a huge number of data connectors. So you can also manually enter your own data with, for example, just an Excel file. A downside of this is that this data isn't automatically refreshed. As a user, you'll therefore always have to keep doing this yourself. In itself this isn't a problem when you only use Power BI personally. But as soon as you start doing this for an organization, for example, you'll quickly be dealing with a huge amount of data. And all this data also comes from different data systems, which is exactly the point where you no longer want to do this manually.
Get more out of Power BI with TimeXtender
One way to automate that process is to get started with TimeXtender. TimeXtender is a Data Management Platform, also known as a software platform used for collecting and managing data. You could see the software as an overarching umbrella, helping in the data process from bringing in the data all the way to visualizing the data in Power BI. If you were to develop and manage a data warehouse yourself, this often costs a lot of time and money. The TimeXtender Data Management Platform lets you develop faster because it generates automated (ETL) scripts and also saves on management. This way, you easily develop a future-proof data warehouse that any developer can work with. Want to know more about this? Sign up for the live demo on May 12!
Why use Power BI in combination with TimeXtender?
Power BI is a genuine visualization tool that you use to visualize your data, and it's good at that. But unfortunately there are limited options in Power BI to model data. So when you want to approach it professionally to offer Power BI organization-wide, you'll quickly need a data warehouse. This is because Power BI doesn't have a central environment where all data comes together in a secure and well-manageable way. This is possible when you use TimeXtender. In addition, TimeXtender in combination with Power BI also offers the advantage that you have up to 10x faster access to data compared to, for example, manually developing and maintaining your data. It's also a lot easier to unlock data sources, since you have 130+ connectors at your disposal.
Want to know more?
Want to learn more about Power BI? Then sign up for the free online Power BI Basics training on May 7. Interested in the combination of Power BI and TimeXtender? Then also sign up for the live demo on May 12!