Power BI licenses

Users can be assigned either a Power BI Free or a Power BI Pro license. Power BI licenses (Pro and Free) can be purchased individually in the Office 365 admin center, and a Power Pro license is included with an Office 365 Enterprise E5 subscription. A Power BI Pro license is required to publish content to Power BI app workspaces, consume a Power BI app that's not assigned to Power BI Premium capacity, and utilize other advanced features, as shown in the following table:

Feature	Power BI Free	Power BI Pro
Connect to 70+ data sources	Yes	Yes
Publish to web	Yes	Yes
Peer-to-peer sharing	No	Yes
Export to Excel, CSV, PowerPoint	Yes	Yes
Email subscriptions	No	Yes
App workspaces and apps	No	Yes
Analyze in Excel, Analyze in Power BI Desktop	No	Yes

With Power BI Premium, users with Power BI Free licenses are able to access and view Power BI apps of reports and dashboards that have been assigned to premium capacities. This access includes consuming the content via the Power BI mobile application. Additionally, Power BI Pro users can share dashboards with Power BI Free users if the dashboard is contained in a Premium workspace. Power BI Pro licenses are required for users that create or distribute Power BI content, such as connecting to published datasets from Power BI Desktop or Excel.

In this sample project example, only three or four business users may need Power BI Pro licenses to create and share reports and dashboards. Mark Langford, a data analyst for the sales organization, requires a Pro license to analyze published datasets from Microsoft Excel. Jennifer Lawrence, a Corporate BI developer and report author for this project, requires a Pro license to publish Power BI reports to app workspaces and distribute Power BI apps to users.

The following image from the Office 365 admin center identifies the assignment of a Power BI Pro license to a report author:

Power BI Pro license assignment

As a report author, Jennifer doesn't require any custom role assignment as per the Roles property of the preceding image. If Jennifer becomes responsible for administering Power BI in the future, the Edit option for the Roles property can be used to assign her to the Power BI service administrator role, as described in the Power BI project roles section earlier.

The approximately 200 Adventure Works sales team users who only need to view the content can be assigned Free licenses and consume the published content via Power BI apps associated with Power BI Premium capacity. Organizations can obtain more Power BI Pro licenses and Power BI Premium capacity (virtual cores, RAM) as usage and workloads increase.

Typically, a Power BI service administrator is also assigned a Power BI Pro license, but a Power BI Pro license is not required to be assigned to the Power BI service administrator role.

The administration and governance of Power BI deployments at scale involve several topics (such as authentication, activity monitoring, and auditing), and Power BI provides features dedicated to simplifying administration.

These topics and features are reviewed in Chapter 12, Administering Power BI for an Organization.

Given the broad controls associated with the Power BI service administrator role, such as managing Power BI Premium capacities and setting policies for the sharing of external content, some organizations may choose to limit this access to defined time periods. Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management (PIM) can be used to provide short-term, audited access to this role. For example, a decision could be made to allow one security group of users to export data from Power BI. A user, such as a BI manager, could be granted Power BI service administrator rights for one day to implement this policy in the Power BI admin portal.

Power BI license scenarios

The optimal mix of Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium licensing in terms of total cost will vary based on the volume of users and the composition of these users between read-only consumers of content versus Self-Service BI users. In relatively small deployments, such as 200 total users, a Power BI Pro license can be assigned to each user regardless of self-service usage and Power BI Premium capacity can be avoided. Be advised, however, that, as per the following Power BI Premium features section, there are other benefits to licensing Power BI Premium capacity that may be necessary for certain deployments, such as larger datasets or more frequent data refreshes.

If an organization consists of 700 total users with 600 read-only users and 100 self-service users (content creators), it's more cost effective to assign Power BI Pro licenses to the 100 self-service users and to provision Power BI Premium capacity to support the other 600 users. Likewise, for a larger organization with 5,000 total users and 4,000 self-service users, the most cost-effective licensing option is to assign Power Pro licenses to the 4,000 self-service users and to license Power BI Premium for the remaining 1,000 users.

Several factors drive the amount of Power BI Premium capacity to provision, such as the number of concurrent users, the complexity of the queries generated, and the number of concurrent data refreshes. The Power BI Premium calculator provides an initial estimate of the mix of Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium capacity needed for a given workload and can be found at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/calculator/.

See Chapter 12, Administering Power BI for an Organization, and Chapter 13, Scaling with Power BI Premium and SSAS, for additional details on aligning Power BI licenses and resources with the needs of Power BI deployments.

Power BI Premium features

An organization may choose to license Power BI Premium capacities for additional or separate reasons beyond the ability to distribute Power BI content to read-only users without incurring per-user license costs. Significantly, greater detail on Power BI Premium features and deployment considerations is included in Chapter 13, Scaling with Premium and Analysis Services.

The following table identifies several of the top additional benefits and capabilities of Power BI Premium:

Additional Power BI Premium capabilities

Beyond the six features listed in the preceding table, the roadmap included in the Power BI Premium white paper has advised of future capabilities including read-only replicas, pin to memory, and geographic distribution. See the Power BI Premium white paper (http://bit.ly/2wBGPRJ) and related documentation for the latest updates.