Power BI licenses

Power BI provides a number of different licensing options that provide flexible and affordable pricing for individuals and organizations. These licensing options come in two primary categories:

• Shared capacity
• Dedicated capacity

Let us first have a look at shared capacity.

Shared capacity

Shared capacity is like an apartment building. While each tenant in the building has their own personal living quarters accessible to only themselves, certain infrastructures such as plumbing, electrical wiring, and stairways are common to everyone in the building. Shared capacity for Power BI is similar. Each tenant within the Power BI service has its own area for publishing data and reporting assets but infrastructure such as memory and processing capacity are shared among the tenants. Thus, just like a noisy neighbor in an apartment building can affect other tenants, so too can tenants within shared capacity in the Power BI service impact the performance for other tenants.

Two licensing options exist for using shared capacity within the Power BI service:

• Free
• Pro

In the next two sections, we look at the differences between free and Pro licensing.

Free

It is possible to use Power BI entirely for free. First, the Power BI Desktop application is always free to download and use. Licensing does not become a factor until one desires to use the Power BI service. However, there is a free version of the Power BI service license. The free license allows reports to be published to the Power BI service, however, there are significant limitations with this approach. Figure 1.6 provides an overview of using Power BI free licensing.

Figure 1.6: Power BI free

As shown in Figure 1.6, report authors can use Power BI Desktop to create datasets and reports and publish these assets to the Power BI service. However, datasets can only be refreshed from cloud sources and only from the user’s personal workspace, My Workspace. Refreshing on-premises data sources is not supported. In addition, sharing content with other internal and external users is only possible through the Publish to Web feature.

It is important to understand that the Publish to Web feature does not provide any kind of security or authentication. Anyone that has the link to the report that has been published using the Publish to Web feature can access the report anonymously. There are many other features that cannot be used in the Power BI service as well, such as subscriptions and comments.

Once the limitations are understood, solely using the free license for Power BI has only limited uses. Mainly, it is used for testing or performing a proof of concept. However, the free Power BI service license can be coupled with Power BI Premium to provide a powerful and affordable solution for enterprises.

Now that the free licensing model is understood, let’s compare it with the pro licensing model.

Pro

The Pro licensing option for Power BI removes the limitations of free licensing when using the Power BI service. Figure 1.7 presents an overview of Pro licensing.

Figure 1.7: Power BI Pro

As shown in Figure 1.7, Pro licensing allows users to share reports with both internal and external users. However, those users also require a Pro license in order to access and view the reports and datasets. Essentially, anyone that collaborates (views, creates, edits) datasets, reports, and dashboards must have a Pro license.

Using a Pro license removes all of the restrictions of the free licensing structure and users are able to utilize the standard features of the Power BI service including the ability to create subscriptions, comment, create and use apps, and leverage the Analyze in Excel feature, which exports a report’s underlying data to Excel in order to support further analysis.

Now that we have explored the free and Pro licensing options associated with shared capacity, we’ll next look at the licensing models available for dedicated capacity.

Dedicated capacity

In addition to shared capacity licenses, there are also dedicated capacity licenses available for Power BI. These licenses reserve memory and processing capacity solely for the use of a particular tenant. In addition, these licenses enable advanced features such as larger datasets, increased user quotas, more frequent dataset refreshes, paginated reports, goals, scorecards, pipelines, and embedding of content into corporate applications.

Three licensing options exist for using dedicated capacity within the Power BI service:

• Premium
• Premium Per User
• Embedded

We cover each of these licensing options in detail in the following sections.

Premium

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 as well as fully interacting with standard Power BI service features such as using subscriptions and comments. 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. Figure 1.8 presents an overview of Premium licensing.

Figure 1.8: Power BI Premium

Power BI Premium is purchased in capacity units priced on a per-month basis. These capacity units are called node types and range in size from a P1 with 25 GB of RAM and eight virtual cores for $5,000/month to a P5 with 400 GB of RAM and 128 virtual cores for $80,000/month. It is important to understand that this is dedicated capacity and is charged on a per-month basis (not per minute or hour). Power BI Premium also includes a license for using Power BI Report Server on-premises.

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 15, Building Enterprise BI with Power BI Premium.

With an entry price point for Power BI Premium of $5,000 per month, many mid-sized organizations were priced out of the ability to afford dedicated capacity. Thus, Microsoft recently introduced Premium Per User pricing, which we cover next.

Premium Per User

Premium Per User (PPU) licensing effectively works identically to Pro licensing except that all users of a PPU workspace must have a PPU license. An overview of PPU licensing is shown in Figure 1.9.

Figure 1.9: Power BI Premium Per User

As shown in Figure 1.9, PPU licensing works the same as Pro licensing except that PPU licensing adds the additional advanced features of Premium such as increased dataset sizes, increased refresh frequency, paginated reports, goals, scorecards, and pipelines.

Let’s now take a look at the last dedicated capacity licensing option, Embedded.

Embedded

Power BI Embedded is intended for use by developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that use APIs to embed Power BI visuals, reports, and dashboards within their custom web applications. These applications can then be accessed by external customers. Figure 1.10 provides an overview of Power BI Embedded.

Figure 1.10: Power BI Embedded

Similar to Power BI Premium, capacity units or node types for Embedded range in size from an A1 with 3 GB of RAM and a single virtual core for $750 per month to an A6 with 100 GB of RAM and 32 virtual cores for $24,000 per month. However, different than Premium, Embedded is charged on a usage basis per minute versus a flat charge per month. The usage-based charge is attractive to developers and ISVs as this provides greater flexibility and less expense, particularly during development, since the service can be deprovisioned when development is not occurring.

With the basic licenses for Power BI understood, let’s next consider how these different licenses are combined to provide a complete licensing scenario for an organization.

Power BI license scenarios

The optimal mix of Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium licensing in terms of total cost varies based on the volume of users and the composition of those 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.

However, 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. See Chapter 14, Administering Power BI for an Organization, and Chapter 15, Building Enterprise BI with Power BI Premium, for additional details on aligning Power BI licenses and resources with the needs of Power BI deployments.

In the sample project example introduced in the section Sample template – Adventure Works BI, Power BI Premium is being used. Therefore, only a few users need Power BI Pro licenses to create and share reports and dashboards.

Referencing Table 1.3, 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. Finally, Brett Powell as dataset designer also requires a Power BI Pro license to create and publish the underlying dataset.

Typically, a Power BI administrator is also assigned a Power BI Pro license. Per Table 1.3, Anna Sanders is the Power BI administrator. However, a Power BI Pro license is not required to be assigned to the Power BI administrator role.

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.

We mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that Power BI is a robust, flexible business intelligence platform and the different licensing options and combinations are a reflection of that flexibility. In the following sections, we’ll next cover the tools, processes, and overall design of datasets.