Forum Discussion
Another Power BI licencing question
- 1 year ago
I understand your frustration Power BI licensing and setup can indeed seem complex, especially when dealing with multiple tenants and evolving services like Microsoft Fabric. To answer your core question: if you're the only developer creating reports in Power BI Desktop and want to share them via Power BI Service, each user (including you and any colleagues viewing the report) needs a Power BI Pro license this is the minimum requirement for sharing content within the same tenant. You do not need Fabric capacity unless you're using Fabric-specific features like Data Warehousing or Real-Time Analytics; your Power BI content will work fine without it for now. The reason your trial keeps rolling might be because you're on a Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) or Fabric trial, which includes extended capabilities but once it ends, you’ll need to purchase either Pro or PPU licenses depending on your needs. Lastly, having two tenants (your company and the parent company) adds complexity because Power BI content is tenant-specific, and sharing across tenants requires external sharing setups or workspace access permissions, which must be carefully managed with IT. I recommend consolidating reporting into one tenant if possible to simplify access and governance.
Hi Si_7777
If you want to share Power BI reports with colleagues (who are all in the same tenant as you), everyone who wants to view or build reports needs a Power BI Pro license, including you. Each Pro license is currently about $10/user/month.
You don’t need Fabric or Premium unless you plan to share with a large number of users (hundreds or more) or need advanced features (like bigger data capacity, paginated reports, or AI workloads).
You only need Fabric Capacity if, You want to share reports with free users (people who don’t have a Pro license) Or you want to use advanced “Fabric” features (Data Warehousing, Data Science, etc.
If you’re in your own tenant and need to share reports with people in a parent company (separate tenant), you can invite them as guest users (Azure B2B), but they still need a Pro license to view shared reports unless you have Premium.