Forum Discussion
Power BI Licensing
Hi All,
This is my first post in this forum. Please excuse me if i missed any rules. We are trying to get power bi for our reporting purposes. We are on Office 365. My questions.
1) Does Power BI Service comes with office 365 or we need tio purchase it seperately?
2) What are the costs?
3) We need only 3 developer licenses and there are over 800 users who need to access the reports (do they need license as well)?
Please provide some suggestions.
Thanks
Hi beaconfbb,
Below you'll find some clarification on your questions:
- Power BI Free licences are free for all users regardless of office 365 subscriptions. Power BI Pro licences are included in the Office 365 E5 licence, not in other licences
- The cost of one Power BI pro licence is 9.99 dollar.
- within Power BI there are only Free and Pro licences, no developer licences. all users who you will be sharing reports with will require a Pro licence (The rule of thumb is that you can use a free licence to develop all your content, but when you want to share that content with other users you will require a pro licence). If 800+ users will require access it might also be worth looking into Power BI premium, this is an alternative to a Pro licence where you do not need to buy a licence per user
More details can be found at: Pricing & Product Comparison | Microsoft Power BI
Best regards,
Tim
16 Replies
Hi beaconfbb,
Below you'll find some clarification on your questions:
- Power BI Free licences are free for all users regardless of office 365 subscriptions. Power BI Pro licences are included in the Office 365 E5 licence, not in other licences
- The cost of one Power BI pro licence is 9.99 dollar.
- within Power BI there are only Free and Pro licences, no developer licences. all users who you will be sharing reports with will require a Pro licence (The rule of thumb is that you can use a free licence to develop all your content, but when you want to share that content with other users you will require a pro licence). If 800+ users will require access it might also be worth looking into Power BI premium, this is an alternative to a Pro licence where you do not need to buy a licence per user
More details can be found at: Pricing & Product Comparison | Microsoft Power BI
Best regards,
Tim
Thanks Tim,
That is very informative. When i meant 800 users, these users will be viewing reports. Please correct me if i am wrong.
In Power BI you develop a report and publish it to an url and users access that url to view the report. Is that not so?
If that is the case why would we need 800 licenses if all they do is view the report ?
How to check if we have Power BI proc license and how to check get the URL where we publish the report?
Thanks
Hi beaconfbb,
Yes, basically everyone can download Power BI desktop for free and create reports there. so 800 users can download Power BI and start creating reports for 0 dollar. Once you have finished a report you can publish it to Power BI service (powerbi.microsoft.com) to your own workspace (still free). However, the moment you want to share your reports with other users, both the sharing user (your developer) and the receiving users (the 800 people) need to have a Pro licence to be able to access the report, even just as a viewer.
This might seem like a high price for users who will only be viewing, but the flipside is that you'll have zero investment costs while developing and only pay for the users that will actually use the tooling.
Alternatives for Power BI pro when you want to reach a large group of only-viewers would be Power BI premium (one big licence), Power BI embedded (embed reports in a web portal on a website), or publish to web (create a url that can be accessed for free by everyone, there are some downsides to this method).
Best regards,
tim
