Forum Discussion
Power BI Licensing
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
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
Thanks Tim,
One more set of questions and i think i will be good 🙂
Can i have Pro licenses for 3-5 developers and the rest 800 be under premium? If the user is having premium license is that enough for the user to see the report shared by our developers?
Thanks
Hi beaconfbb
The combination is not feasable. But To add on what timg has said if your 800 users are going to interact with your report then you need to buy a Premium License for your developpers. But if there are going to only be viewers then a One pro license can do the job: develop your report and Publish it, once published, create an embed code for Public view and share the link with them or just embed the link into a website of your choice.
I would start with one pro license and add as I go. The premium is very cost effective espacially if you are not using it proparly.
Hi Amine,
Embed codes still require users to have a licence (Easily embed secure Power BI reports in your internal portals or websites | Microsoft Power BI-blog | Microsoft Power BI).
Regards,
tim
Thanks Amine and Tim. What if i create a report and publish it to a workspace and share the url. It is strictly for viewing , they cannot make changes. They can download and create their own version on their desktop and use it for their individual purpose.
Hi beaconfbb,
If you take a premium licence this would be enough for both the developers and users. Then you would not need the pro licences.
Best regards,
Tim