Power BI Premium per user license doesnt allow report access to free power bi users

[kurrysamir]

Hi All,

I upgraded my power bi pro license to power bi premium per user license and currently I am the only one who is responsible to publish reports in Power BI service. I wanted to have a Power BI per user since it will allow me to better manage my deployments across different environments.

Please correct my understanding here, all the free Power BI non-technical users(around 50 users) will have to get a power bi per user license if I were to publish my reports from a power bi workspace? If that is true, we need to spend 50 * licensing cost for all the users without we not using all the capabilities that premium per user gets on table. 

Or is there any other way I can use a Power BI premium per user workspace, make reports, dashboards, apps and share it with my power bi free users.

Thanks in advance. 

[aj1973 · Accepted solution]

Hi @kurrysamir 

Correct, all 50 users must have a PPU licenses to consume your report. The other way is to buy Premium capacity but for only 50 free users would be very expensive and not a good move.

[kurrysamir]

Thanks Amine then I could stick to using Power BI Pro license. By using Power BI Premium per user I wanted to access the deployment pipelines as currently we I have to publish my PBI file once each to UAT and PROD. Any other way by using Power BI Pro license I can access the deployment pipelines?

[aj1973]

No, pipeline is Premium functionality.

However with Pro license you can create 3 WS,

One WS_Dev for Dataset + Report

Another WS_Dataset_Prod where you put the dataset prod without its reports

And a third one WS_Prod where you publish only Thin Reports.

Of course you need to version you datasets and reports by a suffix of your choice and you can rename your reports when added to an App for the end users.

[kurrysamir]

@aj1973 my company is willing to buy Power BI Premium Per user for all business users. We have a couple of guest users. Does the same licensing conditions apply the guest users as well? Or the guest users having just Power BI Pro license would suffice? 

[aj1973 · Accepted solution]

@kurrysamir The premium capacity is feature or functionality related to the Workspace not to the Type of license. If a Workspace was created and used by a User who has a PPU License then all the items in that workspace can only be consumed by a PPU License holder regardless whether the user is internal or external. So the guest users won't be able to use their Pro License to consume items created by a PPU user.

[kurrysamir]

Thank you for the advice will follow it. Any idea why the non-technical users needs a power bi premium per user license as even they wont be able to take advantages as the people who build reports, dashboards and do all the sorts of configuration. Pretty sure this is a common situation across most companies. In my company, the users mostly use analyse in excel feature the most to do pivotting.

[aj1973 · Accepted solution]

Hi @kurrysamir 

Correct, all 50 users must have a PPU licenses to consume your report. The other way is to buy Premium capacity but for only 50 free users would be very expensive and not a good move.