Which Power BI Licensing Option is Best for a 50-Employee Company?

[Enorpa]

Hi everyone,

I work as a data analyst in a company with 50 employees, and I create reports using Power BI. My datasets are primarily sourced from Google Sheets. In our organization, only two people (myself and another team member) will be designing and publishing Power BI reports, while the rest of the employees will only view the reports.

Given this setup, which Power BI licensing option do you think would be the most cost-effective for us?

• Power BI Pro?
• Power BI Premium Per User (PPU)?
• Or any other licensing model?

I’d love to hear your experiences and recommendations.

Thanks in advance!

[pbiuseruk · Accepted solution]

Hi Enorpa,

Depends on a couple of things.

If you're planning on doing advanced things like merges within dataflows, then you'll need a premium per user license but I'm assuming that it may not be required.

One thing to mention is that if a user already has an E5 MS license, then Power BI Pro is already included for the user. It's worth checking if users would benefit from an E5 license and if it makes sense for them to have that, rather than buying the Power BI license as an add-on seperately.

Power BI Pro licenses are usually all that's required - I would recommend just getting licenses for yourselves (the devs) and then whoever else needs to view the reports. Licenses can also be moved around, so if people leave, then you can reassign their license to other new joiners.

Another thing is that if your reports are single paged reports that need to be viewed, then what you can actually do is set up subscriptions to the people that need to view them (could do daily, weekly, monthly, etc..) and they would come out like screenshot images of the one paged report that will be sent to them via mail.

This option is definitely the most cost effective for single paged reports but because they're images, users won't be able to interact with the reports (e.g. use slicers or do drill downs and cross filtering). With this approach, only the devs would need a Power BI Pro license and the viewers won't need any license.

As a summary though, I'd say just get Power BI Pro Licenses for yourselves and anyone that needs to view the reports (unless you already have E5 licenses).

[Enorpa]

Hi pbiuseruk, First of all, thank you for your valuable advice. Currently, we don’t have any E5 licenses, and interacting with reports is quite important to me. However, there’s one point that confuses me: if I purchase a premium capacity, can users with the free version only view the reports? At this stage, I believe purchasing Pro licenses for each user would be a more cost-effective solution. We plan to start this project with 5 users initially and then expand it to include all users across the company in the future.

[Jai-Rathinavel]

@Enorpa Yes if you purchase a premium capacity any user with free license will be able to access the reports. But premium capacity comes with a Price (P1 Capacity $5000/month) . Since you are just using google sheets as your datasource I wouldn't recommed going with a Premium capacity. First go with minimal investment ($500/Month) and scale up as your demand or data grows.

Did I answer your question? If yes, please mark my post as a solution.

Thanks,

Jai

[Jai-Rathinavel]

@Enorpa 

You can take advantage of Fabric Free Trial which comes with a free of cost for 60 days, users can be assigned Fabric Free license and they would be able to access the shared reports hosted on a Fabric workspace and can be extended if Microsoft gives an extension period.

Post that you can switch to Power BI Pro licenses for all the 50 users which comes to a monthly expense of $500 per Month i.e as per current pricing a Pro license is $10 each per month since your organisation has 50 users it would be 50 x $10. But post April 1, 2025 it would be $14 dollars per month per license and monthly expense would be 50 x $14 ($700) per month. 

Did I answer your question? If yes, please mark my post as a solution.

Thanks,

Jai

[Enorpa]

@Jai-Rathinavel I have completed the 60-day trial period and now I want to proceed with the purchase. Since I have never been involved in this process before, I would like to understand the steps I need to follow. I understand that I need to be a domain admin in the Admin Center panel. Additionally, it seems I need to configure some DNS records and proceed with the purchase through these records. Could you guide me on this? I would appreciate details about the process and any points I should pay attention to.

[Jai-Rathinavel · Accepted solution]

@Enorpa Please check out the below video on how to setup a custom domain in your current tenant

https://youtu.be/Lv98ZI1cmdI?si=LNXRhs5Kzkcm05EE

Did I answer your question ? Please mark this post as a solution

Thanks,

Jai

[pbiuseruk · Accepted solution]

Hi Enorpa,

Depends on a couple of things.

If you're planning on doing advanced things like merges within dataflows, then you'll need a premium per user license but I'm assuming that it may not be required.

One thing to mention is that if a user already has an E5 MS license, then Power BI Pro is already included for the user. It's worth checking if users would benefit from an E5 license and if it makes sense for them to have that, rather than buying the Power BI license as an add-on seperately.

Power BI Pro licenses are usually all that's required - I would recommend just getting licenses for yourselves (the devs) and then whoever else needs to view the reports. Licenses can also be moved around, so if people leave, then you can reassign their license to other new joiners.

Another thing is that if your reports are single paged reports that need to be viewed, then what you can actually do is set up subscriptions to the people that need to view them (could do daily, weekly, monthly, etc..) and they would come out like screenshot images of the one paged report that will be sent to them via mail.

This option is definitely the most cost effective for single paged reports but because they're images, users won't be able to interact with the reports (e.g. use slicers or do drill downs and cross filtering). With this approach, only the devs would need a Power BI Pro license and the viewers won't need any license.

As a summary though, I'd say just get Power BI Pro Licenses for yourselves and anyone that needs to view the reports (unless you already have E5 licenses).