Power BI Premium VS Power BI Premium Per User

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Introduction: 

Power BI Premium is designed for unified self-service and enterprise BI. That is, whether it is a large amount of data at the enterprise level or a business analyst building it, can be achieved by Power BI Premium. Previously, the price of Power BI was based on capacity and as a result, it was relatively unsuitable for individuals and small teams. To better serve customers, Power BI has introduced Premium Per User (PPU), a new approach to per-user licensing of premium features. It includes not only all Power BI Pro licensed features, but also features such as paginated reports, AI, and other features currently only available in the Premium version.

Cost：

Unlike Power BI Premium, which is billed on a per-capacity basis, Power BI Premium Per User will cost $20 per user per month for a license. For users who already have a standalone Power BI Pro license or a Microsoft 365 E5 license, there will be an additional $10 per user per month.

Capacity：

Power BI Premium is a tenant-level Microsoft 365 subscription available in two SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) families (P&EM SKUS). All Power BI Premium SKUs are available as capacity nodes, each of them represents a set amount of resources consisting of processor, memory, and storage.

Processing is achieved by a set number of v-cores, divided equally between backend and frontend.

Power BI Premium Per user allows users to purchase premium features on a per-user basis, or a capacity basis such as P1, P2, etc. in the usual way. The storage resources will be shared by all PPU license users in the organization.

If there are multiple users in your organization, you can use a PPU license to get advanced benefits. When purchasing a PPU license, you do not need to select any v-core for PPU capacity. There will always be only one PPU capacity per tenant, and this capacity will be available when the user is first assigned a PPU license for that tenant. Users do not need to worry about the concept of any v-cores in PPU capacity.

Differences between Power BI Premium per user and per capacity:

Currently, users can access the Premium Per User capabilities through a Premium Per User license, which includes all of the features of Power BI Pro.

*Premium Per User (PPU) only supports BYOK when it's enabled across the entire tenant.

In addition, Power BI Premium Per user does not support classic workspaces, it only supports workspace V2. classic workspace and my workspaces are blocked. You cannot assign PPU capacity to classic workspaces. You do not have the option to revert back to Classic workspace from New workspace either.

While PPU offers most of the premium features for individual users, it differs significantly from Power BI Premium in terms of Share. PPU does not grant users unlimited distribution rights. When you have a Premium license, reports and content in Premium capacity can be shared with users who have a free license. This is useful for large organizations that want many users to view and interact with reports and data because they don't need everyone to have a Power BI Pro license and only need the Power BI Free license to view the content. But PPU doesn't do that, and any content saved in PPU workspaces can only be shared with users who also have a Power BI Premium Per User.

Summary: 

These are some explanations of the differences between Power BI Premium and Power BI Premium Per User, you can choose your own License according to your needs.

Document reference:

What is Power BI Premium?

Power BI Premium Per User

Author: Caitlyn Yan 

Reviewer: Ula Huang, Kerry Wang