All You Need to Know About Power BI Premium

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There has been so much about Power BI licensing that it always gets confusing when someone starts exploring and finding the best option for them. All different possibilities were briefed in another post about Power BI pricing. In this post, we will look at all the key points that clarifies many of doubts about Power BI Premium in your thoughts –

  1. This is a capacity-based offering where capacity means a node/machine or a cluster of nodes where all your reports are hosted on
  2. This capacity is dedicated to you only. This is in contrast to Power BI PRO which is a shared service and where the node(s) are hosting reports for multiple tenants
  3. Further, since this is capacity-based so the configuration of machine/node drives the pricing of it. Though there are not much options available for SKUs as you see a variety in Virtual Machines but still good enough to serve a dedicated capacity
  4. This is all managed by Microsoft i.e. it’s just like a Managed VM
  5. You can scale up and scale down as per your requirements
  6. Now, the question comes up that we have now our own machine to host all our Power BI reports so anyone in our organization can access it without having an individual/separate license as opposed to Power BI PRO. Yes, this is true.
  7. But, you still need a PRO license for who all want to publish the reports to workspace. Report consumers don’t need a separate PRO license but all the publishers still would need it in order to deploy the reports to workspace and collaborate with other users in the organization
  8. Capacity is billed monthly with an annual commitment
  9. Power BI Premium can be bought from o365 admin center. By default, office 365 includes PRO licenses and you can buy premium capacity as an add-on to existing PRO licenses
  10. Power BI Report server is also considered as Power BI Premium and follows almost similar principles as mentioned here with the major difference that Report Server is for on-premise data centers. Consider it like how you used to setup SQL Server Reporting Services on your on-premise side of the world though collaboration is different in Power BI.