How do Power BI licenses work?

Power BI was recently named by Gartner as one of the best BI tools currently available. But alongside all the positive feedback about Microsoft's platform, its licensing structure still causes some confusion. That is why, in this blog, we explain which licenses are available.

Update!

Microsoft Fabric was launched in 2024. The Power BI service will be increasingly integrated with this new service, and this page has been updated to reflect these developments and the current Fabric licenses.

First of all, it is important to understand the basic components of Power BI before we move on to how the licenses work. Below, we give you a brief explanation.

The basics of Power BI

When we talk about Power BI, we are talking about several components, such as software, apps and connectors.

Power BI Desktop is a free application that you can install on your computer. Once the software is installed, you can start building reports right away, using a wide range of data sources. This software is therefore mainly used offline on a computer. You only start using the Power BI service when you want to share your report with other people.

The Microsoft Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), also known as Power BI Online, is part of Power BI's SaaS (Software as a Service) offering. This means the software is used entirely online through the browser. The Power BI service is used to share reports and dashboards. In addition, reports in the service can be opened from Power BI Mobile (available on iOS and Android).

With Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft has brought all of its data analytics solutions together under one big umbrella. Under this umbrella you will find various Azure and Power BI tools, with the Power BI service environment as the foundation.

Power BI licenses

Within the Power BI service, a distinction is made between the following licenses: Power BI Desktop, Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium, Power BI Embedded and Power BI Report Server. Each of these licenses comes with different functionality and costs. Below, we explain for each license what you can and cannot do with it.

Power BI Desktop

The free Desktop version of Power BI naturally comes with a free license. Signing up takes very little time, after which you can get started right away. This free license gives you 10 GB of cloud storage, which you can use to host Power BI reports or Excel workbooks. There is, however, a maximum size for reports you can host with a free license: 1 GB. You can also refresh your reports automatically up to 8 times a day.

The free Power BI license also has a number of limitations. The most obvious one is that you cannot share your reports or dashboards with other users. Nor can you view reports or dashboards that others have shared. The only two ways for free users to share a report are to send the Power BI Desktop file (if the data has been imported or the recipient has access to the source data) or to publish the report to the web as an embedded report. The latter is a handy feature if you want to share your dashboard or report with everyone on the World Wide Web, but it is not a secure option when it comes to confidential information. A final limitation is that a free license does not let you integrate with Office 365 (SharePoint and Teams), export reports to PowerPoint or export data to CSV files.

Power BI Pro Per User

Power BI Pro is the full version of Power BI. A Power BI Pro license currently costs around €9.40 per user per month. These licenses can be purchased separately or in combination with an Office 365 plan. Incidentally, the Office (& Microsoft) 365 E5 license is the only one that includes a Power BI Pro license.

The Pro license also has all the options of the free license: 10 GB of storage, a maximum report size of 1 GB and 8 automatic data refreshes. But there is one big difference: Pro users can share their reports and dashboards with other Pro users, whereas users with a free license are limited to uploading and viewing only their own content.

Because reports can be shared, the Pro license also lets you integrate with Office 365 and Teams, use shared workspaces and subscribe to reports and dashboards. The Pro license is the most common license, and in small to large companies alike it is common for every user who wants to use Power BI to have a Pro license.

Power BI Premium Per User

The Premium license offers more technical capabilities: 48 daily refreshes, XMLA endpoints (which allow data to be pushed directly from a data warehouse), incremental refresh and certain AI capabilities (AutoML, Impact Analysis and Cognitive Services).

Content from users with a Premium Per User license can be shared in a Premium Per User workspace, in which case the content is not accessible to users with a free or Pro account, unless there is a Premium Capacity of F64 or higher.

Fabric Premium Capacity

For a scalable Power BI environment for companies with a lot of data or many employees, there is Premium Capacity: not a per-user license but an organization-wide license. It therefore provides dedicated capacity, also known as a “Premium Workspace”. Simply put, this means you get a kind of reserved container of space in Microsoft's cloud (Azure), where all of Microsoft's online services are stored. This can be used to host large datasets, ranging from 25 to as much as 400 GB. It also allows you to store up to 100 TB of data in total.

One feature you get with Premium Capacity is Power BI Report Server. Report Server lets you keep all your data in an on-premises environment, so your data stays local and does not go to the cloud. Report Server is comparable to what used to be SQL Server Reporting Services, but built for Power BI reports. Although the cloud service offers more capabilities, both are equally easy to use.

Update!

See the Microsoft website for the full overview of Fabric Premium Capacities, including all prices, capabilities and limitations. As of 1 January 2025, it is no longer possible to purchase a Power BI Premium Capacity, only a Fabric Capacity.

Power BI Embedded

One license you do not get with Power BI Premium is Power BI Embedded. Power BI Embedded is a Microsoft Azure service that lets you quickly embed data visualizations, reports and dashboards in an app. Embedding works on a capacity-based model that is billed by the hour. The app can then be shared with users who only have a free license. Power BI Embedded is also used by ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to build Power BI capacity into an application.

See all the new pricing and feature differences per license in this overview

Power BI licenses	Power BI Desktop	Power BI Pro	Power BI Premium
Cost	Free	€9.40 Price per user per month	€18.70 Price per month per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource with an annual subscription
Included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5
Per-user license
On-premises reporting via Power BI Report Server
Advanced features such as XMLA connectivity, incremental data refresh and AI applications
Broad distribution of content without requiring a Power BI Pro license for content consumers
Maximum size of an individual dataset	1GB	1GB	1GB
Maximum storage	10GB	10GB	10GB
Maximum number of automatic refreshes per day	8	8	48
Publish reports to share them
Subscribe to reports for change notifications
Broad distribution of content without requiring a Power BI Pro license for content consumers
Access via mobile devices
Cloud service
Import from Excel, CSV and Power BI Desktop files
Publish to the web
Export to PowerPoint/CSV
Embed content in other interfaces, such as Teams, SharePoint and other SaaS applications

Getting started with data

Now that we have covered the different Power BI licenses, the next step in the process is to start importing data. There are several ways to do this, one of which is to import your data manually through Power BI. One advantage of Power BI is that it has a great many data connectors, so you can also enter data manually using, for example, just an Excel file. The downside is that this data is not refreshed automatically, so as a user you will always have to do that yourself. That is not really a problem if you only use Power BI personally. But as soon as you do this for an organization, you will quickly be dealing with a lot of data. And all that data also comes from different systems, which is exactly the point at which you no longer want to do this manually.

Get more out of Power BI with TimeXtender

One way to automate that process is to start working with TimeXtender. TimeXtender is a Data Management Platform: a software platform used to collect and manage data. You could see the software as an overarching umbrella that supports the data process from ingesting the data all the way to visualizing it in Power BI. Developing and managing a data warehouse yourself often takes a lot of time and money. The TimeXtender Data Management Platform lets you develop faster because it generates automated (ETL) scripts, and it also saves on maintenance. This way, you can easily build a future-proof data warehouse that any developer can work with. Want to know more? Sign up for the live demo on 12 May!

Why use Power BI in combination with TimeXtender?

Power BI is a true visualization tool for visualizing your data, and it is very good at that. Unfortunately, Power BI offers limited options for modeling data. So if you want to take a professional approach and roll out Power BI across the organization, you will soon need a data warehouse. This is because Power BI has no central environment where all data comes together in a secure and manageable way. That is possible when you use TimeXtender. In addition, combining TimeXtender with Power BI gives you access to data up to 10x faster than, for example, developing and maintaining your data manually. It also makes it much easier to unlock data sources, as you have more than 130 connectors at your disposal.

Want to know more?

Want to learn more about Power BI? Sign up for the free online Power BI Basics training on 7 May. Interested in combining Power BI and TimeXtender? Then also sign up for the live demo on 12 May!

Free Power BI training Live TimeXtender demo