Power BI - Pricing and Licensing

There are two types of licenses available in Power BI - Power BI Free and Power BI Pro.

Power BI Free is free, of course, but it lacks some Enterprise/advanced features.

Power BI Pro is $9.99 per user per month and is subscription based (yearly subscription is required).

Power BI licensing is not based on the role of the user, but rather on the content the user is consuming. For example, like most licensing types, you won’t find a read-only user license or a power-user license. Let’s take a look at the primary components of Power BI and see their license types. As you know, there are main components of Power BI – Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service.

Power BI Desktop is absolutely free. All the features, capabilities of Power BI Desktop are free without any restrictions.

For Power BI Service, the general rule of thumb is that if a user is consuming “pro content”, then they require Power BI Pro else the free version will suffice. Pro content is mainly based on the following 3 factors:

1. Data Refresh - Here are some scenarios that will you help understand when a pro license is needed.

·    Your data source is hosted on-premises, and you are pulling the data into Power BI. If you need to refresh the data automatically, then you'll need Power BI Pro. Please note that data can be refreshed manually, in which case, Power BI Pro is NOT required.

·     Your data source is hosted on premises, and you are querying the data source live (using DirectQuery option). Querying on-premises data sources live requires Power BI Pro.

·    Your data source is hosted in the cloud (for example, you are using Dynamics CRM Online, SalesForce, etc.). You can refresh data once a day using Power BI Free; however, refreshing data more frequently than once a day requires Power BI Pro.

     2. Collaboration - If the report, dashboard, etc. is in a Group Workspace, users will need a pro license to access the report/dashboard. Also, creating organizational content pack requires a pro license.

     3. Security - If the report, dashboard, etc. is using Row Level Security (RLS), users will need a pro license to view the report/dashboard. 

More information on Power BI Pricing can be found here  - https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

 Note: If you are using on-premises data sources, you'll need to use Power BI Gateway to refresh the data automatically.