Choosing Power BI Pro or Premium: A License Comparison

Learn about Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium – what license should you choose?

When it comes to a choice between Microsoft's Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium, it can often be challenging to make an efficient decision. It is essential to evaluate organizational requirements, usage, and future plans.

Firstly, the options available include variants like Free, Pro, Premium per User (PPU), and Premium per Capacity (PPC), each offering different access levels and capabilities.

• The Free tier provides basic functionality, allowing for utilization of the Power BI Desktop but lacks content sharing ability.
• Pro license offers full developer functionality with few exceptions. It allows content sharing and demands a Pro license for consumers seeking report access.
• PPU license presents all Premium features on a per-user basis, offering full functionality for developers, but requires users to access workspace content linked to it.
• PPC license provides full Premium functioning. Here although a Pro or PPU license is needed for report sharing, a Free license suffices to consume content linked to a PPC license.

In making this decision, delineating differences between Pro, PPU, and PPC licenses is advised. Below, are certain key differences between the licenses to consider:

• Price
• Model size limit
• Daily refresh limit on Power BI Service datasets
• Deployment Pipelines
• Dataflow features
• Advanced AI, XMLA endpoint read/write connectivity, and Multi-Geo support (PPC Only)

Beyond these, it's also critical to consider flexibility regarding future changes, number of report consumers, enterprise-level Power BI usage, report size, and any deal-breaker technical requirements.

If your usage aligns with the features offered by the Premium licenses, but PPC feels excessive, Premium per User could be the right solution. Keep in mind, though, the Power BI Premium domain is seeing ongoing investment and development, meaning its value will likely surge over time. Therefore, the choice of license ultimately depends on the specific needs of your organization.

For further information, please refer to the following links:

• Power BI Pricing Overview
• Premium License Detailed Description
• Premium Per User FAQ

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