Choosing the right Power BI licensing option can be daunting, especially with the various options available. At A is A Consulting, we often help organizations navigate these choices to find the best fit for their needs. In this post, we’ll break down the key differences between Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium Per User (PPU), Power BI Embedded, and Fabric Capacities so you can make an informed decision.
1. Power BI Pro: Ideal for Small Teams and Individual Users
A Power BI Pro license is required for the person deploying the report and any users who want to view the report.
Key Features:
- Allows users to create, share, and collaborate on reports and dashboards.
- Data refreshes up to 8 times a day.
- Integrated with Microsoft Office 365, offering tight integration with tools like Excel and SharePoint.
- Access to Power BI Service for report publishing, and sharing dashboards with others.
- Cost: approx. $15 AUD/month per user.
Best for: Small teams or organizations where individual users need the ability to collaborate on reports but don’t require large-scale capacity or high-volume data processing.
2. Power BI Premium Per User (PPU): Unlocking Premium Features at a Personal Level
Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) offers advanced features typically reserved for larger deployments but without requiring an organization to invest in full-scale capacity.
Key Features:
- Includes all Power BI Pro features.
- Paginated reports, which are perfect for generating operational reports in PDF or other printable formats.
- Increased data refreshes—up to 48 times per day.
- Dataflow Gen 1.
- Cost: approx. $30.00 AUD/month per user.
Best for: Teams that want to produce automated PDF reports saved to SharePoint folders, or want to take advantage of user-configured notifications.
3. Power BI Fabric Capacities: Enterprise-Grade Data Management and Analytics
A Fabric Capacity can be purchased in addition to your Power BI licensing. These allow you to create data warehouses and data lakehouses to centralize your data, along with the ability to automatically bring data from your various business apps into these central locations.
Fabric Capacities are purchased at an organizational level (not per user). These range from an F2 capacity all the way to an F2048. You can find the current price of these capacities on the Azure Pricing Page.
There are some nuances with this, where if you have an F64 capacity or above for your organization, users can view reports with a Fabric free license. This eliminates per-user licensing for your organization. However, if you have anything below F64, users will need at least a Power BI Pro License.
Best for: Large enterprises that need high-performance data infrastructure, including real-time analytics and big data capabilities, along with tight governance and compliance controls. It allows for significant savings at the higher tiers by eliminating per-user licensing.
Which Option Is Right for You?
- Power BI Pro is ideal for small organizations or teams that need the core reporting and collaboration features without advanced AI or large-scale datasets.
- Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) is perfect for growing businesses that need the full suite of premium features but on a per-user basis rather than full capacity.
- Fabric Capacities are built for medium to large organizations that require high-performance data handling, real-time analytics, and scalable infrastructure to support enterprise-level data management needs