Is a Pro license needed for viewing a dashboard?

[dprice1]

We are looking at licensing Power BI after a successful beta phase of using the Pro Trials. We have encountered issues with Report consumers needing to sign up for the Pro Trial just to see the dashboards, it was my understanding that the consumers can see the dashboards if shared with them using the free licenses but the dashboard designers and publishers will require the Pro license. There doesn't seem to be a consensus on this question in the forums and our CEO is pushing for us to begin rolling out reports to his executives. Will each of the executives, who will be looking at the reports through the web portal, need a pro license? Even though they themselves will not be building nor maintaining these reports?

[v-piga-msft]

Hi @dprice1，

It seems that you are looking for the features of Pro license and Free license.

Free service will have capabilities equivalent to Power BI Pro, except for sharing, enterprise distribution, and collaboration. 

Actually, if you want to view the reports shared with you, you need to have a Pro license.

For your secenario, I suggest you could refer to Premium  which Sharing requires a Power BI Pro license but recipients can be Power BI Pro or free users.

For more details about Power BI license, you could refer to this article.

Best Regards,

Cherry

[lswanson1]

@v-piga-msftso I have Power BI Desktop through my organizations software portal.  I do not have Power BI Pro.  I have created a dashboard off of a Sharepoint list and published it to My Workplace as well as a Teams site.  I want to be able to have everyone in my organization view the dashboard for consumption only.  However, when they go to view the dashboard, they are prompted to sign in to Power BI, then Sign in to Microsoft, then sign up for a free trial of Power BI Pro.  When that trial expires, will they still be able to view my Dashboard?

[PaulDBrown]

@lswanson1 

"When that trial expires, will they still be able to view my Dashboard?"

No, they won't be able to. They will need a Pro License, or your organisation will need a Premium License (or Embedded).

[lswanson1]

@PaulDBrownso is there any form of Power BI that is free?  You need a license to create and a license to view?  Seems kind of crazy to me.

[PaulDBrown]

@lswanson1 

You can share reports to free users by:

1) Sharing the PBIX file itself (lots of potential headaches and very clumsy)

2) Using the "Publish to web" feature in the service (you need to be anabled by the workspace Admin to be able to do this). You should NEVER use this feature with reports containing confidential information, for obvious security reasons.

3) If your organisation has a Premium or Embedded license.

So yes, there are ways. 

[lswanson1]

@PaulDBrownThank you for the response 🙂

So avoid 1.  Got it.  With regard to option 2, if there is no CSI information, and we opt to publish to the web, that makes it viewable to the entire public (all internet?)  Our goal is to share this via embedding in Sharepoint page.  With regard to option 3, if my organization had that access, wouldnt that have already materialized in my attempts to share, or am I missing something?

[PaulDBrown]

@lswanson1 

"With regard to option 2, if there is no CSI information, and we opt to publish to the web, that makes it viewable to the entire public (all internet?) " Correct, it is a "public link", so it can potentially be reached through search engines and if the link is "happily" shared around.

"With regard to option 3, if my organization had that access, wouldnt that have already materialized in my attempts to share, or am I missing something?"  For this I suggest you read up on the details for each license type:
PBI Premium 
PBI Embedded 
If you are hoping to share by embedding in a sharepoint page, I would say PBI Embedded is the right option. It all of course depends on how many "free" users are going to be using the dashboards/reports from a $$ standpoint.