Power BI Premium + Power BI Report Server - still requried Pro license for users?

[mittalpatel130]

Hello,

I am working on one Power BI Premium deployment project which is for on-premise Power BI Report Server.

So now, they have purchased Power BI Report Server + Power BI Premium licenses for the organization.

Now, the question is  - What exactly the capabilities difference between Free and Pro users? 

As per my findings, there are no Dashboards and sharing features available in Power BI Report server. Then why would any user need Pro license? Do they need it to publish the reports to Power BI Report Server? 

How are they going to share the Reports with colleagues? 

Can anyone please explain me this difference and send me if any documentation or reference link available?

Thank you

[jcollinson2001 · Accepted solution]

As you've said, a pro license is required to publish reports to the report server (or service for that matter).

A free license entitles you to author Power BI reports on your local PC, but not publish them.

This clarifies things for the PBI service:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-free-vs-pro

Here's a blog post which confirms it for Report Server:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlrsteamblog/2017/05/17/a-closer-look-at-power-bi-report-server/

"Either way you license Power BI Report Server, “publisher” users who publish Power BI reports to the report server for others to access need Power BI Pro licenses, whereas “reader” users who merely view reports don’t need any per-user licenses."

Hope this helps.

[pbx · Accepted solution]

To add to all of this, if you are looking for a way to enforce pro licenses on the users that want to publish reports, there's none out of the box. You have to manage that yourself, and don't give permissions to publish to those that don't have the license. But then things start to become tricky if you want to give access to users to deploy paginated reports, as that doesn't need Pro license, but once you give them that ability, they can publish PBI reports to PBI server. So if you ask me, this pro license for on premise is nothing but driving up number of users on the cloud and "maybe" easy migration of licenses into the cloud, if and when you decide to do it. Otherwise, I don't think MS is going to go after you for your 10/month payment!

[mittalpatel130]

Thank you for the quick responses.

Please correct me if I misunderstood. 

If we assign users a permission to publish paginated reports to Power BI Report Server, then they automatically get ability to publish Power BI Desktop Reports to Power BI Report Server. Isn't it?

Other than publishing, does Pro license restrict any capability like sharing of reports? I am sure it is there in case of Cloud service, but how about on-premise? 

I am really looking for some document around capabilities, security, permissions ( RLS, export, share, download, etc.) for Power BI Report Server where all these are clearly defined, because I have to deal with users for the Rollout plan and I don't want to promise which is not possible.

Please suggest.

[pbx]

I have looked around and couldn't find an easy way by which you can only allow users to upload only paginated reports and not PBI reports. I certainly haven't looked too deep to find a solution to it, because frankly I see it more of a MS problem than mine :). As for sharing, once a report is uploaded to your server, it's up to you to who you share it with, i.e. who do you grant "Browser" permission.

As for documentation, there's good documentation about PBI Report Server, and capabilities from MS, it's just that it may not packaged in a way you like them and ready for answering all different types of questions. The following blog is a very useful source of information:
https://whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/

[jcollinson2001]

Great point:

"But then things start to become tricky if you want to give access to users to deploy paginated reports, as that doesn't need Pro license, but once you give them that ability, they can publish PBI reports to PBI server."

[jcollinson2001 · Accepted solution]

As you've said, a pro license is required to publish reports to the report server (or service for that matter).

A free license entitles you to author Power BI reports on your local PC, but not publish them.

This clarifies things for the PBI service:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-free-vs-pro

Here's a blog post which confirms it for Report Server:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlrsteamblog/2017/05/17/a-closer-look-at-power-bi-report-server/

"Either way you license Power BI Report Server, “publisher” users who publish Power BI reports to the report server for others to access need Power BI Pro licenses, whereas “reader” users who merely view reports don’t need any per-user licenses."

Hope this helps.