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beaconfbb
Regular Visitor

Power BI Licensing

Hi All,

This is my first post in this forum. Please excuse me if i missed any rules. We are trying to get power bi for our reporting purposes. We are on Office 365. My questions.

1) Does Power BI Service comes with office 365 or we need tio purchase it seperately?

2) What are the costs?

3) We need only 3 developer licenses and there are over 800 users who need to access the reports (do they need license as well)?

Please provide some suggestions.

Thanks

2 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS
timg
Solution Sage
Solution Sage

Hi beaconfbb,

Below you'll find some clarification on your questions:

  1. Power BI Free licences are free for all users regardless of office 365 subscriptions. Power BI Pro licences are included in the Office 365 E5 licence, not in other licences
  2. The cost of one Power BI pro licence is 9.99 dollar. 
  3. within Power BI there are only Free and Pro licences, no developer licences. all users who you will be sharing reports with will require a Pro licence (The rule of thumb is that you can use a free licence to develop all your content, but when you want to share that content with other users you will require a pro licence). If 800+ users will require access it might also be worth looking into Power BI premium, this is an alternative to a Pro licence where you do not need to buy a licence per user

More details can be found at: Pricing & Product Comparison | Microsoft Power BI

Best regards,

Tim





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aj1973
Community Champion
Community Champion

@beaconfbb 

You are welcome,

Just mark this thead as a solution for the rest of the community Please

 

Regards
Amine Jerbi

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View solution in original post

16 REPLIES 16
timg
Solution Sage
Solution Sage

Hi beaconfbb,

Below you'll find some clarification on your questions:

  1. Power BI Free licences are free for all users regardless of office 365 subscriptions. Power BI Pro licences are included in the Office 365 E5 licence, not in other licences
  2. The cost of one Power BI pro licence is 9.99 dollar. 
  3. within Power BI there are only Free and Pro licences, no developer licences. all users who you will be sharing reports with will require a Pro licence (The rule of thumb is that you can use a free licence to develop all your content, but when you want to share that content with other users you will require a pro licence). If 800+ users will require access it might also be worth looking into Power BI premium, this is an alternative to a Pro licence where you do not need to buy a licence per user

More details can be found at: Pricing & Product Comparison | Microsoft Power BI

Best regards,

Tim





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Thanks Tim,

That is very informative. When i meant 800 users, these users will be viewing reports. Please correct me if i am wrong. 

In Power BI you develop a report and publish it to an url and users access that url to view the report. Is that not so?

If that is the case why would we need 800 licenses if all they do is view the report ?

How to check if we have Power BI proc license and how to check get the URL where we publish the report?

Thanks

Hi beaconfbb,

Yes, basically everyone can download Power BI desktop for free and create reports there. so 800 users can download Power BI and start creating reports for 0 dollar. Once you have finished a report you can publish it to Power BI service (powerbi.microsoft.com) to your own workspace (still free). However, the moment you want to share your reports with other users, both the sharing user (your developer) and the receiving users (the 800 people) need to have a Pro licence to be able to access the report, even just as a viewer.

This might seem like a high price for users who will only be viewing, but the flipside is that you'll have zero investment costs while developing and only pay for the users that will actually use the tooling.

Alternatives for Power BI pro when you want to reach a large group of only-viewers would be Power BI premium (one big licence), Power BI embedded (embed reports in a web portal on a website), or publish to web (create a url that can be accessed for free by everyone, there are some downsides to this method).

Best regards,

tim





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Thanks Tim,

One more set of questions and i think i will be good 🙂

Can i have Pro licenses for 3-5 developers and the rest 800 be under premium? If the user is having premium license is that enough for the user to see the report shared by our developers?

Thanks

Hi beaconfbb,

If you take a premium licence this would be enough for both the developers and users. Then you would not need the pro licences.

Best regards,

Tim





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aj1973
Community Champion
Community Champion

Hi @beaconfbb 

The combination is not feasable. But To add on what @timg has said if your 800 users are going to interact with your report then you need to buy a Premium License for your developpers. But if there are going to only be viewers then a One pro license can do the job: develop your report and Publish it, once published, create an embed code for Public view and share the link with them or just embed the link into a website of your choice.

I would start with one pro license and add as I go. The premium is very cost effective espacially if you are not using it proparly.

 

Regards
Amine Jerbi

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Hi Amine,

Embed codes still require users to have a licence (Easily embed secure Power BI reports in your internal portals or websites | Microsoft Power BI-blog ...).

Regards,

tim





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aj1973
Community Champion
Community Champion

@timg 

I was talking about this link here

aj1973_0-1612991725600.png

You can Embed that link to a web site, No fees needed. I was not talking about the Embeded License. Sorry for the confusion

My Bad 

Regards
Amine Jerbi

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Thanks Amine and Tim. What if i create a report and publish it to a workspace and share the url. It is strictly for viewing , they cannot make changes. They can download and create their own version on their desktop and use it for their individual purpose.

 

Hi Beaconfbb,

Via Power BI service they would still require a pro licence.

You could distribute the report for example through teams or onedrive and all users would be able to open it for free on Power BI desktop, but the moment you want to share it with specific people in the organization through power BI service (even just for viewing) a Pro or enterprise licence will be required. (unless all data may be viewed by everyone outside the organization as well, then a "publish to web" code could be used as well like @aj1973 mentioned. Though keep in mind that this method offers zero security.)





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aj1973
Community Champion
Community Champion

@beaconfbb 

You are talking about 2 things at the same time:

This here 

aj1973_0-1612991953489.png

Is an URL that can be shared with anyone no fees related except your Pro License. They can ONLY view the report.

 

Now to make changes on a report in any one's desktop, that anyone needs to have access to what is called the Dataset of the report. For this the persone who is going to have access to the Dataset, there is 2 Options

  1. Pro license for who ever is going to have and access the dataset
  2. Without a pro license you can send the Pibx file of the report to the person who wants to make changes on the report, but this would need a hassle.

Let me know if you need more details

 

 

Regards
Amine Jerbi

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Hi Amine,

A big security sidenote here is that all reports that are published through the "publish to web" option have no security and can be viewed by everyone outside the organization as well, not only the 800 authorized viewers inside the organization. So this method would only be valid if the used data is meant for public view.

Regards,

Tim





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aj1973
Community Champion
Community Champion

@timg 

I totaly agree, but that would be his choice.

 

My point was, before jumping on purchasing licenses that would waste money he needs to set up a strategy on how and who is going to use the dataset, dashboard, reports, workspace, App.... 3 Developpers and 800 users or viewers is in itself a project that needs to be set up the right way from the get going. 

There is too much to learn about Power Bi so going step by step could save you Time and Money

 

Regards
Amine Jerbi

If I answered your question, please mark this thread as accepted
and you can follow me on
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Thanks a lot Amine and Tim. Thanks for the suggestions. We have multiple data sources and so far we have been using Excel and now want to move either to Power BI or Tableau. All your points make sense . I will update here tomorrow once i talk to my team and the other stake holders. Once again thank you all for the time and suggestions. Greatly appreciate it.

aj1973
Community Champion
Community Champion

@beaconfbb 

You are welcome,

Just mark this thead as a solution for the rest of the community Please

 

Regards
Amine Jerbi

If I answered your question, please mark this thread as accepted
and you can follow me on
My Website, LinkedIn and Facebook

Thanks everyone.

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