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adrianbravo
Helper I
Helper I

which are the differences between power bi free and power bi pro?

I need to recomend which version are going to use within customer.

I would like to know what can i do in Power BI Pro that can not do in Power BI Free..

If you know some link i will appreciate.

Thank's.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
ankitpatira
Community Champion
Community Champion

18 REPLIES 18

@adrianbravo Here is another page that outlines the Pro features. 

Personal experiance. There are very few organizations that I know of that would be happy with Free.

Some of the largest limitations are 1x refresh of data per day, no connections to on premises data sources via the gateways, and not being able to use Groups.

 

The free version is designed to wet your appetite and allow you to see how things work. If the company is ok with seeing a daily report, and you can work around the limitations - cool. But in my experiance that is a rarity.

 

edit: added link


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Are you able to view reports (shared with you) as a free user, when they were created by a pro user (with all the features enabled that the pro user has, of course)

@tschmidt87 If the Pro user applies anything to the dataset/report/dashboard that falls under the "Pro" license, then all users of the shared content must have a Pro license as well.


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@Seth_C_Bauer strange, because im currently on a 60-day pro trial and i've created about 5 different dashboards which all have automatic refresh (which is a pro feature) and shared the dashboards with non-pro users. They can all view it. 

Am i missing something?

@tschmidt87 Can you elaborate on "Automatic Refresh" - is this data Online (OneDrive, SharePoint Online), or does this mean you are using direct query or live connection?


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@Seth_C_Bauer Im using a daily scheduled refresh wihtin PowerBI Service using a personal gateway via my PC. The data is a live connection to an internal MySQL db.

@tschmidt87 Interesting. Shouldn't work if the end users are purely on "free". If they have "Free with Pro Trial" - like you, I would expect it to.

Point of clarification. You aren't using a live connection. You are importing data. 
Live Connection refers to connecting to a SSAS cube or model and your data is always up to date.

Direct Query refers to connecting to a SQL Database - also always up to date

Import - You need to schedule a refresh because the data is static.

 

So if you scheduled a refresh, then you are importing data. In either case, you are using a personal gateway which requires a Pro license. So unless something changed, I would consider the fact that it works right now ... temporary.


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@Seth_C_Bauer

 Is the gateway only available for Power BI pro ? 

 

Also, can I share reports/dashboards using PowerBI free?

@vanessa

 Is the gateway only available for Power BI pro ? 

 Nope, you can now use the gateways as a free user

Also, can I share reports/dashboards using PowerBI free?

No, there is no sharing any longer using the free license. (The one caveat is using "Publish to Web", but you wouldn't do this with company information. It is purely for public facing info)


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Thats the thing. It does work, using the database connection that i set up via Desktop. Every day at 10AM this is being updated using the MySQL credentials stored in the "Automatic Refresh" section on PowerBI Service. Sorry if i am not fluent with PowerBI-specific terminology, i'm relatively new to it.

 

As it stands, my organization could easily use PowerBI for free with simply one account being enabled for PRO features (me, for example). However, i can literally not find a single piece of information regarding this anywhere. I need to decide in the next weeks if my Organization can afford PowerBI (one or two Pro users) or not (hundreds of Pro users). 

I'm not too sure which decision to take simply because everything is fully functional for our users without having Pro (or a trial thereof). I guess i will give Support a call

@tschmidt87 I'm currently testing PowerBI and have the same question. Would I need to get ~100+ pro licenses? or would it be enough to just have ~5 Pro + ~100 free? My infrastructure is similar to yours in the sense that we have some on-premise data that needs to be brougth to Power BI cloud via Data Gateway. If you don't mind me asking, what were your findings in terms of licensing for your case?

 

Thanks,

@diriver63, we ended up getting approx. 50+ pro licenses for anyone who uses PowerBI in any way.

 

I have no idea why the pro features were working for free users in the beginning but it MAY have something to do with the fact that i used "publish to web" and embedded all reports into our organization's sharepoint site. I think embedding reports is the only way a free user could utilize pro features, as it doesnt recognize a logged in user.

 

Just confirmed: When someone is trying to sign into power BI and access a "pro" dashboard within Power BI service, they do get error messages, whereas in embedded reports, they dont.

@tschmidt87 That would be the missing piece to your description, using "Publish to Web" is also a very big hole in company security if you are using it for private company information. I can't stress enough in this forum that this is "not" a use case for internal company data. Generating that URL exposes your company data externally, and can be found by anyone. Just because you embed it in a SharePoint site doesn't in any way shape or form make it secure. 

The Publish to Web documentation here has a giant warning box on top and the first sentence should have a user just stop immediately... "When you use Publish to web, the report or visual you publish can be viewed by anyone on the Internet."

This feature shouldn't be used to get around licensing.


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@Seth_C_Bauer "...publish can be viewed by anyone on the Internet..@ as long as someone has that long url correct? or these url data are searchable by the search engine?  Thanks 

@smerchant "Publish to Web" is not secure in that it relys on (Security by Obscurity). When taking company private information into account, this shouldn't be acceptable.

Easily found on Google, not yet that I know of. But it apparently isn't that hard to create something to go looking for publish to web URLs (spoke with my security team).


Looking for more Power BI tips, tricks & tools? Check out PowerBI.tips the site I co-own with Mike Carlo. Also, if you are near SE WI? Join our PUG Milwaukee Brew City PUG

Yes, i'm aware of the security concerns, although i don't see how anyone would "find" a published report without the unique identifier in the URL, in practice. I've tried numerous times to crawl/search for one of my published reports using various keywords and i haven't managed to find it..

@tschmidt87 I'm currently testing PowerBI and have the same question. Would I need to get ~100+ pro licenses? or would it be enough to just have ~5 Pro + ~100 free? My infrastructure is similar in the sense that we have some on-premise data that needs to be brougth to Power BI cloud via Data Gateway. If you don't mind me asking, what were your findings in terms of licensing for your case?

 

Thanks,

ankitpatira
Community Champion
Community Champion

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