The Clearly Podcast

This is the Clearly Podcast episode 2, Power BI licensing recorded on Wednesday the 14th of October 2020 with hosts Shailan Chudasama, Tom Gough and Andy Clark. In this show we give an overview of Power BI licensing which has 3 tiers

1. Free, which is where we spend most of our time as consultants in the Power BI desktop

2. Pro which is a price per user per month subscription model

3. Dedicated which is a consumption model where users pay for cloud compute and storage

We talk through the differences between the licensing tiers, use cases and hybrid models where an organization can mix licensing types to serve their needs in the most cost effective manner.

The free tier has a lot of the core functionality for Power BI, which is available for free, particularly when you download the Power BI Desktop. So when you're a Power BI developer you're spending most of your time working with Power BI Desktop. 

At that point you can build a data model and pull from a huge variety of data sources. You can either publish and view online, you just can't share with other people.

If you want to learn how Power BI works the free version is ideal because you can start with no financial investment, it's only when you want to use it in a corporate environment and want to share you're work that you'll have to use a paid license.

With free you can setup a Power BI account, you can publish yourself and learn Power BI for a very low cost, just your own time. The next licensing model is when you need to share.

It's also worth mentioning that Power BI desktop is the report authoring and creation tool. If you go to competitive products you'll generally get a time-bombed or limited tool where you'll get a couple of weeks or possibly months if they extend a trial license.

The Pro version is required when you want to start sharing. We've noticed on several occasions that people will download the Power BI desktop and generate a report pack but can't give other people access. They're unsure of how to give others access so will consider sending a colleague the PBIX file which they can do but you have no controls. This is where you use Power BI Pro to create a workspace or multiple workspaces where you upload your reports to the Power BI service which is where you can start sharing the reports via one or many workspaces. Workspaces are flexible and can be structured by department or a certain group of users. As soon as you share a workspace the users are immediately notified so they can start interacting with the reports. We've noticed that other products may have licensing restrictions on how and what a user can access. The Power BI Pro license pretty much covers everything a user will need to do and you can enable/disable functionality according to user need and security.

We've noticed that corporate user can see Power BI within their Office 365 environment which is provisioned but is also a free license so if they choose to use this they will need a paid license to share their work. It's worth mentioning that a Power BI license is a monthly user license that is currently $10/user/month. 

The main driver for people to move to Premium is pricing. The Power BI Pro license is a monthly per user named license whereas the Premium license is based on compute power that you're buying without having to give people specifically named licenses. So if you have 200-300 users who are consuming reports and not really creating reports then that's where the driver to move to Premium kicks in because it'll become cheaper to buy dedicated capacity rather then buying Pro Licenses. The other two things are features available that become unlocked with a Premium license. One of those is the ability to use Power BI embedded so if you need to provide reporting to a supplier or customer portal on your website then you'll need to use Premium, otherwise you'd need to provide named licenses for all of your suppliers or customers. The other item is paginated reporting that allows you to provide pixel perfect printable type report formats that would be otherwise unavailable in Pro. Now, it's very unlikely that the need for paginated reporting, for a small organization, will push you over the edge as the cost will probably be prohibitive for the functional benefit. There is a forthcoming feature called Power BI Premium per user license but we don’t have complete details for that yet (for more details see https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/answering-your-questions-around-the-new-power-bi-premium-per-user-license/). The announcement was made a few weeks ago where we can license Power BI Premium on a user-by-user basis. While this won't include the embedded capability it will include the paginated reporting and the increased number of model refreshes in a 24 hour period which will increase from 8 to 48. As of recording we don't have clarity of pricing.

We've also seen customers upgrade their Office 365 E3 licenses to E5 as it includes the Power BI Pro license. Many customers have decided to use this option to get the Power BI licenses as they get a number of other benefits from the E5 license such as voice, conferencing and cloud app security. More details of the Office 365 E5 license are here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e5?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab. We'd advise that you work with your licensing partner to see if this is a benefit for your organization.

Power BI Pro v Premium isn't an either or option. Any user that has Power BI Premium licensing will need Power BI Pro licenses for report creation and editing. But all users may consider how they can most effectively blend those licenses to get maximum cost efficiency depending on the needs of their user base. Microsoft has a useful Power BI licensing calculator here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/calculator/.

Some users will also use dedicated capacity to use data center proximity to allocate Power BI compute power within a geographic proximity to their users. This can also benefit users with concerns over data protection and GDPR concerns. As a general point we try to steer users away from putting too much personally identifiable data into a Power BI model, although at times this may be unavoidable. In those cases the location of the tenant will be relevant

Machine Learning is an interesting feature that is part of Premium capacity. Right now, we don’t see users purchase Premium for this feature although it may be the case that Premium per user licenses are populate to take advantage of machine learning.  We've had recent conversations where customers have asked about machine learning for subjective rather than objective data. 

To get more details of Power BI licensing please talk to us but also look at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/. We also recommend that you speak to your licensing partner or Microsoft sales representative to get detail and answer any specific questions.