When starting to look into Power BI as a solution for your organisation you are likely to start by visiting Microsoft’s pricing page, where you will see just 2 options (Pro or Premium). This, however, is a little over simplified and it certainly doesn’t make it clear that you can actually rent capacity for just the hours you need!
After an hour of research it becomes clear that there are actually a really wide range of options available which start from the completely free (always the best price!) to over £60k per month for the highest Premium offering, so it is important to really understand what options are available to you so you can optimise your ROI.
Keeping up with licensing options is a challenge due to the rapid pace of change, with the below accurate as of September 2020.
At a very high level there are 5 options available for Power BI:
- Power BI without a license (free)
- Power BI Pro (£7.50)
- Power BI Embedded (varies)
- Power BI Premium (varies)
- Power BI Report Server (on prem, possibly free)
Power BI without a license
Power BI is free for personal use and it's great for getting started and assessing whether it is the right solution for some or all of your needs. Once you’ve decided that Power BI has functionality you want to take advantage of, you can carry on for free until you want to share your reports/data with somebody and then you need to move on to a paid subscription. The features that are available are really cost effective at just £90 per user per year.
Power BI Pro
Power BI Pro is essentially the same as Power BI free but with sharing capabilities bolted on, so it is only when you want to share your work that you must have a subscription. At only 7.50 GBP a month per user, this represents amazing value.
If you're a global admin or billing admin in Microsoft 365 you can get a trial for your organization, you'll get 25 licenses to use for one month. For step-by-step instructions on how to sign up, see Get a Power BI subscription for your organisation.
If your company has an Office 365 Enterprise E5 licence (~£31 per user per month) then Power BI Pro is included in that at no extra cost.
Power BI Embedded
If you want to test Premium features before you buy, you can create a new Power BI Embedded capacity (A SKUs) in the Azure portal and assign a Workspace to it – this way you will get access to all the Premium features for as long as you need to test and when you’ve finished you can simply pause the capacity so you don't incur further costs. You’ll still need to pay while you’re testing, but it will be a tiny fraction of the cost of buying Premium.
As an example you could trial an A3 SKU for 8 hours and that would cost only £24, whilst an A3 SKU that was running for 1 hour every workday would cost £60 for 4 weeks. The price more or less doubles each step up in capacity.
Another way to test out the embedded functionality would be to take a look at the playground Microsoft have kindly set up for you.
It is worth noting that the embedded capacities start a little lower than Premium, so an A4 is equivalent to a P1 capacity, with A5 and A6 capacities aligning with the P2 and P3 capacities, respectively.
|
SKU |
DEDICATED INFRASTRUCTURE |
VIRTUAL CORES |
MEMORY |
PRICE (month) |
PRICE (hour) |
8 Hour trial cost |
20 Hour trial cost |
|
|
|
|
|
£ |
£ |
|
|
|
A1 |
No |
1 |
3 GB |
548.48 |
0.75 |
6 |
15 |
|
A2 |
No |
2 |
5 GB |
1,092.56 |
1.5 |
12 |
30 |
|
A3 |
Yes |
4 |
10 GB |
2,189.47 |
3 |
24 |
60 |
|
A4 |
Yes |
8 |
25 GB |
4,383.34 |
6 |
48 |
120 |
|
A5 |
Yes |
16 |
50 GB |
8,771.04 |
12.02 |
96.16 |
240.4 |
|
A6 |
Yes |
32 |
100 GB |
17,546.76 |
24.04 |
192.32 |
480.8 |
Power BI Premium
Power BI Premium is a tenant-level Microsoft 365 subscription available in two SKU families:
- P SKUs (P1-P5) require a monthly or yearly commitment and are billed monthly, and includes a license to install Power BI Report Server on-premises.
- EM SKUs (EM1-EM3) require a yearly commitment and are billed monthly. EM1 and EM2 SKUs are available only through volume licensing plans. You can't purchase them directly.
P4 and up are designed for very large enterprise implementations with many users and in most circumstances you probably don't need it, as the video below suggests:
Power BI Report Server Only licensing
There are two ways to get this
- Purchase Power BI Premium P SKU P1-P5 (EM sku do not work),
- Purchase SQL Server Enterprise with software assurance agreement
With the integration of SQL Server Reporting Services and Power BI, organizations can now use Enterprise SQL Server with Software Assurance to publish Power BI reports fully within the bounds of their organization. It is worth noting functionality differences between SaaS and on-prem versions as part of your decision making process.
According to this blog article, you are required to have Pro if you publish reports to Power BI Report Server.
Common questions:
Do I have to pay to connect to my on-premises data? No, the on premises data gateway is free.
Do I have to pay to connect to my cloud data? It depends which region your data is hosted in, if your data and Power BI tenant are in the same geo region then it is still free.
