The document compares Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service, detailing the features and limitations of free, pro, premium, and premium per user (PPU) licenses. Free users can create and connect to data but cannot share or collaborate, while pro users can share and collaborate with others and access enhanced capabilities through premium services. Pricing details and storage limits are provided, alongside statistics about data refresh rates and language support.

2. Power BI Desktop vs Power BI Service on Cloud

5. Free per-user license
Users with free licenses can use the Power BI service to connect to data and
create reports and dashboards for their own use. They can't use the Power BI
sharing or collaborating features with others, or publish content to other
people's workspaces. However, Pro and Premium Per User (PPU) users can share
content and collaborate with free users if the content is saved in workspaces
hosted in Premium capacity or Fabric F64 or greater capacity.
Power BI Pro is an individual per-user license that lets users create content and
also read, and interact with content that others publish to the Power BI service.
Users with this license type can share content and collaborate with other Power
BI Pro users. Only Power BI Pro users can publish or share content with other Pro
users or consume content that's created by other Pro users, unless a Power BI
Premium capacity hosts that content. If a Power BI Premium capacity hosts the
content, then Pro users can share content and collaborate with free and PPU
users too.
• A developer license (every developer will need one)
• Data Ingestion
• Data Transformation and Data Modelling
• Report Creation
• Report Sharing
Up to 10 GB of storage per license, with individual files capped at 1 GB.
Pro license

6. Pro Benefits
• Build Content: Create reports and visualizations by connecting to more than
100 sources and embedding APIs and controls. Stay connected with the
latest information with scheduled data refresh.
• Tell Data Stories: Add live data from Power BI reports to presentations — it
offers a PowerPoint add-in. Answer questions without switching context by
drilling down into data.
• Monitor Usage: Track which users and groups use Power BI the most with
activity metrics. Gain insights into how people use the solution from the
admin settings.
• Localize: The Power BI Service supports 44 languages. These include Arabic,
Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, English, French, German,
Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) and Russian.
• Get Mobile Insight: Focus on what’s important while out of the office —
utilize the Power BI Mobile App. Access on-premises data, scan barcodes and
QR codes and ask questions with the Q&A virtual assistant. Annotate and
share reports and visualizations and set notification alerts.
• AI Support: Artificial intelligence powers visuals, including key influencers
and decomposition trees and smart narratives, anomaly detection,
clustering, forecasting, Q&A and Quick Insights. AutoML, AzureML,
CognitiveServices and R/Python transformations are AI enrichment
capabilities.
• Need to buy individual licenses for every user.
• Doesn’t allow more than eight refreshes per day per dataset.
• It isn’t flexible in addressing big data needs as it restricts data model size to 1
GB.
• Doesn’t allow more than 10 GB of storage. Opting for multiple Pro licenses is
one way to boost storage equivalent to 10GB multiplied by the number of
licenses.
• Doesn’t permit consuming or collaborating on reports unless you have a Pro
license.
• Doesn’t provide text analytics and machine learning (ML). However, some AI
visuals, like Q&A, Smart Narrative and Key Influencers, are available.
Pro Limitations
Pricing
Power BI Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and has the same license lifecycle. It’s available for self-service purchase and in the Microsoft admin center for $9.99 per month.

7. Premium Benefits
the following benefits and features apply to Premium and PPU versions
• Share Insights: Build mashups, data models, reports and dashboards by directly connecting
to live streaming data in the Power BI Service. Automatically find trends and anomalies and
share insights with free Power BI users.
• Manage Content Lifecycle: BI content creators in your organization can build and test
content using the deployment pipelines tool. They can create reports, datasets and
dashboards in the Power BI service before it’s made available to content consumers.
• Dataflows: Though this feature is available in Pro, Premium and PPU versions, some
capabilities are specific to Premium and PPU. These include an enhanced computing engine,
DirectQuery, in-storage computations and linked entities.
Incremental data refreshes maintain optimum performance with live updates, boosting the
time-to-insight.
• Forecast Trends: Build, train, validate and apply machine learning models directly in Power
BI. The solution hosts data models using automated ML(AutoML) with Azure Machine
Learning — no need for a separate subscription.
• Aggregate Data: Optimize query performance using ML-driven automatic data aggregations
— self-training and self-optimizing — no need for extensive data modeling skills.
• Configure Backup and Recovery: Perform backup and restore operations using XMLA
endpoints, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and Analysis Services cmdlets for
PowerShell. It’s available in Premium and PPU.
• Azure CognitiveServices APIs: Enrich data by performing sentiment analysis, keyphrase
extraction, language detection and image tagging. Available with Premium and PPU versions.
• Design Print-ready reports: Create, publish and share pixel-perfect, paginated reports using
the free-to-download Power BI Report Builder. Paginated reports are available out of the box
in Gen2, the latest Premium version.
• Optimized Updates: Microsoft enables asynchronous data refreshes with REST APIs,
eliminating the need for long-running, unreliable HTTP connections. Data refreshes are set to
occur 48 times per day per dataset.
• Bring-your-own-key (BYOK): While Power BI uses Microsoft-managed keys to encrypt data,
as a Premium user, you can use your data keys.
• Multi-geo: Deploy content to data regions other than the tenant’s home region. It’s a
Premium feature that helps you address industry and organization-specific data residency
needs in various regions.
• The need to purchase Pro licenses for individual report creators.
• There might be the need to purchase Pro licenses for external content consumers, like
clients who don’t have access to your organization’s Premium account.
• 400 TB of storage
Pricing
Premium costs $4,995 per capacity/month — it’s billed monthly with an annual
commitment.
Premium Capacity Limitations
• PPU doesn’t offer multi-geo support, unlimited distribution, and Power BI reports on-
premises. It supports BYOK only when it’s enabled across the tenant.
• Doesn’t allow sharing content with free users.
• Doesn’t support on-premises reporting.
• Reports migrated from PPU environments to non-PPU environments only open if you
refresh the datasets at least once.
• Dedicated computing with up to 100 TB of storage, enabling working with up to 50 GB
of data
Pricing
A PPU license costs $20 per user per month.
Premium Per User (PPU)
Limitations

8. Until 30 June 2024 Power Bi
Premium per Capacity ->
From 1 July 2024 Microsoft
Fabric SKUs
• Microsoft Fabric SKUs today available 1 to 1
with Premium capacity worldwide (beside
China)
• Microsoft Fabric SKUs possible to scale-up and
scale-down (not possible with Premium Capa
• Microsoft Fabric SKUs auto assignment license
to a report consumer available only from the F
64
• F 64 capacity can handle around 500
concurrent active users before seeing
performance degradation

9. Power BI Premium Capacity SKUs vs Fabric Capacity F-SKUs

10. To keep in consideration
• Until 30 June 2024 Power Bi Premium per Capacity -> from 1 July 2024 Microsoft Fabric SKUs
• Premium capacity interesting when over 350 – 450 users
• How many users a Premium P1 Capacity can provide access? There is no explicit limit
• External users who want connect to their data and create or modify the reports will need their
Power BI Pro individual licence

11. Possible options could be:
• Microsoft 365 + individual Power Bi Pro licenses
• During development phase a lower F-Skus to reduce costs, then when live with external clients (consumers)
upgrade to F 64
• Split Devs with a Low F and a F 64 for the Production