Is Power BI Free? This is one of the most common questions we are asked every day. Yes! it is free but hold on to that …”Free” always has its own limitations.

There are several Power BI license options to consider. We briefly highlight key points for licensing Power BI.

  • Power BI Desktop : is free for individual users. Power BI Desktop lets you create data models and build reports.Power BI Desktop users are limited to using the reports themselves or publishing them to the web where they are public.
  • Power BI Pro : enables users to share their dashboards and reports with each other for consumption inside the Power BI Service.The main limitation here is that any output created by a Power BI Pro license is only sharable with other users who also have a Power BI Pro license.
  • Power BI Premium: is priced based on computing capacity (how much compute power is needed) or by users/month.

How to buy Power BI?

  • Power BI Desktop is free.
  • Power BI Pro is part of the Office 365 Enterprise license.
  • Power BI Preimun comes as Premium Per User or Capacity subscription.
  • A capacity-based Premium subscription allows users with free licenses to access any content, but only users with a Pro or Premium Per User license can create content.

Don’t want to move to the cloud …

Power BI Report Server is the on-premises solution for reporting today, with the flexibility to move to the cloud tomorrow. It’s included with Power BI Premium Or SQL Server Enterprise with Software Assurance(SA)

Creating Power BI reports is where the catch comes in. Even if you are running everything on-premise and you are not using any Power BI in the cloud. You will still require a Power BI Pro license for each person who wants to author and publish reports.

Have questions around Power BI licensing?

This is a basic guideline on how to license Power BI. If you would like to get a deep drill on how Power BI licensing works for your organization, do contact our licensing experts.