Power BI Premium Per User Licensing Explained
By: Chris Kraus
Enter, the Premium
Even if you’re new to the Business Intelligence space, you’ve probably already heard of Microsoft’s Power BI platform. They’ve been on a monthly release cycle since February 2015 and steadily climbing the Gartner Magic Quadrant for years. While the incremental development approach really seems to work for them, every once in a while they release a change that has the potential to catapult them to the next level. Last Quarter’s announcement of Power BI Premium Per User could be one of these golden tickets, especially if your business is already using Power BI.
Wait, What’s Power BI Premium?
Let’s back up. In order to fully appreciate the benefits of Power BI Premium Per User licensing, you first need to be up to speed on the benefits of the Premium capacity, which up until recently has only been available as a per node license, starting at $5k/month. If you are an independent user, a small business, or even a larger business that is allergic to high monthly premiums, you probably haven’t considered signing up for a Premium capacity as the Pro licensing satisfies all the basic requirements of a great BI platform and is ridiculously cheap at $9.99/user. Unless, you have the size and scale of a large enterprise, in which case $5k/month was more cost effective than $10/month multiplied by 1,000 users.
Historically, the licensing structure of Power BI Premium has been intended for larger organizations with large data volumes (up to 100TB supported!) and the need to process analysis of these data stores quickly through the Power BI platform. The main attractors were size, scale, and speed, and the security of knowing you had a dedicated node in Azure attached to your workspace.
Over time, Microsoft began adding additional features like:
Pre-built cloud platform connectors
Ability to select your data cloud region
Paginated Reports built on SRSS
Additional governance and security with active directory integration
Advanced workloads for AI like Azure Cognitive services
Better support for Azure DevOps workflows.
The gap between “Pro” and “Premium” grew and the reasons for upgrading became increasingly tantalizing. While a small cohort of users have jumped on the bandwagon, the main-stream BI customer still couldn’t justify the $5k/month price. Without hitting data size or speed constraints and without 1000’s of users, there just wasn’t a convincing case to upgrade for smaller teams or smaller datasets.
Behold, the great blue cloud in the datacenter has heard our cry! With the advent of Premium Per user, Microsoft is finally giving organizations the flexibility to spring for Premium where it makes sense, without committing to unwieldy subscription fees. A chance for the little guy to take on big problems or the chance to innovate with a small team in a larger organization. Let’s take a look at some of the key differences as well as some “got ya’s” to be aware of.
How is Power BI Premium different from Premium Per User?
Before you get too excited about the licensing, I want to clarify the one major difference in cost that may not be immediately apparent from Microsoft’s advertising. While using Power BI Premium Capacity, view-only users are free, so long as the node can keep up with the query demand. With Power BI Premium-Per-User, viewers must also pay $19.99 to access the features built by other Premium-Per-User creators. In Microsoft terms, “Unlimited Distribution” is not supported on the Per User plan. This is how Microsoft keeps their platform scale for large enterprises. While this means there isn’t a huge windfall for enterprise business, there is still potential for license optimization if you are in the small/medium category, currently on the Premium Capacity licensing. More on that later…
There are also a few tricky cross-over rules regarding mixing access between licenses. In short, your Premium Capacity viewers cannot access content created with the Premium Per User licensing. Microsoft does support the mixture of licenses, but the use case is intended to be a small team working internally with Per User licenses, partitioned separately from the Premium Capacity workspaces.
In addition, here are a few other features not supported by Premium Per User licensing:
Multi-Geo Support
Power BI On-Prem Reporting Server
Models limited to 100GB
However, with the caveats out of the way, here are the features from the Premium Capacity licensing that ARE supported with the Per User plans.
Refresh rate of 48/day (up from 24 on Pro)
Paginated Reports
AI Capabilities (AutoML, Impact Analysis, Cognitive Services)
Advanced Dataflows Features (Direct Query, etc…)
Usage-based Aggregate Optimization
Application Lifecycle Management (Deployment Pipelines)
XMLA Endpoint Connectivity
Enhanced Automatic Page Refresh
So what does this mean for your business? What license are you on now? Is it worth the jump to premium? Or, maybe you sprung for the Premium Capacity and have doubted the cost-effectiveness of that choice. The sections below outline some of the things you should be thinking through if you are currently on the Free, Pro, or Premium Capacity plans.
Spoiler Alert: if you’re on the Premium Capacity and are not a large business, there may be some significant savings to be had!
What if I’m on the Power BI Free License?
I’m willing to bet that there are a lot of you in this boat. Plenty of users have downloaded the free Power BI software and used it in a desktop capacity to do individual analysis. In my opinion, Microsoft does a poor job at showing Desktop users what they are missing in the cloud. They give you a tiny taste with the Free License, but folks often don’t know what they are missing and never try upgrading to Pro licensing.
If you are using Power BI on a personal basis, or for one-off ad-hoc projects, free will get you pretty far. However, if you’re trying to deploy a consistent Business Intelligence experience within an organization, you’ll see very quickly where this falls short. The jump to Pro is all about setting up the automation pipeline and creating an environment that promotes discovery and interaction from your users consuming analysis - ideally, in a way that doesn’t generate an influx of tickets to IT!
In short, if you’re on the Power BI Free license and regularly using and sharing your analysis within an organizational setting, you owe it to yourself to explore what Power BI Pro has to offer. Unless you have specific use cases that require the size capacities or advanced analytics offered by Premium, start with Pro.
What if I’m on the Power BI Pro License?
If your mouth started watering during my description of Premium features above, you’re probably in this category. You’ve used Power BI Pro long enough to appreciate its capabilities and you’ve been contemplating bridging the chasm and flipping that switch for months, but just haven’t been able to muster the willpower (or the budget!).
You are Microsoft’s target audience. They REALLY want you to try Premium. In fact, if you’ve been logged in on the platform recently, I’m sure you’ve noticed all the flashing lights pointing you towards starting a Premium-Per-User trial. And frankly, why not? The cost of a single user upgrading to Premium is almost negligible at an additional $10/month.
However, similar to the Free platform, where you can create, but not share. The Premium licensing falls into the same type of restriction. A user enabled for Premium cannot use the features unless a workspace is upgraded to Premium. Consequently, a Pro user cannot access content in a Premium workspace.
Thus, the end result reflects the standard Pro licensing. Both the report writer and the report consumer need to be paying for the Premium Per User in order to collaborate on the advanced features. In this way Microsoft preserves their existing licensing model for enterprises pricing.
What if I’m already using a Power BI Premium Capacity Node?
If you’re already using a Power BI Premium Capacity Node, it is worth evaluating whether you can “downgrade” to Premium-Per-User in a cost effective manner. I put “downgrade” in quotes, simply because the functionality of the licenses is identical, only the licensing and cost structure will change. This is primarily due to the fact that “view only” users are free in the Premium per Capacity model, while the Premium-Per-User model requires all users to have a license.
If you need more than 250 people on a Premium feature set within your organization, the scaled costs of the Premium per Capacity model takes over, at a flat $4995 /month. You would not need to upgrade to a second node (an additional $4995/month) until well over 1000 users.
However, if your users have mixed requirements and those actually using and consuming Premium capacity features are a smaller subset within the organization, it’s worth doing the math to determine if split licensing between Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User tiers makes sense. If you have 250 users, with only 50 using premium features, you could be paying $3k/month for the same level of service as your Premium Capacity node buys you at $5k/month. I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly rather have that $24,000 back in my budget, for the relatively small headache of managing users between Pro and Premium licenses.
How Much Does Power BI Premium Per User Cost?
When I dug into the licensing costs, I immediately thought to check out Microsoft’s licensing calculator page (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/calculator/) to dig into the various combinations of licensing. To my surprise, this page has been discontinued and redirects you only to the generic Power BI Pricing page. At first glance, I assumed that this was due to Microsoft not having been able to update the calculator to reflect the new Premium-Per-User model, however, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Microsoft may not be too excited about sharing that information. There are quite a few small to medium size businesses that stand to save a significant amount of money by “downgrading” from Power BI Premium Capacity to Power BI Premium Per User, provided the math adds up.
In an attempt to take the guesswork out of the equation for you, we built a calculator of our own to highlight this savings potential. If you are one of these small to medium size businesses using a Premium Capacity node, check out the calculator below to evaluate whether you would see significant savings by switching your licensing.
Total Users - Start by entering the total number of users creating or consuming reports in the Power BI service
Premium Creators - Next, estimate the number of report creators that have a specific need for the Premium features.
Premium Viewers - Likewise, estimate the number of report consumers that have a specific need to access the Premium enabled workspaces.
Pro Creators - Estimate the remaining number of report writers that do not have a need to access Premium features, but still need Pro licensing to create and share reports.
Power BI Premium Nodes - Lastly, enter the number of Premium Capacity Nodes you currently have enabled.