Licensing Tiers
Arjun finishes the Weekly Sales report, publishes it and clicks Share. Power BI replies that sharing needs a Pro licence. Power BI licences are less about building and more about who may share and who may look. Get the tier right and you neither overpay nor lock your own manager out.
The rule
Free builds alone, Pro shares, capacity lets free users view.
Power BI is licensed two ways: per user (every person holds a licence) and per capacity (the organisation rents dedicated computing power for its workspaces).
| Tier | Kind | What it allows |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Per user | Desktop, plus a personal My workspace in the Service. You can publish there for yourself, but you cannot share or use shared workspaces. |
| Pro | Per user | Publish to shared workspaces, share reports, build apps, collaborate. |
| Premium Per User (PPU) | Per user | Everything in Pro plus premium features: much larger models, more refreshes, deployment pipelines. |
| Capacity (Fabric F SKUs, and the older Premium P SKUs they replace) | Per capacity | Workspaces run on the organisation's own capacity. On F64 or larger, people with a free licence can view the content. |
Three details decide most real questions:
- In an ordinary workspace, the viewer needs Pro too, not just the author.
- A semantic model in a Pro workspace can be up to 1 GB and refresh on a schedule 8 times a day; PPU and capacity allow up to 48.
- Content in a PPU workspace can be opened only by other PPU users.
On a capacity, creators still need Pro or PPU to publish. The capacity is what lets a large audience read without each reader holding a paid licence. Prices and plan names change from time to time, so check Microsoft's current pricing page, but the shape — per user versus per capacity — stays the same.
The shortcut
Ask two questions, in order. Does anyone else need to see it? If not, Free is enough. How many viewers? A handful: Pro for everyone involved. Hundreds or thousands: a capacity of F64 or larger, with creators on Pro and readers on Free.
Count the people
Arjun builds the report. Meera and the two branch managers read it. Four people in all.
The trap is buying Pro only for the author. In an ordinary workspace the report is shared successfully, and then every reader without Pro is told they cannot open it.
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
Arjun has only a Free licence. What can he do?
A report lives in an ordinary Pro workspace. Arjun, on Pro, shares it with Ravi, who has a Free licence. What happens?
A retailer wants 3,000 staff to read reports without buying 3,000 paid licences. What fits?
How many scheduled refreshes a day can a semantic model have in a Pro workspace?
Content sits in a Premium Per User workspace. Who can open it?
Remember
- Free builds alone, Pro shares, capacity lets free users view.
- Ask: does anyone else need to see it, and how many viewers are there?
- Trap: licensing only the author — in an ordinary workspace every reader needs Pro as well.