What is a Power BI Pro License?

Thinking about using Power BI to share data insights with your team? You’ve likely run into the need for a Power BI Pro license. It’s a recurring theme: you build a fantastic report on your own, but the moment you try to share it, you hit a paywall. This article breaks down exactly what a Power BI Pro license is, what features it unlocks, who it’s best for, and how it compares to the other options available.

What Is a Power BI Pro License?

In simple terms, a Power BI Pro license is a per-user subscription that enables you to share and collaborate on your reports with other Power BI users. While the free version of Power BI is great for creating reports for your own personal use, it’s intentionally limited. You can connect to data and build all the visualizations you want, but you can’t share them in a private, collaborative workspace with your colleagues.

Think of it like this: Power BI Free gives you a personal workshop, but a Pro license gives you the keys to the company factory floor, where you can work on projects with your team. To share a report, view a report shared with you, create an app workspace, or subscribe to a dashboard, both the creator and the viewer need a Pro license.

The Pro license is the standard offering for business users and serves as the entry point into Power BI's collaborative ecosystem, making it one of the most common license types for teams and organizations.

Key Features Unlocked by Power BI Pro

Upgrading from the free version of Power BI to Pro isn't just about sharing, it unlocks several other important capabilities that are required for professional business intelligence work.

Collaborative App Workspaces

App Workspaces are the heart of Power BI collaboration. They are shared environments where teams can work together on the same dashboards, reports, and datasets. With a Pro license, you can both create and contribute to these workspaces. This is fundamental for team-based projects where multiple people need to build upon or analyze the same set of data without sending files back and forth.

Peer-to-Peer Sharing

The most straightforward feature is the ability to share a report or dashboard directly with another user. A Pro user can publish a report and grant access to other Pro users, who can then view and interact with it in their own Power BI environment. This is perfect for ad-hoc sharing, a quick analysis check by a manager, or sending findings to a stakeholder.

Content Embedding Capabilities

While the more advanced embedding features are found in Premium licenses, Power BI Pro allows you to embed your reports into secure internal applications like SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. This lets you bring your data to where your team already works, creating a seamless flow of information without forcing everyone to log into the Power BI service constantly.

Higher Data Refresh Rates

Timely data is critical for making good decisions. The Free license limits dataset refreshes from cloud sources to once per day. A Power BI Pro license significantly boosts this, allowing you to schedule up to eight refreshes per day for each dataset. For businesses tracking daily sales, campaign performance, or operational metrics, having data that is only a few hours old (instead of a full day old) makes a huge difference.

Larger Data and Storage Capacities

Data models can get big, fast. The Pro license raises several key limits compared to the free version:

• Maximum model size per dataset: 1 GB

• Maximum storage per user: 10 GB

While 1 GB may still be a constraint for massive enterprise datasets (which is what Power BI Premium is for), it’s more than enough for the vast majority of departmental and small business use cases.

Who is the Power BI Pro License For?

A Power BI Pro license isn't for everyone, but it’s a perfect fit for a certain type of user who has moved beyond individual analysis. Here are a few common scenarios where a Pro license is a necessity.

Analysts and Data Professionals

If your job is to build and distribute reports for others to consume - whether you’re a data analyst, business analyst, or marketing specialist - you absolutely need a Pro license. It’s the only way to get your work into the hands of the decision-makers who need it.

Small to Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs)

For SMBs, the Power BI combo of a free desktop tool and affordable Pro licenses is a game-changer. An entire team of ten can get equipped with collaborative business intelligence for around $100 per month. This allows them to create reports for sales, finance, operations, and marketing and share them company-wide without investing in expensive enterprise-level software.

Teams Within a Large Organization

Even in large companies that may use Power BI Premium, individual departments often manage their own Pro licenses. A marketing or sales team, for example, can create its own private workspaces to build and share department-specific reports without needing to involve a central IT or data team.

Power BI Pro vs. Other Licenses: A Quick Comparison

Choosing the right Power BI license depends entirely on how you intend to consume and distribute reports. Microsoft offers a tiered model to fit different needs and budgets.

Power BI Free

The Free license is designed for individual users. It's an excellent way to learn Power BI, connect to hundreds of data sources, clean up your data, and build powerful, interactive reports for your own exploration. Its main limitation is the inability to share reports publicly or privately with other users.

• Best for: Learning Power BI, personal data analysis projects, very small businesses where one person handles all analysis.

Power BI Pro

As we've covered, this is the first paid tier intended for collaboration. It gives you all the capabilities of the Free license plus the ability to share, collaborate in workspaces, and embed content in Teams and SharePoint. You and anyone you share with must have a Pro license.

• Best for: Business analysts, teams, SMBs, and any group of users who need to share and view reports collaboratively.

Power BI Premium Per User (PPU)

This is a more powerful version of the Pro license, also assigned to individual users. It includes all Pro features plus access to Premium-only capabilities like paginated reports (pixel-perfect reports formatted for printing), advanced AI features, larger model sizes (up to 100 GB), and higher data refresh rates (up to 48 per day). Anyone you share a PPU report with also needs a PPU license.

• Best for: Data professionals and power users who need more horsepower and advanced features than Pro offers but don’t need the capacity of a full Premium subscription.

Power BI Premium (Per Capacity)

Unlike the other licenses, Premium Per Capacity is not assigned to individual users. Instead, you purchase a certain amount of dedicated processing "capacity" (resources) for your whole organization. The benefit here is that while report creators and analysts still need a Pro license to publish content, your report viewers do not need any paid license to see the reports stored in Premium capacity. This is cost-effective for organizations with a large number of report consumers.

• Best for: Large enterprises with many report viewers, businesses requiring dedicated computing resources for large datasets and heavy usage.

How Much Does a Power BI Pro License Cost?

A Power BI Pro license has a straightforward pricing model. As of late 2023, it costs $10 per user, per month. Microsoft often offers a 60-day free trial, which allows teams to test out the collaboration features before committing.

It's also worth noting that Power BI Pro is included in the Microsoft 365 E5 subscription. If your organization already uses this top-tier office suite, you may already have access to Pro licenses without any additional cost.

Final Thoughts

The Power BI Pro license is the essential building block for creating a collaborative data culture in your team or organization. While the free tool is perfect for individual exploration, Pro is what transforms your personal insights into shared assets that can drive business decisions. For the majority of business users, it offers the right balance of features, performance, and price.

While Power BI Pro offers powerful collaboration, it comes with a steep learning curve that can take weeks or even months to master. For those who need to get answers from their data without becoming a BI expert, we built a tool to skip that process entirely. With Graphed, we let you use simple, plain English to connect your data sources from across marketing and sales, ask questions, and build real-time, interactive dashboards in a matter of seconds, not hours.