There are a number of ways to license Power BI technology, including the following:

• Power BI Free
• Power BI Pro
• Power BI Premium
• Power BI Embedded
• Power BI Report Server

Power BI Desktop is free to download, install, and use. In addition to simply sharing Power BI files (.pbix), which are the files that are created by the Power BI Desktop program, Microsoft provides a free method of using Power BI Service so that you can publish and share reports via a featured called Publish to web. Publish to web creates a web browser link or URL to a report that's published in the Power BI Service. While this URL is long and cryptic and these reports are not indexed by search engines, anyone with the link can browse the report anonymously. This means that there is no real security other than simple obfuscation.

It is important to note here that Publish to web is the only sharing mechanism available with a free license of Power BI. All other sharing, collaboration, and export features are not available in the Power BI Service. This includes app workspaces for collaboration, sharing of reports and dashboards, as well as exporting to PowerPoint/CSV and embedding within Microsoft SharePoint.

The free licensing of Power BI also comes with certain restrictions on the automatic refreshing of data. Only online sources of data can be refreshed automatically. This means any data that is accessible online via the internet. On-premises data sources that require an on-premises data gateway or any live (DirectQuery) sources are not supported. Furthermore, even the online data sources can only be refreshed eight times per day, and the minimum time between refreshes is 30 minutes.

Finally, the free Power BI license restricts the total size of any single data model that's published to the Power BI Service to 1 GB and the total size of all data models that are published to the Service for each user to 10 GB.

The classic way to license Power BI that provides more secure sharing and additional features is called Power BI Pro. Pro is a subscription license for authoring and consuming shared reports within the Power BI Service. Each user who authors or consumes a shared report must purchase Power BI Pro for a commercial list price of $9.99 per user per month.

Pro licensing of Power BI enables all of the sharing, collaboration, and export features that are not enabled with a free license and also allows online and on-premises data sources to be refreshed.

Finally, Pro has the same restrictions in terms of dataset size and total capacity as Power BI free licenses. This means that the total size of any single data model that's published to the Power BI Service is restricted to 1 GB and the total size of all data models that are published to the Service for each user cannot exceed 10 GB.

Power BI Premium is a capacity-based subscription license similar in concept to Power BI Embedded. Like Power BI Embedded, this means that increments of capacity in the form of virtual CPU cores and memory are purchased. Unlike Power BI Embedded, these capacities are purchased on a monthly—not an hourly—basis. These increments of capacity are called node types and range in size from a P1 with eight virtual cores and 25 GB of RAM for approximately $5,000/month to a P5 with 128 virtual cores and 400 GB of RAM for approximately $80,000/month. In addition to this capacity licensing, report authors also need to license Power BI Pro for the standard license cost of $9.99 per user per month.

As opposed to Power BI Embedded, all of Power BI Premium's SKUs provide dedicated capacity, and are intended to serve both internal and external users. Power BI Premium also increases a single dataset size to 10 GB and supports up to 48 refreshes per day with a minimum time between refreshes of 1 minute. Finally, Power BI Premium unlocks enterprise features such as the ability to publish paginated reports, incremental refresh, and multi-geo support.

Power BI Premium's SKUs also provide a license for Power BI Report Server. The same number of virtual cores that are provisioned for Power BI Premium in the cloud can also be used for Power BI Report Server, although you should check the latest documentation from Microsoft since the exact licensing model changes over time.

Power BI Embedded is a capacity-based subscription license. This means that increments of capacity in the form of virtual CPU cores and memory are purchased on an hourly basis. These increments of capacity are called node types and range in size from an A1 with a single virtual core and 3 GB of RAM for approximately $750/month to an A6 with 32 virtual cores and 100 GB of RAM for approximately $24,000/month. Power BI A SKUs are billed hourly; the approximate monthly prices are provided here. Power BI Embedded A SKUs are purchased via the Azure Portal. In addition to this capacity licensing, report authors also need to license Power BI Pro for the standard license cost of $9.99 per user per month.

Power BI Embedded is intended for use by developers and independent software vendors that use APIs in order to embed Power BI visuals, reports, and dashboards within their custom web applications. These applications can then be accessed by external customers. While Power BI's embedding technology can be used to create applications that are accessed by internal users, different SKUs are required, the Power BI Premium SKUs that include EM at the end.

Finally, it is worth noting that A1 and A2 nodes run on non-dedicated capacity while A3 to A6 nodes run on dedicated capacity. This is important as dedicated capacity can avoid noisy neighbor scenarios that may impact overall performance.

Power BI Report Server is intended for customers who wish to keep their data completely on premises. Power BI Report Server is a superset of SSRS and, therefore, can be licensed by purchasing a license of SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance (SA) or by purchasing any Power BI Premium SKU. The details of SQL licensing are beyond the scope of this book, but typical costs will range in price from $4,000 - $7,000 per core. In addition, report authors also need to license Power BI Pro for the standard license cost of $9.99 per user per month.

Importantly, the Power BI Report Server does not provide the same level of functionality as the Power BI Service. For example, Power BI Report Server does not allow reports to be created or edited like in the Power BI Service. In addition, features such as workspace apps, dashboards, real-time streaming, Q&A, quick insights, and R visuals are not supported within the Power BI Report Server. However, Power BI Report Server can access and refresh online and on-premises data sources without requiring a gateway.