What is Power BI Premium?
Power BI Premium is the premium licensed version of Power BI and provides a wide range of premium features as well as Power BI enhancements. It is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft as part of the Power BI suite. It is designed to empower organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions by providing a scalable and comprehensive platform for sharing insights across an enterprise.
Power BI Premium is available in 2 SKU-level families and is also a tenant-level Microsoft 365 subscription. Power BI Premium per user (PPU) is a licensed version of Power BI Premium that provides organizations with premium features on a per-user basis.
Table of contents
Key Takeaways
- Power BI Premium is a comprehensive analytics platform with advanced features and dedicated resources.
- Licensing is capacity-based, and pricing varies based on the selected capacity level.
- It provides scalability, advanced analytics, and enterprise-wide sharing capabilities.
- Power BI Premium is designed for organizations with significant data analysis requirements, offering a robust solution for business intelligence.
- Power BI Premium provides multiple advantages such as scalability, enterprise-scale features, and many more premium features for individuals as well as organizations
- Ensure that you refer to the latest Microsoft Power BI documentation for any latest features and updates.
Features
The key features of Power BI Premium are highlighted below:
| Feature Category | Power BI Premium Per User | Power BI Premium Per Capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Model Memory Size Limit Capacity | Up to 100 GB | Up to 400 GB |
| Refresh rate for datasets | 48 times per day | 48 times per day |
| Advanced AI capabilities (AutoML, Impact Analysis, Cognitive Services) | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced dataflow features (e.g. DirectQuery) | Yes | Yes |
| Usage-based aggregate optimization | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment Pipeline capabilities | Yes | Yes |
| XMLA endpoint read/write | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic page refresh capabilities | Yes | Yes |
| Support for incremental refresh | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-Geo support (Ability to deploy content to data centers in the non-home region of your tenant) | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited Distribution option | Yes | Yes |
| Building Power BI reports on-premises | Yes | Yes |
| Bring Your Own Key feature | Yes | Yes |
| Data Security and Encryption capabilities | Yes | Yes |
| Maximum Storage (Native) | Yes | Yes |
| Report creation | Yes | Yes |
| Ability to publish reports | Yes | Yes |
| Paginated reports | Yes | Yes |
| Integration to Microsoft 365 | Yes | Yes |
| Ability to asynchronous data refresh | Yes | Yes |
| Autoscale by computing the capabilities for capacity overloads | Yes | Yes |
| Provision of on-demand loading abilities for large datasets | Yes | Yes |
| Local query caching to speed up report rendering | Yes | Yes |
| Ability to stream dataflows using near real-time data | Yes | Yes |
| Ability to connect to Azure from Microsoft Cloud using a virtual network data gateway | Yes | Yes |
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Licensing
Power BI Premium is licensed on a capacity-based model, with different capacity levels available to meet varying organizational needs. Users with free Power BI licenses can still consume and interact with reports and dashboards hosted on a Premium capacity. It offers different licensing options as highlighted below:
- Power BI Premium Per User (PPU): Typically, suitable for licensing individual users who have access to larger model sizes, the ability to read/write XMLA, the option of deployment pipelines, high frequency of data refreshes, and features at enterprise scale. It includes all the features offered as part of Power BI Pro with additional premium features that include:
- Advanced AI, dataflow, and XMLA read/write capabilities.Higher model size limit of 100GBThe high-frequency rate of datasets i.e. 48/day
- Maximum storage can be up to 100 TB
- Power BI Premium per Capacity SKUs: It’s suitable for organizations and includes all the features offered as part of Power BI Premium Per User (PPU). It also enables you to access the rest of the Microsoft Fabric workloads by providing a unified product experience and flexibility of capacity selection.
Note: Power BI Admins typically manage the Power BI Premium Per User license and this also includes determining and creating a Power BI premium workspace. Once created, you can switch between Power BI Premium workspaces and Power BI Premium per-user capacities. The following table shows license requirements for accessing Power BI Premium Per User contents.
| Users who can access the contents as per license type | Power BI Premium Per User | Power BI Premium Per Capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Power BI Pro | Yes | No |
| Power BI Premium Per User | Yes | No |
| Power BI Premium Per Capacity | Yes | Yes |
Pricing
There are different pricing models for Power BI Premium based on the selected capacity level, and there are different options available, such as Power BI Premium P SKU, Power BI Premium A SKU, and Power BI Premium Per User.
- Power BI Premium P SKU: The pricing for this license requires commitment on a monthly or yearly basis and typically is billed monthly basis. You have a choice of either creating a new tenant and then configuring Power BI Premium P1 SKU for a new subscription or purchasing the Power BI Premium capacity if your organization is an existing subscriber. The pricing for this license starts from $4,995 Per Month for P1 SKU. This includes all the features of Power BI Premium per user and provides additional access to the rest of the Microsoft Fabric workloads.
- Power BI Premium A SKU: You can purchase this license for testing and other purposes. This license provides Premium capacity on an hourly basis. The licenses for Fabric Capacity Reservation SKUs start from $5,000 Per month per user for F64. The other license includes Fabric Capacity pay-as-you-go SKUs starting at $8,409.60 Per month for F64 SKU (P1 equivalent).
- Power BI Premium Per User: It starts at $20 per month per user.
Power BI premium SKUs are available in different editions, each offering different levels of capacity, features, and pricing. Power BI premium SKUs are designed to meet the varying needs of organizations.
Power BI premium SKUs include:
- Power BI Premium EM SKU (Embedded): This SKU is designed for embedding Power BI content in applications without requiring individual user licenses.
- Power BI Premium P SKU (Professional): This SKU is suitable for organizations with advanced data preparation and modeling needs. It includes features such as dataflows, larger data capacity, and paginated reports.
- Power BI Premium EM SKU (Enterprise): This SKU is targeted at large organizations with more extensive data analytics requirements. It includes all the features of the P SKU and adds enhanced performance and support for large datasets.
- Power BI Premium Gen2: Microsoft introduced Power BI Premium Gen2 to provide enhanced performance and flexibility. It offers improved resource management and scalability compared to the previous generation.
It is recommended that you refer to the Microsoft website to understand the pricing details of Power BI Premium based on capacity, SKU model, and charging frequency (Hour/Month).
Note: There is no Power BI premium trial offered by Microsoft at the moment. However, you can try using a Power BI Individual trial for Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) till the time your organization has not disabled such trial options.
Advantages
The key advantages of using Power BI Premium include:
- Power BI Premium provides dedicated cloud resources for your organization, ensuring consistent performance even during peak usage times.
- Power BI Premium can handle datasets which is crucial for organizations dealing with massive amounts of data
- Power BI Premium supports paginated reports, which are pixel-perfect, printable, and shareable reports.
- Power BI Premium allows organizations to leverage features like AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) and integrate machine learning models directly into their Power BI reports for enhanced analytics.
- Power BI Premium allows for the creation and consumption of on-premises reports using the Power BI Report Server. This is useful for organizations with strict data residency or regulatory requirements that mandate on-premises solutions.
- There is a dedicated storage and compute resources for Power BI dataflows.
- Power BI Premium offers enhanced security features, including support for Azure AD-based identity and access management.
- Power BI Premium supports incremental data refresh, allowing organizations to refresh only the portions of their data that have changed.
- Concurrency and Dedicated Capacity: Power BI Premium provides dedicated capacity, which ensures consistent performance even when multiple users are accessing and interacting with reports simultaneously.
- Power BI Premium offers enhanced monitoring and auditing capabilities, providing administrators with detailed insights into the usage, performance, and health of the Power BI environment. This is valuable for optimizing resource utilization and troubleshooting issues.
Important Things to Note
The important things to note on the Power BI Premium include:
- Power BI Premium is more suitable for larger organizations with extensive data analysis and reporting needs.
- Users with free and Pro licenses can still consume content hosted on Premium capacities, but creating and publishing reports on Premium requires a Premium license.
- Power BI Premium has a limitation of 225 seconds in rendering for Power BI visuals and in certain cases, it may even time out for rich visuals failing to display
- If multiple concurrent operations are being processed, throttling may occur in Power BI Premium capacities and error messages will be displayed. In such scenarios, you may consider using the autoscale option
- Ensure that your semantic models are compatible with Power BI Service modern infrastructure
- If you are using Power BI Premium Per User (PPU), it’s difficult to share the data between the tenants
- PPU workspace doesn’t support running dataflow
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The key differences between Power BI Pro and Premium include:
Global administrators or Power BI service administrators who have sufficient permissions can check for Power BI Premium capacity in the Power BI service. You can navigate to the Capacity Settings page of the Power BI Admin portal to view the number of v-cores purchased and the availability of Premium capacities. Users who have been assigned with Capacity Admin role can specify a default capacity in a Power BI premium workspace, track capacity resources usage, and view and manage the capacity assigned to them.
Power BI Premium and Power Automate are separate services. The licenses for Power BI Premium are separate from Power BI Premium. However, they can be integrated to automate workflows triggered by events in Power BI. While they are distinct services, having both can enhance the capabilities of your data workflows and reporting processes.
You generally need a Power BI Premium or Power BI Premium Per User (PBI-P) license to create and publish paginated reports. These licenses allow you to use Power BI Report Builder, a separate tool for creating paginated reports. Users with free or Pro licenses can view paginated reports if they are published to a Power BI service workspace that is associated with a Premium or PBI-P capacity.
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