Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) license
If you ever wanted to try and use capabilities and features provided by Power BI Premium license, now is the time. Starting early Nov 2020 Microsoft Power BI team will be rolling out a new license type in preview. This new license is named: Power BI Premium Per User.
What is Power BI Premium Per User?
In our last post, we touched on two existing Power BI licenses: Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium. If you remember Power BI Premium is a capacity license. If you purchase 1 capacity of this license you can server consumption needs of 450 readers. Read the old post to understand this calculation. But then you have to pay a heft fee of close to $5000 per capacity per month.
Small and mid-size businesses who want to utilize the power of AI, paginated reports, more frequent refreshes, deployment pipelines, and many more features provided by Premium license today got demotivated by just hearing the price.
Power BI Premium per user is a new way to license premium features on a per user basis. With this new license, you get all the capabilities of a pro license along with premium features.
Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium are at the extreme ends of the spectrum. With Power BI Premium per user the gap fills (though only little).
What’s the difference between Power BI Premium and Power BI Premium Per User?
There are some differences. You can check the table below by Microsoft.
But there are still report sharing constraints which are outlined in the table below. Example: If you create and share a report in a workspace marked as PPU, a Pro user cannot view/access that report. So you will need all the users to have PPU license to “view” the report.
What’s the price for the Power BI Premium per user?
Update: March 10, 2021
Power BI Premium will be priced at $20 per user per month. Isn’t that cheap?
There is no official news on the price by Microsoft. However, the good news is it will be free to use in the preview period.
As per official source: “Premium per user will be uniquely affordable and highly competitive among individual user offerings in the industry”
We also don’t know if there will be a min. requirement for the number of PPU licenses.
What’s our thought?
Microsoft clearly says this new license will address the needs to provide a low cost entry point to get access to premium features. However, there will still be more cries than smiles when it comes to users who just need read access. Procuring a Pro or PPU license for them doesn’t make sense even now.
Have more questions?
Head to Microsoft official post on this to know more about scenarios and questions around this.
When is PPU License launching?
Nov 2020 this new license type is launching in public preview. It will be free to use till GA. We are excited to try and let our users and customers know our first hand experience.
Join our list to be the first one to know more about our first hand experience.