Hey guys!
In this article, I will share with you more information about Power BI Premium Per Capacity Licensing (SKU P), which costs from R$32,000.00 on the Microsoft website and is the most complete Power BI license.

In this article, we will discover the characteristics of this type of licensing, when it is interesting and when it is not.

If you are interested in learning about an innovative solution that allows you to reduce monthly spending on Power BI PRO licenses by up to 90%, I recommend that you learn more about Power Embedded, a tool that will improve the governance and sharing of reports in your company.

 

Summary of all Power BI license types:

FreePROPPUReport ServerPremium by Capacity (SKU P)Premium by Capacity (EM)EmbeddedMicrosoft Fabric
License TypeBy UserBy UserBy UserLocationBy CapacityBy CapacityBy CapacityBy Capacity
ValueR$ 0.00R$54.90 per user/monthR$ 109.80 per user/monthIncluded with Power BI Premium or SQL Server Enterprise + SAFrom R$31,960.00 per monthFrom R$4,070.65 per monthFrom R$5.63 per hour onFrom R$1.06 per hour on
Can share reportsNoOnly with PRO accountsOnly with PPU or PRO accounts*Yes, with any user on the local networkYes, even with Free account users.Yes, with any user on the local networkYes, with any user. You don't even need to have a Power BI account.Yes, with any user. You don't even need to have a Power BI account.
Pro account required to view reportsNo (Does not allow sharing)YesYesNoNoNoNoNo
Form of hiringOffice 365Office 365Office 365Office 365Office 365Office 365Azure PortalAzure Portal
How to access reportspowerbi.compowerbi.compowerbi.comLocal serverpowerbi.comWeb portal created by the companyWeb portal created by the companyWeb portal created by the company
Maximum data model size1GB1GB100GBUnlimited400GB (P5)10GB (EM3)400GB (A8)400GB (F1024+)
Daily updates18481.44048484848
Allows you to embed reportsNoYes (limited quantity for testing only)Yes (limited quantity for testing only)Yes (intranet and sharepoint only)YesYes (intranet and sharepoint only)YesYes
 

Power BI Premium by Capacity (SKU P)

Summary

The Premium Capacity license is aimed at large companies, with hundreds or thousands of users, since the INITIAL cost of this license is USD 4,995.00 (R$ 32,000.00) per month.

This is the most complete license of all, and one of its biggest advantages is the fact that you can share reports with users who have a Free Power BI account, that is, you no longer need a PRO license for people who only view reports (but you still need a PRO license for those who publish).

As feature differences of this license in relation to Power BI Premium per User, we can mention the features Automatically scale capacity, Encrypt your data using your custom key, Multiple geographic areas and data sets ranging in size from 25 GB (P1) to 400 GB (P5).

From 500 users with a PRO license (or 250 with a PPU license), the price of PRO accounts is already the same value as the Premium account per Capacity, so this licensing change makes a lot of sense from a financial point of view, freeing up Premium resources for all users in the company.

An important point to highlight is that workspaces with Premium capacity (SKU P) can use all the features of Microsoft Fabric, so you don't need to migrate to Fabric to have access to Dataflows Gen2, Spark Notebooks, Datawarehouse, Lakehouse, etc...

Furthermore, this license allows the use of Power BI Report Server for free (install Power BI on a local server in your infrastructure).

The way to contract this license is through Office 365 and generally the contract is for 1 year to obtain a discount on the monthly fee (This amount of 32 thousand is already discounted from the 1 year contract – Without this, the monthly fee is almost 39 thousand).

Capacity table

Power BI SKUPower BI virtual coresMaximum model sizeReal-time connections per second
Maximum memory per query (GB)Parallelism in model updatingRows per table in Direct LakeFabric SKUPower BI Embedded SKUPrice (Excluding Taxes)Price (With Taxes)
P1825GB3010401.5 billionF64A4BRL 27,405.90R$ 31,960.20
P21650GB60
20803.0 billionF128A5R$ 54,811.80R$ 63,952.50
P332100GB120401606.0 billionF256A6R$ 109,623.60R$ 127,936.90
P464200GB2408032012 billionF512A7R$ 219,247.20R$ 255,873.80
P5128400GB48016064024 billionF1024A8R$ 438,494.40R$ 511,747.60

Comparison table

Power BI PROPower BI PPUPower BI Premium
PriceR$ 54.90 (month/user)R$ 109.80 (month/user)From R$32,000.00 (month)
Storage limit10GB/user100 TB/userNo limit
Maximum semantic model size1GB100GB400GB (P5)
Scheduled updates8 times a day48 times a day48 times a day
Share with Free AccountNoNoYes
Share with PRO AccountYesNoYes
E-mail subscription without needing a PRO AccountNoNoYes
Incremental update of DataflowsNoYesYes
Hybrid tables (DirectQuery + Import)NoYesYes
DatamartsNoYesYes
XLMA EndpointNoYesYes
Deployment Pipelines (DevOps)NoYesYes
Git integrationNoYesYes
Advanced AI featuresNoYesYes
Asynchronous updateNoYesYes
Automatic aggregationsNoYesYes
Backup and Restore the semantic modelNoYesYes
Dataflows Premium FeaturesNoYesYes
Find insights in your dataNoYesYes
Query cacheNoYesYes
VNET Data GatewayNoYesYes
Automatically scale capacityNoNoYes
Encrypt your data using custom keyNoNoYes
Multiple geographic areasNoNoYes
Power BI Report ServerNoNoYes

Features and Limitations

What you can do with this license:

What you CANNOT do with this license:

  • It has no limitations

Support materials

Slides used in the presentation
Click here to view the content

Live on Hugo Venturini's channel
Click here to view the content

Live on the .NET Channel
Click here to view the content

Live on the Microsoft Reactor channel
Click here to view the content

 
 
So that's it, folks!
I hope you enjoyed this post and follow the series where I will explore all types of Power BI licensing!