Pragmatic Works Nerd News

Power BI Pro vs Power BI Premium

Written by Mike Davis | Jul 19, 2018

Here at Pragmatic Works, we believe that Power BI is the best analytics system out there. Power BI’s suite of business analytics tools deliver insights throughout your organization. You can connect to hundreds of data sources, simplify data prep, and drive ad hoc analysis. And of course, create beautiful reports, then publish them for your organization to consume on the web and across mobile devices.

We work with many of our clients to implement Power BI and gain all the advantages that come with it. Oftentimes, people are unsure what license they should buy, either Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium. Here’s a simple breakdown of the difference:

  • With Power BI Pro, users are licensed individually. If you have 10 people that need to get into Power BI, then you need 10 licenses. When you buy a license, that user can both create and view/consume content. Obviously, if you have a lot of users, this can get quite expensive.
  • With Power BI Premium you are not buying individual licenses, you’re buying a ‘bulk’ for your company. The Premium features allow anyone in your organization to get in and view content. But the people that are creating content will still need a Power BI Pro license in order to get in a build reports/content.
  • So, if you have a lot of users that need to consume content, but only a few that need to create, then Power BI Premium may be the way to go.
  • You can do a mix of both Pro and Premium, where you buy Premium for your whole organization, then buy Pro licenses for a few individuals.

Basically, that is the big difference between Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium. So, the advice here is to look at your company size, the amount of users that need access and who needs access to view only and who needs to be able to create content.

If you’d like to learn more about the incredible advantages of Power BI, you’re in the right place. Contact us to learn more about using and implementing Power BI in your organization from the best in the business. And with our new Power BI Managed Services offerings, with 3 different tiers of service, we will make managing your Power BI environment a breeze.