Checked by Hanny Ramzy on 26 September 2026. Drafted with AI help, then checked against Microsoft's own Power BI and Fabric documentation on Microsoft Learn. Screenshots are from our own test Microsoft 365 account.
Power BI has three licences for people: Free, Pro and Premium Per User (PPU). The short version is this. Free is for dashboards you build for yourself. Pro is for sharing, and it has to be on the account of everyone who opens the shared report, not only the person who built it. PPU is for analysts whose data is too big, or changes too often, for Pro.
That second point catches out a lot of Malaysian SMEs. The owner or the finance person builds a sales dashboard, buys one Pro licence, shares it, and the rest of the team gets a “you need to upgrade” message instead of the numbers.
Office Niaga supplies Microsoft 365 to Malaysian businesses through a Microsoft CSP partner, alongside Google Workspace, and we can supply Power BI Pro licences too. This guide explains what each licence does, using Microsoft’s own documentation, so you buy the right number of the right one. We have not included prices, because they vary by supplier and change often.
Free, Pro and Premium Per User at a glance
This table compares what each per-user licence lets you do in the Power BI service, as Microsoft’s documentation described it on 26 September 2026:
| What you want to do | Free | Pro | Premium Per User |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build reports in Power BI Desktop | Yes, Desktop is free | Yes | Yes |
| Create reports and dashboards in your own My workspace | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Publish to a shared workspace and work on it with colleagues | No | Yes | Yes |
| Share a report or dashboard with someone else | No | Yes, with other Pro or PPU users | Yes, with other PPU users |
| View a report someone shared from an ordinary (shared capacity) workspace | No | Yes | Yes |
| View content shared from Fabric F64 or larger, or Premium, capacity | Yes, with a workspace role such as Viewer | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled refreshes per day, per semantic model | 8 (in My workspace) | 8 | 48 |
| Semantic model size | 1 GB default | 1 GB default | Up to 100 GB |
| XMLA endpoint, deployment pipelines, Premium AI features | No | No | Yes |
A “semantic model” is what Microsoft used to call a dataset: the data and calculations behind your report. Two limits in the table apply to shared capacity, which is where ordinary workspaces live. Microsoft allows eight scheduled refreshes a day there, and each refresh must finish within two hours. Clicking Refresh now yourself does not count towards the eight.
Free: dashboards for yourself
Most people start with the free licence. Microsoft now names it Fabric (Free), because Power BI is part of Microsoft Fabric, its wider data platform. Microsoft’s description is plain: users with a free licence “can use the Power BI service to connect to data and create reports and dashboards for their own use. They can’t use the Power BI sharing or collaborating features with others, or publish content to other people’s workspaces.”
In practice, Free is good for:
- Learning Power BI and building your first reports in Power BI Desktop, which is a free download.
- Publishing your own reports to My workspace so you can open them in the Power BI service in your browser.
- Setting a scheduled refresh on your own data, and adding alerts to your own dashboard tiles.
What Free cannot do matters just as much. A free user cannot share a report, cannot create a shared workspace, and cannot view a report that a colleague shared from an ordinary workspace. Microsoft also says a free licence obtained through self-service sign-up does not expire unless it is cancelled or removed. When we first published a report from Power BI Desktop with an account that had never used Power BI, Microsoft asked us to sign up for the free licence first; it did not start a trial.
Pro: sharing with the team, and everyone needs it
Power BI Pro is the licence most small businesses end up needing. Microsoft describes it as a licence “that lets users create, read, and interact with content that others publish to the Power BI service”, and adds the sentence that matters most: “Only Power BI Pro users can publish, share, or consume other Pro users’ content unless it resides in a Power BI Premium capacity.”
“Consume” means view. Microsoft’s sharing guide says the same thing from the other side: “Recipients also need a Power BI Pro or PPU license, unless the content is in a Premium or Fabric capacity.” So in an ordinary workspace:
- The person who builds and publishes the report needs Pro.
- Everyone who edits it in the shared workspace needs Pro.
- Everyone who only opens it to look at the numbers needs Pro too.
With Pro you can publish to shared workspaces, share reports and dashboards, publish apps, subscribe to email updates of dashboards and reports, and share with guest users outside your company. For guests, Microsoft says the person sharing needs Pro or PPU, and the guest needs a Pro or PPU licence of their own (from their company or yours), unless the content is on F64 or larger capacity.
Pro keeps the shared capacity limits from the table: up to eight scheduled refreshes a day and a 1 GB default size per semantic model. For most SME sales, stock and finance reports built from Excel files or an accounting system, that is plenty.
Premium Per User: for analysts with big data or frequent refresh
Premium Per User (PPU) “includes all Power BI Pro license capabilities”, so you do not need Pro as well. On top of Pro, Microsoft lists these features for PPU:
- Up to 48 scheduled refreshes a day per semantic model, instead of 8.
- Semantic models up to 100 GB, instead of the 1 GB default.
- XMLA endpoint access, for tools that read and write models directly.
- Deployment pipelines, for moving reports from development to test to production.
- Premium AI features, advanced dataflow features and enhanced automatic page refresh.
The important limit: PPU content is only for PPU users. Microsoft says “to collaborate and share content in a PPU workspace, all users need a PPU license”, and that this “includes scenarios where users are accessing the content through the XMLA endpoint, Analyze in Excel, Composite Models”. A colleague with Pro cannot open a report in a PPU workspace.
So PPU makes sense for a small group of analysts who all need the heavier features, not for sharing a dashboard with the whole company. Microsoft’s own guidance says PPU “is more cost effective when Power BI Premium features are needed for fewer than 250 users”. Note that PPU does not give you a Fabric capacity, so it does not unlock Fabric items such as lakehouses, warehouses or notebooks.
The exception: capacity for large organisations
There is one way for people with only a free licence to view shared reports: put the content on a capacity. A capacity is a block of computing power the organisation pays for, separate from per-user licences.
Microsoft’s rules for capacity, as of September 2026, are:
- On Fabric F64 or larger (or the older Power BI Premium P capacities), free users with the Viewer role can view reports and dashboards. Both the report and its semantic model must be on that capacity.
- On smaller Fabric capacities, F2 to F32, every viewer still needs Pro or PPU.
- People who create and share content still need Pro or PPU, even on a capacity.
F64 is a large capacity bought through Azure, designed for organisations with many report viewers. For a company with a handful of people who need a dashboard, Pro for each person is the normal answer. Office Niaga does not sell Fabric capacity or PPU; if you think you need either, talk to us and we will point you in the right direction.
Which one do I need?
Start with your situation in the left column. This is our reading of Microsoft’s licensing rules:
| Your situation | What to buy |
|---|---|
| Just you, analysing your own spreadsheets | Free is enough. Download Power BI Desktop and publish to My workspace. |
| You build a report, and colleagues need to see it live | Pro for the creator and for every viewer. |
| Several people build and edit reports together | Pro for each of them. |
| A model bigger than 1 GB, or more than 8 scheduled refreshes a day | PPU, for everyone who works with or views that content. |
| Hundreds of people only need to view reports | Fabric F64 or larger capacity, plus Pro or PPU for the creators. |
| Your company is on Microsoft 365 E5 or Office 365 E5 | You already have Pro. Check it is assigned. |
| You want to share with a client or accountant outside the company | Pro for you, and Pro or PPU for them, from their company or yours. |
| You are not sure yet | Start Free, then use Microsoft’s 60-day trial of the paid features before buying. |
Microsoft’s licensing guide mentions both a 60-day individual trial of paid features and a 30-day organisation trial of Pro for up to 25 users. Your admin can turn self-service trials off, so if you do not see the trial button, ask whoever manages your Microsoft 365.
Example: 5 staff need to see the sales dashboard
Say your sales manager builds a monthly sales dashboard in Power BI Desktop, from an Excel export of your accounting system. The five people in your sales team need to see it every morning, and it should refresh twice a day.
This is how the licences work out:
- The sales manager needs Pro to publish the report to a shared workspace and share it.
- Each of the five sales staff needs Pro to open it, because the workspace is on ordinary shared capacity.
- That is 6 Pro licences in total. If the sales manager is one of the five, it is 5.
- Twice-a-day refresh is well within Pro’s limit of eight scheduled refreshes a day, so PPU is not needed.
- Nobody needs Fabric capacity. F64 is for organisations with far more viewers.
If only the manager has Pro, the report publishes and the share goes out, but each of the five staff members sees a prompt to upgrade to Pro, PPU or a trial when they open it.
Two things will not get around this. Power BI’s “Publish to web” creates a public link that anyone on the internet can open, which is not a place for your sales figures, and free users cannot create one anyway. Exporting the report to PDF or PowerPoint and emailing it can work for a monthly summary, if your admin allows exports, but your team then gets a static snapshot, not a live report they can filter.
Common mistakes we see
These are the licensing mistakes that cost businesses time or money, based on the rules above:
- Buying Pro only for the creator. The most common one. Every viewer of shared content needs Pro, unless you have F64 or larger capacity.
- Not realising E5 includes Pro. Microsoft says each Microsoft 365 E5 licence includes one Power BI Pro licence, and Office 365 E5 includes it too. Companies on E5 sometimes buy Pro again. Check Billing > Licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin centre first.
- Assuming Business Premium includes Power BI. It does not. Microsoft’s plan table shows no Power BI in Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium or E3.
- Buying PPU for a team that only views reports. PPU is only useful if everyone who opens that content has PPU. Mixing PPU creators with Pro viewers leaves the viewers locked out of the PPU workspace.
- Buying a small Fabric capacity to avoid Pro. Below F64, every viewer still needs Pro or PPU.
- Signing up with personal Gmail or Hotmail. Microsoft does not accept consumer email addresses for Power BI. Use your work address.
Works for Google Workspace companies too
You do not need to move your email to Microsoft to use Power BI. Microsoft’s rule is that you sign up with a “work or school email account”, and that “you can’t use consumer email accounts (for example, Gmail or Hotmail) directly.” An address on your own company domain, such as one you use with Google Workspace, is a work address.
What happens next depends on whether your company already has a Microsoft tenant, which is Microsoft’s directory for your business:
- If it does, for example because you already use Microsoft 365, you sign in with that account and get a licence depending on your organisation’s settings.
- If it does not, Microsoft says the email validation “might route you to an alternate sign-up that provisions an account and sometimes a new tenant.”
For one person trying Power BI, the self-service route is fine. For a team, it is tidier to have an admin set up the Microsoft tenant properly first, then buy and assign Pro licences from the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Power BI then reads your data from Excel files, CSV exports, databases and many online services, wherever they live.
What changed recently
Microsoft has renamed and reshuffled parts of Power BI over the past two years. These are the changes you are most likely to notice:
- Power BI is now part of Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft says administration and licensing are now integrated with Fabric. You can sign in at app.powerbi.com or at app.fabric.microsoft.com.
- The free licence is called Fabric (Free). If your account page shows Fabric (Free), that is the Power BI free licence.
- “License mode” is now “workspace type”. Microsoft says this “is a terminology change only; functionality remains the same”.
- Datasets are now semantic models. Same thing, new name.
- Power BI Premium capacity (P SKUs) is being retired. Microsoft no longer sells new P SKUs and asks customers to move to Fabric F SKUs. Microsoft says Pro and Premium Per User “continue as-is”.
How to check which licence you have
If you are a user, sign in at app.powerbi.com, select your profile picture at the top right and look at the licence type. Select View account > Subscriptions for more detail. Our guide to what Power BI is and how to open it shows where to find it.
If you are the Microsoft 365 admin, go to Billing > Licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin centre and select Power BI Pro to see who has one. Our guide to assigning a Power BI Pro licence walks through it.
To get started, our help centre also covers building your first report in Power BI Desktop and publishing and sharing a report.
How we checked this guide
Every licensing fact in this guide comes from Microsoft’s own documentation on Microsoft Learn, checked on 26 September 2026: “Power BI service features by license type”, “Licenses and subscriptions for business users”, “Power BI features available to free users”, the Power BI licensing guide for organisations, “Understand Microsoft Fabric licenses and capacity”, the Premium Per User article, “Data refresh in Power BI”, “Large semantic models in Power BI Premium”, the self-service sign-up and trial articles, the Power BI Premium to Fabric migration overview, and the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plan options table. We quoted Microsoft directly where the exact wording matters. The screenshots come from our own test Microsoft 365 account on 26 September 2026, where we built a report in Power BI Desktop, signed up for the free licence and checked the admin centre. We did not include prices, because they vary by supplier and change often.
We drafted this guide with AI help. Hanny Ramzy then checked every licence rule, limit and menu path against those pages on 26 September 2026. For the Microsoft 365 plan names mentioned here, see our guide to Office 365 vs Microsoft 365. Microsoft changes Power BI licensing from time to time, so we will update this page when the rules change.
Need Power BI Pro licences?
Office Niaga can supply Power BI Pro licences and help set up your first dashboards. If you are not sure how many licences you need, WhatsApp our team on +60 16-916 3324 and tell us who builds the reports and who needs to see them. We will work out the number with you, whether your company uses Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
Hanny RamzyHanny Ramzy runs Office Niaga at Web Impian Sdn. Bhd. (SSM 920163-H) in Kota Bharu, Malaysia, helping businesses and agencies move to Google Workspace and business email with Ringgit billing and local support.