PowerBI Pro for Licencing & Understanding the two query options

Problem: Require reporting and dashboards quickly and securely at a reasonable price.
Hypothesis: There are great reporting solutions, and two other enterprise-leading products are Tableau and Qlik. However, these can be expensive to install and pay for licencing.

Proposed Resolution: PowerBI Pro (PowerBI Premium is for larger enterprise solutions) is a cloud-based solution that can connect to multiple data sources and on-prem using the Gateway. E5 licences include the PowerBI Pro licence for creating and publishing reports. An E3 licence can get an add-on for about £7.50 per month. This is only needed by the people creating the reports.
 
To paraphrase "You can embed the report (not dashboard) on a SharePoint web page and share it with company users. You will then only be needing one licence to publish the report. The downside of this option is there is no builtin security for the report. Anyone who has access to the web page can access the report."

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts and understanding, please check your licencing with Microsoft and a licencing professional.

Updated: Nov 2022

3 Power BI licence types:

1. Free (per user)
2. Pro (per user per month) $
3. Premium (resource/capacity based)  $$$ - 2 options

Choose depending on your usage pattern/scenarios. Premium is great for enterprise-level but out of the range for most SME businesses.  Feature and pricing comparison

Creating Reports

When you create a Power BI report, a semantic model is created within the Power BI Service.  This shows the data you can access, and using DAX queries binds the report to the underlying queried data.

There are two ways to access the data:

1. Import Mode (Data is periodically brought into the Power BI Dataset.  Reporting is fast, but there is a time lag until the data pull is refreshed); or 

2. Direct Mode (queries the underlying system, so data is up to date, but it's slow and can hammer the source systems).

Options for Querying Data from Power BI (Pre MS Fabric)

Last updated: Jan 2025