Six Reasons to Consider Power BI Premium
Why consider Power BI Premium
Power BI Premium has many essential capabilities to bring together both self-service analytics and enterprise analytics solutions.
Share data with everyone without purchasing per-user licenses
The key for many organizations that decide to go with Power BI Premium is the ability to share Power BI reports and dashboards. With Power BI Premium, anyone in the organization can consume reports and dashboards without requiring recipients to be individually licensed.
Increased scale and performance capabilities
The other key component is that Power BI Premium offers a dedicated capacity hosted by Microsoft for consistent performance. Dedicated capacity differs from shared capacity where workloads run on computational resources shared with other organizations.
Dedicated capacity is an isolation of the computation resources for use by a specific organization. This capacity is also how it can provide dependable and consistent performance for an organization’s hosted content. The Power BI service makes the best use of an organization’s dedicated capacity resources while not exceeding limits imposed on the capacity.
Flexibility to license by the capacity for the organization
Another nice feature is that the dedicated capacity can be scaled up or down according to the organization’s needs.
Large User Populations
With a larger user population, purchasing licenses on a per-user basis can get expensive very quickly. As an example, if your organization has 20,000 users who need Power BI Pro licenses, you would potentially be looking at $200K per month, which quickly adds up to $2.4 million per year.
Power BI Model Size Limitation
With a Power BI Pro license, you get 10GB of space, and each Power BI Model can’t exceed 1GB in size. This limitation means you need to leverage other technologies along with Power BI Pro to leverage more massive data sets. In larger enterprise organizations, the data volumes quickly exceed the 1GB limit driving the need for Power BI Premium capacity.
Data Set Refresh Frequency
The Power BI Free version enables you to refresh once per day. Power BI Pro enables you to refresh up to eight times per day. Power BI Premium enables you to refresh up to 48 times per day while also enabling incremental refreshes.
In Summary
There are, of course, other considerations as to why you may want to consider Power BI Premium or to stay with Power BI Free or Power BI Pro. Power BI Premium is a great licensing option if your organization fits into any of the scenarios discussed above; however, not all companies need these features, which is why we’re frequently guiding customers through their Power BI licensing options and helping them choose the best option for their organization’s analytics needs.