Power BI Licensing and Setup
Written By: Austin Levine
Last Updated on September 23, 2026
Power BI Free lets you build and view reports for yourself only. Power BI Pro, at $14.00 per user per month paid yearly, adds sharing, collaboration and scheduled refreshes. If nobody else needs to see your reports, Free is enough. The moment a second person needs to open what you built, you need Pro (or a large enough Fabric capacity covering the audience, covered in our full licensing guide).
What Power BI Free includes
A Free license is assigned automatically the first time someone signs in to Power BI. It lets you:
Build reports in Power BI Desktop, connecting to a wide range of data sources.
Publish those reports to your own My workspace in the Power BI service.
Refresh your data manually, from Desktop or from My workspace.
It does not let you publish to a shared workspace, share a report with a colleague, or schedule an automatic refresh outside My workspace. Free is built for one person working alone, not a team.
What Power BI Pro adds
Pro is the license most teams run on. With Pro you can:
Publish to shared workspaces and share reports and dashboards with other Pro or PPU users.
Build and publish apps to distribute a set of reports to a wider audience.
Schedule up to 8 refreshes a day for a semantic model.
Publish paginated reports to any workspace where you have at least the contributor role.
Pro's own limit is a 1 GB semantic model. If your model outgrows that, or you need more than 8 refreshes a day, the next step up is Premium Per User, covered in Power BI Pro vs Premium.
Free vs Pro at a glance
Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
Cost | $0 | $14.00 per user/month, paid yearly |
Build reports in Desktop | Yes | Yes |
Publish outside My workspace | No | Yes |
Share with others | No | With other Pro or PPU users |
Scheduled refreshes per day | Not available outside My workspace | 8 |
Semantic model size limit | 1 GB | 1 GB |
How to choose
You are learning Power BI, or building reports only for yourself. Free is enough. You can still connect to real data sources and build a full report, you just cannot hand it to anyone else.
More than one person needs to see the same report. You need Pro, for at least the person publishing it. If every viewer also needs to publish or edit, every one of them needs Pro too.
You have many viewers who never need to publish or edit. Look at whether a Fabric capacity of F64 or larger makes more sense than buying Pro for each viewer. See which license each role on your team actually needs.
Microsoft also offers a trial of Pro, so you can test collaboration features before committing to a paid license for your whole team.
FAQs
Can I use Power BI without paying anything?
Yes. A Free license lets you build reports in Power BI Desktop and publish them to your own My workspace. You cannot share that content with anyone else on a Free license alone.
What can't I do with a free Power BI license?
You cannot publish to a shared workspace, share a report or dashboard with another person, build or distribute an app, or schedule an automatic refresh outside My workspace. Viewing someone else's report also needs either a Pro or PPU license, or a viewer role on a workspace hosted on an F64 or larger Fabric capacity.
How do I upgrade from Power BI Free to Pro?
An administrator assigns a Pro license to a user from the Microsoft 365 admin center, or the user starts a Pro trial directly from the Power BI service. No reinstall or data migration is needed; the same account simply gains the ability to publish and share.
Sources
Power BI pricing - Microsoft
Data refresh in Power BI - Microsoft Learn
Understand Microsoft Fabric licenses and capacity - Microsoft Learn
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