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Can I Publish a Power BI Report with a Free Account?

Cody Schneider•

Trying to share a Power BI report can feel confusing, especially when you’re just starting with a free account. You’ve built a great dashboard in Power BI Desktop and hit "Publish," but what happens next is what really matters. This article will show you exactly what you can and can't do with a free Power BI account when it comes to publishing and sharing your reports.

First, Let's Understand the Power BI Licenses

Power BI’s functionality is tied directly to your license type. What you can share, who you can share with, and how you can collaborate all depend on whether you're using a Free, Pro, or Premium account. Understanding the differences is the first step to figuring out your publishing options.

Power BI Free: The Personal Analyst Sandbox

The free Power BI license is designed for individual use. Think of it as your personal data analysis workspace. It's powerful and allows you to do quite a lot:

  • Connect to hundreds of data sources.

  • Create complex reports and dashboards in Power BI Desktop.

  • Perform data cleaning and modeling using Power Query and DAX.

  • Publish your reports from Desktop to your private workspace, known as "My Workspace," in the Power BI service online.

The key limitation is right in the name: it's for you. The "My Workspace" environment is a silo. You can see everything you publish there, but you can’t use it as a hub to collaborate or share reports privately with your teammates. You're essentially the only one with access to it.

Power BI Pro: The Gateway to Collaboration

Power BI Pro is the first paid tier and is priced per user. This license unlocks the platform's core collaboration and sharing features. Everything in the Free license is included, but with a Pro account, you can now:

  • Share reports and dashboards with other Pro users.

  • Create and use "app workspaces," which are shared environments where teams can co-author, modify, and manage a collection of reports.

  • Subscribe others to reports and dashboards for automated updates.

The important rule for Pro is that both the person sharing and the person viewing the content must have a Pro (or Premium Per User) license. This is the most common setup for small-to-medium-sized teams that need to work on business intelligence together.

Power BI Premium: Enterprise-Level Power and Scale

Premium is the enterprise-grade tier and comes in two flavors: Premium Per User (PPU) and Premium Per Capacity.

  • Premium Per User (PPU): A step up from Pro that includes all Pro features plus some enterprise-level capabilities like larger data models, more frequent refreshes, and advanced AI features. Like Pro, users on both ends of the sharing spectrum need a PPU license.

  • Premium Per Capacity: This is a different model. An organization buys a dedicated amount of processing power ("capacity") for their tenant. Content published to a workspace on this premium capacity can be shared with and viewed by free users. The organization pays a high price for the capacity, allowing them to distribute reports widely without needing a Pro license for every viewer. This is intended for large organizations sharing reports with hundreds or thousands of people.

The Core Question: Can You Publish a Report with a Free Account?

This is where the terminology gets important. The simple answer is: yes, you can absolutely publish a report with a free Power BI account.

The act of "publishing" in Power BI lingo simply means uploading your report file from Power BI Desktop (the app on your computer) to the Power BI Service (the cloud-based platform at app.powerbi.com). With a free license, you can publish anything you build to your personal "My Workspace."

Here's how that works:

  1. Build a Report: Create your report in Power BI Desktop, connecting to your data and building visuals just like a paid user would.

  2. Click Publish: Once you're ready, find the "Publish" button on the Home ribbon.

  3. Select a Destination: Power BI will ask you where you want to publish the report. With a free account, your only option will be "My Workspace." Select it and continue.

  4. View in the Service: Once it's done, you can navigate to https://app.powerbi.com, log in, and you'll find your newly published report and its underlying dataset waiting for you in your workspace.

Again, this makes the report available to you online, from any browser. You can interact with it, filter the data, and use it for your own analysis. The problem arises when you want to show it to someone else.

The Real Question: Can You Share a Report with a Free Account?

This is what most people actually mean when they ask about publishing. Can you create a report for free and send it to your boss, a client, or a teammate? The general answer is no, you cannot share a report privately using only free accounts.

If you click the "Share" button on a report in your free "My Workspace," Power BI will immediately prompt you to start a free trial of Power BI Pro. It’s a hard gate, private, user-to-user sharing is the main benefit of the paid license.

However, there is one very important workaround that lets you share your report publicly.

The Workaround: Publish to Web (and Its Big Security Warning)

Power BI provides a feature called "Publish to web" that allows you to generate a public link to your report. Anyone on the internet with this link can view and interact with your report. It also provides an embed code you can drop into a website, blog post, or portfolio.

This sounds like the perfect free solution, but you must read the warning: When you use Publish to web, you are making your report and its data completely public. It is not secure. There is no password. Anyone who finds the link can see it, and search engines could potentially index it. The underlying data used in the report becomes accessible as well.

You should NEVER use "Publish to web" for any sensitive, confidential, private, or proprietary business data.

So, when is it useful?

  • Sharing a data visualization for a public blog post.

  • Creating an interactive dashboard for your personal portfolio.

  • Sharing a business analysis based on publicly available data (e.g., census data, public market data).

How to Use Publish to Web

  1. Navigate to the report in your "My Workspace" in the Power BI Service.

  2. Go to File > Embed report > Publish to web (public).

  3. Power BI will display a very clear warning message about the public nature of the data. Read it carefully. If you are 100% certain your data is not sensitive, click "Create embed code."

  4. You'll get another confirmation dialog. Click "Publish."

  5. A final window will appear with two options: a public link to your report and an HTML iframe code you can use to embed it on a website.

You can now share that link or use that code. Just remember, it's out in the wild. You can manage and delete these embed codes from your Power BI settings menu if you ever need to revoke access.

If Public Sharing Is Not an Option, What Are Your Choices?

If your data is sensitive and must be shared securely, the "Publish to web" feature is off the table. Here are your realistic options for private sharing.

Option 1: Everyone Gets a Power BI Pro License

This is the standard model for team collaboration. At a minimum, you and the person you want to share with must both have a Power BI Pro license. This allows you to create shared app workspaces where you can collaborate on reports and easily manage permissions for who can view or edit content.

Option 2: Use a Workspace in Premium Capacity

If you're in a large organization that has invested in Power BI Premium capacity, you're in luck. The person publishing the content (you) would still need a Pro license to add reports to a premium workspace, but the people viewing it could do so with a free license. This solution is designed for scenarios where a few creators are distributing reports to a large audience of viewers.

Option 3: The Low-Tech (and Non-Interactive) Method

Don't forget the simplest solution. You can always share static versions of your report absolutely free.

  • Export to PDF: Go to File > Export to PDF. This will generate a static, multi-page PDF of your report.

  • Export to PowerPoint: You can export each report page as an un-editable image within a PowerPoint slide.

  • Take Screenshots: The classic copy-and-paste method.

The obvious downside here is that you lose all interactivity - the primary advantage of Power BI. Viewers can’t click, filter, or explore the data. What you send them is what they get, and it becomes outdated the moment your source data changes.

Final Thoughts

So, can you publish a Power BI report with a free account? Yes, you can publish it for your own personal use in the cloud. The bigger question is about sharing, where free users are generally limited to exporting static files or using the 'Publish to Web' feature, which makes your report and its data entirely public and should be used with extreme caution.

Navigating different BI tools, data sources, and licensing models often makes getting simple answers feel way too complicated. This friction is exactly why we created Graphed. Instead of wrestling with complex software, you can connect your marketing and sales data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce - and create dashboards in seconds just by describing what you want to see. It’s like having a data analyst on your team who handles all the connections, queries, and visualizations for you, letting you go straight from question to insight.