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Can Power BI Premium Share with Free Users?

Cody Schneider•

You’ve built the perfect Power BI report, complete with insightful slicers and brilliant visualizations, only to hit a wall when it’s time to share it. Getting your dashboard in front of colleagues, clients, or a wider audience shouldn't require a degree in Microsoft licensing, but it often feels that way. This article will cut through the confusion and explain exactly how - and when - you can share your Power BI content with free users by leveraging the power of Power BI Premium.

First, A Quick Guide to Power BI Licenses

Understanding Power BI’s licensing model is the first step to mastering its sharing capabilities. The license a user has determines what they can create, share, and consume. There are three main tiers to know.

1. Power BI Free

The Power BI Free license is designed for individual use. It gives you the ability to connect to hundreds of data sources, clean and prepare data, and build powerful reports and dashboards for your own analysis on your personal workspace ("My Workspace").

However, the key limitation is in collaboration. With a Free license, you cannot:

  • Share reports or dashboards with other users.

  • View content that has been shared with you from a Pro or PPU user.

  • Publish content to App Workspaces for team collaboration.

2. Power BI Pro

Power BI Pro is the standard paid license designed for business users who need to collaborate and share their insights. A Pro license is assigned on a per-user basis. In addition to all the features of the Free license, Pro unlocks the ability to:

  • Publish reports to shared App Workspaces.

  • Share dashboards, reports, and datasets with other Pro users.

  • Subscribe to dashboards and report updates.

  • Create and publish Power BI Apps for broad content distribution.

The rule here is simple: to share and collaborate with others, both the creator and the viewer need a Power BI Pro license.

3. Power BI Premium

This is where things get interesting, as Power BI Premium isn't just one thing. It's offered in two distinct ways, each solving a different business need:

  • Premium Per User (PPU): This is a step-up from the Pro license for individual users. It adds more powerful features typically found in a Premium subscription, like larger model sizes, more frequent refreshes, and advanced AI capabilities. However, like Pro, sharing content from a PPU workspace requires the viewer to also have a PPU license.

  • Premium Per Capacity: This is an organizational license, not a user one. Instead of paying per user, the business purchases dedicated resources (compute power) from Microsoft, known as a "capacity." When content is placed in a workspace hosted on this dedicated capacity, something powerful happens: it can be shared with an unlimited number of users, including those on a Free license.

The Simple Answer: Yes, You Can Share with Free Users (If You Have Premium Capacity)

So, can Power BI Premium share with free users? Yes, absolutely - but only when you are using Power BI Premium Per Capacity.

Think of it this way: with Pro, the user is licensed to share and collaborate. With Premium Per Capacity, the content itself is licensed for broad distribution because it’s on dedicated hardware. Your organization pays for the dedicated "power," which makes reports published there freely accessible to anyone you grant permission to view, regardless of their own license type. This is the model designed for large-scale BI deployments where you need to distribute insights across hundreds or thousands of viewers without buying a Pro license for every single person.

How to Share with Free Users Using Premium Capacity

Sharing is straightforward once your organization's Power BI Admin has set up the capacity. The process involves placing your content into a specific type of workspace and then sharing from there.

Step 1: Get a Workspace on Premium Capacity

This step is typically handled by a Power BI Administrator. They either create a new workspace or configure an existing one and assign it to the purchased Premium capacity. You'll know a workspace is on Premium capacity by a small diamond icon next to the workspace name.

Step 2: Publish Your Report to the Premium Workspace

From Power BI Desktop, when you are ready to publish, simply select the workspace that has been assigned to the Premium capacity. Reports already published to a different workspace (like "My Workspace" or a standard Pro workspace) can often be moved or copied over to the Premium workspace.

Step 3: Share the Report or Create a Power BI App

Once your report is inside the Premium workspace, you have a couple of options for distribution:

  • Direct Sharing: You can use the "Share" button on the report or dashboard. Enter the email addresses of the free users you want to grant access to. They will receive an email with a link to view the content.

  • Power BI App: For a more polished and governed distribution method, create a Power BI App. An App bundles related dashboards and reports into one package with its own navigation. After designing the app, you publish it and control access in the "Permissions" tab, where you can give access to specific individuals or entire mail groups. This is the recommended method for broad distribution as it's cleaner and easier to manage.

That's it! The free users you granted access to can now consume the content, interact with filters and slicers, and export data (if permissions allow) without needing a paid license.

The Big Caveat: What About Premium Per User (PPU)?

It’s extremely important to distinguish Premium Per Capacity from Premium Per User (PPU). While PPU gives individual users access to premium features, it does not allow sharing with Free or Pro users.

Content created in a Premium Per User (PPU) workspace can only be shared with other users who also have a PPU license. Trying to share with a Free or Pro user will result in an access error for that person. PPU is meant to give advanced features to a team of power users, not for broad distribution across an entire organization.

Best Practices and Final Licensing Thoughts

When deciding on a licensing strategy, consider who does what on your team. Thinking in terms of roles can clear things up considerably.

Who Needs Which License? A Simple Breakdown

  • Content creators, developers, and analysts: Anyone who builds, publishes, and shares reports needs at least a Power BI Pro license. If they require advanced features like AI insights or larger data models, they need a Premium Per User (PPU) license.

  • Frequent collaborators: Colleagues who need to collaborate within workspaces (not just view final reports) should also have a Power BI Pro license.

  • Consumers and viewers: Individuals who only need to consume and interact with final reports can keep their Power BI Free license, as long as the content is hosted on a Premium Per Capacity workspace. If there is no Premium capacity, these users would need a Pro license to view any shared content.

Choosing Premium Per Capacity is a strategic decision for organizations that want to empower a large base of employees with data-driven insights without the overhead of managing hundreds of individual licenses. The cost is weighed against the benefit of democratization of data, allowing anyone in the organization, from the C-suite to the front lines, to access key reports.

Final Thoughts

Sharing your Power BI reports for free is not only possible, but it’s a core feature designed for large-scale analytics. The key is to publish your content to a workspace hosted on a Power BI Premium Per Capacity plan, which makes the reports accessible to anyone you grant viewing rights to, regardless of their own license type. Just remember that a Premium Per User (PPU) license, despite its name, functions like a Pro license for sharing and requires all viewers to have a PPU license as well.

While mastering Power BI licensing is a common challenge, simplifying the entire reporting workflow is an even bigger goal. We designed Graphed for teams who want to get straight to insights without wrestling with complex tools or permission settings. By connecting your marketing and sales data sources in seconds, you can use simple, conversational language to build and securely share real-time dashboards with your team. Instead of spending hours managing workspaces and hierarchies, just ask for the chart you need and get back to growing your business.