Power BI Back-end Platform Summary

Microsoft offers several Power BI back-end hosting options (shown here) that host reports, data, and other content, including multiple cloud services and an on-premises server product. They vary by support for content types, client tools, features, performance, scaling, security, and licensing:

Power BI Free is designed for small businesses, individual users, and occasional consumers of reports. It lacks security controls, provides limited data storage capacity and refresh rates, and has other significant shortcomings that typically make it unsuitable for midsize and large organizations.

Power BI Pro is designed for organizations with fewer than 500 users, and it lacks high-end capabilities and advanced security and control features that are available in Premium. It is licensed per user.

Power BI Premium is the high-end offering with a superset of the Power BI Pro features and is licensed primarily by capacity, which allows customers to provide access to an unlimited number of internal and external users, removing the need to license users individually. Premium is designed for enterprises with a large number of users that need exclusive Premium features, such as larger data models, SQL Server paginated reports, Analysis Services Tabular data models, data integration pipelines, and high-end security.