Power Bi for small company. will the free version satisfy our needs [closed]

Question

We are a new startup with 5++ employees, we need to use PowerBi as follow:-

1. we have our own SQL server 2017 which contain info about suppliers, and the SQL is hosted in the cloud
2. One of our employees will be building PowerBi reports against the database and others will be accessing those reports.

now my question is about the most suitable license we can use? and does the free version support our needs? if not then what is the price for buying a license for power bi?

second question, if we need to buy a license then can we buy one license and use it by our 5 employees? so the same user will be creating the power-bi and also viewing the reports?

Thanks

Answer 1

The "others will be accessing those reports" bit will only work if both the report creator and the report consumers have Pro licenses. The creator publishes the report and then needs a Pro license to share it with other users in the organisation. The other users in the organisation will need a Pro license in order to access reports shared with them.

And, no, you cannot hack your way around avoiding costs by sharing licenses. That would be against the EULA that you agree to when you buy a license.

The cost for a Power BI license is readily available on the Power BI web site. It even converts it to your country's currency.

Edit to answer the comment "why i can not just create the reports using the free Power BI desktop and then share the reports with the users where they can view the reports using PowerBi desktop"

Several things:

• the Power BI desktop experience is optimised for designing reports, not for viewing reports. The view you see in the desktop is just to help design the browser or mobile experience. Every time you click something in Power BI Desktop, you select it for editing and it is really easy for untrained people to break things.
• some features of Power BI are only available in the Power BI service in the browser, for example natural language query or row level security and selected browser-rendered visuals don't work in the desktop at all.
• the Power BI service can be configured to automatically refresh your data from the various data sources and the report consumer does not need personal access to these data sources.
• A PIBX file that you send around to share with people will need to be refreshed manually and you cannot control which things people will inadvertently or intentionally change in that report.

(And out of curiosity: why are you asking this Power BI question on this totally unrelated site for SharePoint???)