Power BI enables stunning interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities.
However, as data and user volumes grow, data capacity and concurrency limitations emerge.
Power BI Embedded and Power BI Premium provide solutions – but what are the key differences?
As a power bi consulting firm, we help clients navigate the nuances to find the best fit. This article compares Power BI Embedded and Premium across critical dimensions like scalability, cost, access control, and more.
Meeting Demand With Power BI Embedded
Power BI Embedded enables developers to embed robust analytics into custom applications.
It decouples report capacity from user licensing – instead, capacity is allocated based on volume metrics like render sessions.
This pay-as-you-go model brings cloud elasticity to analytics. Capacity scales automatically to match demand spikes from user actions like filtering and zooming visualizations. Lean pricing means it can be very affordable to get started.
Access control stays with the host application, too. Users don’t need Power BI licenses, reducing the total cost of ownership.
Instead, permissions are managed through the app roles and security paradigm you already have in place.
Unleashing Analytics at Scale With Power BI Premium
Alternatively, Power BI Premium delivers dedicated capacity for provisioning content to large user bases.
Allocating capacity upfront can be more cost-effective for large deployments than per-use-based Power BI Embedded.
Premium capacity is pooled at the tenant level – so content can be shared broadly without worrying about concurrency limits.
Cache refreshes happen within capacity clusters for blazing performance even as usage grows.
User licensing is still required with Premium. But capabilities go further, with features like augmented analytics, dataflows, and composite models rolled in.
The ability to publish apps to the entire organization unlocks opportunities for greater reuse and scalability.
Comparing Key Attributes Side-By-Side
| Power BI Embedded | Power BI Premium | |
| Cost Model | Pay-as-you-go based on renders | Upfront capacity commitment |
| Capacity | Auto-scaled, independent per application | Pooled at tenant level |
| User Access | Controlled via app roles and security | Require Power BI licensing |
| Advanced Features | Limited to analytics rendering | Includes data prep, AI insights, and more |
Finding the Right Fit
There’s no universal “best” option – it depends on your specific use case and stage.
Power BI Embedded makes it easy to build analytics into your apps cost-effectively.
Power BI Premium empowers widespread sharing and reuse across larger organizations.
As analytics needs advance, we’ve seen clients leverage both in a multi-tier analytics architecture. Embedded handles surfacing insights to customers or external stakeholder applications. While Premium powers broader internal BI rollouts at scale.
