Last updated on September 17, 2017
NOTICE Sept 17 2017 – The central thrust of this post is incorrect. I am leaving it here, because it still contains valid information, but for an update, please go to this article – Which Premium SKU is Needed to embed Power BI Reports in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams
I have run into this point of confusion several times since the GA of the Power BI Premium SKU. As I mentioned in my post about licensing, the Power BI web part for SharePoint requires the user viewing the report to have a Pro license. Alternatively, if the organization has purchase Power BI premium capacity, and the report has been deployed to that capacity, then all organizational users will be able to view the report in the web part.
The initial announcement about Premium licensing laid out 5 different SKUs for premium, P1, P2 and P3. These SKUs are the “normal” SKUs that are intended to be used by Power BI customers. The “P” stands for Premium. Subsequently, 3 additional SKUs were announced at the Data Insights summit to be used by ISVs. These SKUs are EM1, EM2, and EM3. The “EM” stands for embedded. The embedded in this case means Power BI embedded. That’s where the confusion sets in.
Power BI Embedded is the ISV offering for Power BI. With Power BI embedded, software vendors can use Power BI as the reporting engine in their application. A number of vendors have taken advantage of this capability in the recent past including Nintex with their Hawkeye product, and ourselves with tyGraph for Yammer Reporting. With Power BI embedded, all of the processing for the application is done in the vendor’s Power BI tenant. Customers don’t require a Power BI license of any sort to use the applications. Recently, Power BI embedded has moved to a premium model as well, which is why the EM SKUs exist. They are for purchase by software vendors to power their own applications.
If we have a look at the pricing for each of these SKUs (in $US/month), we can see that the EM SKUs are significantly cheaper, but they also come with the important restriction that they can ONLY be used by ISVs.
| Capacity Node | Cores | Back end cores | Front end cores |
Cost |
| P1 | 8 | 4 cores, 25 GB RAM | 4 cores |
$4,995 |
| P2 | 16 | 8 cores, 50 GB RAM | 8 cores |
$9,995 |
| P3 | 32 | 16 cores, 100 GB RAM | 16 cores |
$19,995 |
| EM1 | 1 | 0.5 cores, 3 GB RAM | 0.5 cores |
$625 |
| EM2 | 2 | 1 core, 5 GB RAM | 1 core |
$1,245 |
| EM3 | 4 | 2 cores, 10 GB RAM | 2 cores |
$2,495 |
It may be natural to think that because your goal is to “embed” a Power BI report in SharePoint, that you will be able to use one of the cheaper, “embedded” SKUs. Microsoft loves to overload terms when they name things, and this is one of those times that this tendency leads to confusion. Make no mistake, in order to embed a Power BI report in a SharePoint page, and to have other users be able to view it, you will need to have a Pro license, and your users will either need Pro licenses as well, OR your organization will need to have purchased a Power BI Premium “P” SKU, not an “EM” SKU.
All well and good, but who knows when EM1 will practically be available to purchase by a small ISVs… (currently only available under EA).
“Please note that availability of EM1 and EM2 in web-direct has been delayed, we are working to confirm a new timeline. We will provide an update by the end of August.”
Meanwhile, I’m trying to ship something in October!
Hello John,
thank you for the clarification. I got a little bit confused when I read about the P/EM products since the prices vary alot and I definitely wanted to have a “cheaper” solution.
Thanks again and greetings
Tobias
John,
Thank you for this. Couldn’t I just use publish to the web (in this case my intranet URL) and then users could consume my Power BI report.
Peter
Hey Peter
That works, but publish to web carries a huge security risk. Anyone with the URL had access to the report. It’s really only good for public data.
Hi John,
Is Power bi-embedded the only approach to publish reports on SharePoint on Prem ?