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Capacity and SKUs in Power BI embedded analytics

  • Article

Power BI embedded analytics requires a capacity (A, EM, P, or F SKU) in order to publish embedded Power BI content.

Capacity is a dedicated set of resources reserved for exclusive use. It offers dependable, consistent performance for your content.

Note

You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) account to publish content.
You can publish content without a Pro or PPU license by using a service principal executing the REST API, Post Import In Group.

What are the different capacities?

Power BI embedded analytics offers two publishing solutions, and Microsoft Fabric offers a third. Each solution requires different SKUs.

Power BI Embedded

Power BI Embedded is for ISVs and developers who want to embed visuals into their applications.

Applications using Power BI Embedded allow users to consume content stored on Power BI Embedded capacity. Power BI Embedded is shipped with an A SKU.

Power BI Premium

Power BI Premium is geared toward enterprises who want a complete BI solution that provides a single view of its organization, partners, customers, and suppliers.

Power BI Premium is a SaaS product that allows users to consume content through mobile apps, internally developed apps, or at the Power BI portal (Power BI service). This service enables Power BI Premium to provide a solution for both internal and external customer facing applications.

Power BI premium offers two SKUs, P and EM.

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is an Azure offering that brings together new and existing components from Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Explorer into a single integrated environment. Fabric uses F SKUs and supports embedding Power BI items. To read more about F SKUs, see Microsoft Fabric licenses.

Capacity and SKUs

Each capacity offers a selection of SKUs, and each SKU provides different resource tiers for computing power. The type of SKU you require, depends on the type of solution you wish to deploy.

To understand which workloads are supported for each tier, refer to the Configure workloads in a Premium capacity article.

To plan and test your capacity, see Capacity planning.

Which SKU should I use?

The following table provides a summary of features, the capacity they require, and the specific SKU that is needed for each one.

In this table, a custom app refers to a web app created using embedded analytics. When you embed to a custom web app as a developer (using the JavaScript or .NET SDKs, or the REST APIs), you can control and customize the UX. This ability isn't available with other embedding options, such as Power BI service and Power BI Mobile.

Scenario Azure Azure Office
(F SKU) (A SKU) (P and EM SKUs)
Embed for your customers
(app owns data)		 ✔ ✔ ✔
Embed for your organization
(user owns data)		 ✔ ✖ ✔
Microsoft 365 apps
(formerly known as Office 365 apps)		 ✔ ✖ ✔
Secure URL embedding
(embed from Power BI service)		 ✔ ✖ ✔

Note

  • A Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license is needed for publishing content to a Power BI app workspace.
  • Only P SKUs and F SKUs equivalent to a F64 SKU or higher, allow free Power BI users to consume Power BI apps and shared content in Power BI service. Smaller SKUs require a Pro license to consume Power BI content.
  • The F SKU is part of Fabric. To read more about F SKUs see Microsoft Fabric licenses.

Capacity considerations

For development testing, you can use free embed trial tokens with a Pro license. To embed in a production environment, you must use a capacity.

Important

Free trial tokens are limited to development testing only. Once going to production, a capacity must be purchased. Until a capacity is purchased, the Free trial version banner will continue to appear at the top of the embedded report.

The following table lists payment and usage considerations per capacity.

Payment and usage Power BI Embedded Power BI Premium Power BI Premium
Offer Azure Office Office
SKU A EM P
Billing Hourly Monthly Monthly
Commitment None Yearly Monthly or yearly
Usage Azure resources can be:
  • Scaled up or down
  • Paused and resumed
    		•  Embed in apps, and in Microsoft applications Embed in apps, and in Power BI service

    SKU computing power

    The following table describes the resources of each Power BI SKU.

    SKU Capacity Units (CU) Power BI SKU Power BI v-cores
    F2 2 N/A N/A
    F4 4 N/A N/A
    F8 8 EM1/A1 1
    F16 16 EM2/A2 2
    F32 32 EM3/A3 4
    F64 64 P1/A4 8
    F128 128 P2/A5 16
    F256 256 P3/A6 32
    F5121 512 P4/A7 64
    F10241 1,024 P5/A8 128
    F20481 2,048 N/A N/A

    1 These SKUs aren't available in all regions. To request using these SKUs in regions where they're not available, contact your Microsoft account manager.

    More information about SKU limits, is available here:

    Embedded memory enhancements

    The amount of memory available on each node size is described in the Max memory (GB) column in the Semantic model SKU limitation table. It's set to the memory footprint limit of a single Power BI item (such as a semantic model, report or dashboard), and not to the cumulative consumption of memory. For example, in an F64 capacity, a single dataset size is limited to 25 GB.

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