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Capacity and SKUs in Power BI embedded analytics

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Power BI embedded analytics requires a capacity (A, EM, or P 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'll need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) account to publish content.

What are the different capacities?

Power BI embedded analytics offers two publishing solutions. Each solution requires different SKUs.

  • Power BI Embedded is an Azure offering aimed at ISVs and developers who want to embed visuals into their applications. Power BI Embedded uses A SKUs.

  • Power BI Premium is a Microsoft Office offer that includes Embedding Power BI. It's geared toward enterprises who want a complete BI solution that provides a single view of its organization, partners, customers, and suppliers. Power BI Premium uses EM or P 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 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 enables Power BI Premium to provide a solution for both internal and external customer facing applications.

Capacity and SKUs

Each capacity offers a selection of SKUs, and each SKU provides different resource tiers for memory and 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.

Power BI Embedded SKUs

Power BI Embedded is shipped with an A SKU.

Power BI Premium SKUs

Power BI premium offers two SKUs, P and EM.

Which SKU should I use?

The table below 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 Office
(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 the P SKU allows free Power BI users to consume Power BI apps and shared content, in Power BI service.

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 table below 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 memory and computing power

    The table below describes the resources and limits of each SKU.

    Capacity Dataset Dataflow Export API
    Capacity SKUs V-cores Max memory (GB)1, 2, 3 DirectQuery/Live connection (per second)1, 2 Max memory per query (GB)1, 2 Model refresh parallelism2 Dataflow parallel tasks5 Max concurrent pages6
    EM1/A1 1 3 3.75 1 5 4 20
    EM2/A2 2 5 7.5 2 10 8 25
    EM3/A3 4 10 15 2 20 16 35
    P1/A4 8 25 30 6 40 32 55
    P2/A5 16 50 60 6 80 64 95
    P3/A6 32 100 120 10 160 64 175
    P4/A74 64 200 240 10 320 64 200
    P5/A84 128 400 480 10 640 64 200

    1 The Power BI Premium Utilization and Metrics app doesn't currently expose these metrics.

    2 These limits only apply to the dataset workload per capacity.

    3 The Max memory (GB) column under the Dataset header represents an upper bound for the dataset size. However, an amount of memory must be reserved for operations such as refreshes and queries on the dataset. The maximum dataset size permitted on a capacity might be smaller than the numbers in this column. For more information, see Memory allocation.

    4 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.

    5 Learn more about parallel tasks in dataflows.

    6 See Export Power BI report to file for more information about Power BI interactive (not paginated) reports.

    1 The Power BI Premium Utilization and Metrics app doesn't currently expose these metrics.

    2 These limits only apply to the datasets workload per capacity.

    3 The RAM per dataset (GB) column (also called the model size limit) represents an upper bound for the dataset size. However, some memory must be reserved for operations such as dataset refreshes and queries. The maximum dataset size permitted on a capacity may be smaller than the numbers in this column.

    4 SKUs greater than 100 GB aren't available in all regions. To request using these SKUs in regions where they're not available, contact your Microsoft account manager.

    5 Learn more about parallel tasks in dataflows.

    6 See Export Power BI report to file for more information about Power BI interactive (not paginated) reports.

    Note the amount of memory available on each node size described in the RAM (GB) column of the table. It's set to the memory footprint limit of a single Power BI item (such as a dataset, report or dashboard), and not to the cumulative consumption of memory. For example, in an Embedded A4 capacity, a single dataset size is limited to 25 GB, and not the total memory footprint of all datasets handled at the same time.

    Embedded memory enhancements

    The amount of memory available on each node size is described in the RAM (GB) column in the SKU memory and computing power table. It's set to the memory footprint limit of a single Power BI item (such as a dataset, report or dashboard), and not to the cumulative consumption of memory. For example, in an Embedded Premium A4 capacity, a single dataset size is limited to 25 GB.

    Next steps