Sharing a Power BI report with free users requires either a large enough Fabric capacity, an embedded application, or a workaround like publishing to the public web. By default, Power BI requires both the sharer and the viewer to hold a Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. But there are several legitimate ways around that requirement, each with different costs, complexity, and trade-offs.
Why Free Users Can’t View Reports by Default
Power BI’s licensing model ties report viewing to per-user licenses. When you share a report through the Power BI service (via direct sharing, apps, or workspace access), every person who opens that report needs at least a Pro license. Free users who click a shared link will hit a paywall prompting them to upgrade. This is true regardless of whether you, the report creator, have a Pro or PPU license yourself.
The exception to this rule is capacity-based licensing: instead of licensing each viewer individually, your organization purchases compute capacity that unlocks viewing for everyone assigned to workspaces on that capacity. The specifics depend on which capacity SKU you use.
Use Fabric F64 (or Larger) Capacity
The most straightforward way to share reports with free users inside your organization is to place the report’s workspace on a Microsoft Fabric capacity of F64 or larger. When you do this, anyone with a free Power BI license and a viewer role on the workspace can open and interact with Power BI content, no Pro or PPU license required.
This is an important threshold. SKUs smaller than F64 still require every consuming user to have a Pro, PPU, or individual trial license. So an F32 capacity, for example, will not unlock free viewing. If your organization already runs Fabric for other workloads (data engineering, data science, real-time analytics), you may already have F64 capacity available, and adding a Power BI workspace to it costs nothing extra beyond the existing capacity subscription.
To set this up, a capacity admin assigns your workspace to the F64 (or larger) capacity in the Fabric admin portal. Then you grant the viewer role to the free users who need access. They can view the report through the Power BI service, through a Power BI app, or embedded in SharePoint Online and PowerPoint.
Use Power BI Premium Per Capacity (P SKUs)
Power BI Premium per capacity (P1, P2, P3, P4) works similarly to the Fabric F-SKU approach. Workspaces assigned to a Premium capacity allow free users to view content without individual licenses. These P SKUs have been the traditional way organizations share dashboards and reports broadly, such as with an entire company of thousands of employees where licensing every viewer individually would be impractical.
Premium per capacity is a significant investment, starting at several thousand dollars per month, so it only makes financial sense when you have enough free viewers to justify the cost over buying individual Pro licenses. The break-even point depends on your organization’s size, but as a rough guide, once you’re sharing reports with more than a few hundred viewers, capacity licensing often becomes cheaper per person than Pro seats.
Publish to the Web (Public Reports Only)
If your report contains no sensitive or proprietary data, the Publish to Web feature generates a public embed code and URL that anyone can access, no Power BI account or license of any kind required. This is the simplest option for truly public content like community dashboards, open data visualizations, or marketing-facing analytics.
The trade-off is significant: the report becomes accessible to anyone on the internet with no authentication whatsoever. Viewers can see detail-level data that your report aggregates, meaning someone could access the underlying data in your model even if the report itself doesn’t display it directly. Never use Publish to Web for confidential, internal, or proprietary information.
Publish to Web also has a long list of technical restrictions. It does not support reports using row-level security, DirectQuery connections, live connections to Analysis Services, shared or certified semantic models, paginated reports, R or Python visuals, report-level DAX measures, or mobile layout views. If your report relies on any of these features, you’ll need a different sharing method.
To use it, open the report in the Power BI service, select File, then Embed report, then Publish to web. Your Power BI admin must have this feature enabled in the tenant settings. You’ll receive an embed code for websites and a direct URL you can share via email or messaging.
Embed Reports in a Custom Application
If you’re building a web application or portal for external users (customers, partners, the public), Power BI Embedded lets you display reports inside your app without requiring viewers to have any Power BI account at all. This is called the “app owns data” scenario: your application authenticates against Power BI on behalf of the user, so the viewer never interacts with the Power BI service directly.
This approach is designed for software vendors and organizations that want to integrate analytics into their own products. The end user doesn’t need a Pro or PPU license, and they don’t even need to be a Power BI user. Your application handles all the authentication and authorization logic.
To move this into production, you assign the workspace your application uses to a Power BI Embedded capacity (A SKU) or a Fabric F SKU. The cost scales with the capacity tier you select rather than the number of viewers, which makes it economical when you’re serving a large audience. Development requires familiarity with the Power BI REST APIs and JavaScript embedding libraries, so this option involves real engineering work compared to the other methods.
Use Power BI Report Server (On-Premises)
If your organization prefers to keep reports on-premises rather than in the cloud, Power BI Report Server is worth considering. Viewers do not need a Pro license to view and interact with Power BI reports or paginated reports hosted on Report Server. Access is controlled through your organization’s existing network authentication (typically Active Directory), so anyone with network access and the right permissions can open reports in a browser.
Power BI Report Server is included with Power BI Premium per capacity licenses and is also available through SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance. The reports must be published to the Report Server rather than the Power BI cloud service, so this method works best for organizations that already have on-premises infrastructure and prefer that deployment model.
Choosing the Right Method
- Internal audience, many viewers: Fabric F64 or Premium per capacity. Both let free users view reports through the standard Power BI service with no extra steps on the viewer’s end.
- Fully public, non-sensitive data: Publish to Web. Zero licensing cost, but zero access control.
- External customers or partners via your own app: Power BI Embedded with the app-owns-data pattern. Viewers need no Power BI account at all.
- On-premises environment: Power BI Report Server. No per-viewer licensing, but requires server infrastructure.
- Small number of external viewers: It may be simpler and cheaper to provide those users with Pro trial licenses (60 days) or purchase Pro licenses for them, rather than investing in capacity-based solutions.
For most organizations looking to share reports broadly within the company, Fabric F64 capacity is the current recommended path. It aligns with Microsoft’s direction for the platform and unlocks free viewing with a single infrastructure decision rather than ongoing per-user license management.