Capacity and SKUs in Power BI embedded analytics
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
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: |
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:
F SKUs - Microsoft Fabric licenses.
SKU limits in Power BI - What is Power BI Premium?
Power BI interactive (not paginated) reports - Export Power BI report to file.
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.