Share Power BI reports with external users without additional pro licenses

There are several options to share your Power BI reports and dashboards with external users, including “Publish to web”, exporting to PDF, image or PowerPoint and sharing directly though the Power BI service. Each method has its own costs and quirks regarding security, interactivity and costs. Which option works best for you depends entirely on your usecase. Lets dive in!

Introduction

In the past, providing a service was often enough. You delivered the product or solution and that was it. But things have changed. In today’s data-driven world, customers expect more than just a service. They want ongoing insights, transparency, and regular updates. Whether it’s usage statistics, performance metrics, or operational overviews, the demand for data is only increasing.

That’s why sharing Power BI reports outside your organization is becoming more important than ever. Power BI is a great tool for visualizing and analyzing data, but when it comes to sharing those insights with people outside your company, it does come with some challenges. Security, interactivity, and licensing all play a role in choosing the right sharing method.

In this article, we’ll walk through the different options for sharing Power BI reports with external users and help you figure out which one fits your situation best.

Exploring the options

Distribute through Power BI service

Upload the report from Power BI desktop to the online Power BI service with the ‘publish’ option. Afterwards you can use the same method as when you share reports through the online portal with a coworker for external users. Navigate to the Workspace access settings and invite the external user. You might be hit with this message:

In that case the Power BI administrator needs to enable the ‘External data sharing’ option in the admin portal. Note that all external users are added as B2B guest users in your Azure Entra and they all need a Power BI pro or premium per user license depending on the workspace configuration.

This is the recommened approach if you only have a handful of users that you want to share reports within your organization.

Publish to web

If you have a dashboard that should be publicly available this is the option for you with just a few clicks you can create a public dashboard link through Power BI online. You can send a direct link to this report to anyone.

Open a report and click on File -> Embed report -> Publish to web.

Please note: this creates a public URL, anyone in the world with that url is able to access your report. You should only use this if your report has exclusively public information.

Export to PDF or PowerPoint

You can also statically export a PDF or PowerPoint from your report or dashboard, this works great when you need to share specific a specific report page with the management team, for example. You can do so from the export menu from the Power BI service.

This method lacks interactive usage though, you won’t be able to click visuals, apply filters or perform any sort of filtering in these static exports.

Email subscriptions

Email subscriptions are perfect to get insights in your email on a set schedule! It’s quite similar to creating a PDF or PowerPoint export, however it’s fully automated. This method is commonly used for providing your team with day/week starts on sales statusses for example.

You can configure email subscriptions from within a Power BI report:

Incorporating into Applications (Power BI embedded)

This is the holy grail of Power BI sharing. With Power BI Embedded, you can build your own solution that fully integrates Power BI reports into your own application or portal. It’s a lot more work compared to the other options, but in return, you get full control over the experience and unlimited flexibility.

No more relying on the standard Power BI interface. With embedding, you can offer a fully white labeled reporting experience to your users, tailored to your brand and your workflows. External users don’t need a Microsoft 365 account, and you’re not stuck managing guest users in Azure either.

It supports everything: Row-Level Security (RLS), email subscriptions, custom filters per user, permission control,  and nearly all the interactivity that Power BI offers out of the box.

One of the biggest advantages? Viewing users don’t require a Power BI pro license, only report publishers do. Instead, you use a Microsoft Fabric capacity or a premium capacity, which lets you pay based on usage or dedicated capacity. This model can be a huge cost saver at scale and gives you predictable performance and resource control.

Behind the scenes, Power BI Embedded creates a secure layer that connects your application to the Power BI service, letting you manage authentication, report access, and user experience all on your terms.

If you’re serious about sharing insights with customers or external partners in a professional way, this is the option to consider.

How to share a Power BI report with external users – conclusion

Looking for an easier way to share Power BI reports externally?

If you’re serious about delivering a seamless reporting experience to your clients, partners, or external users without worrying about licenses, guest users, or technical setup, then take a look at DataTako. It’s built to specifically solve report distribution problem to users inside or outside your organization.

DataTako lets you securely share interactive Power BI reports in a fully white labeled portal. It supports Row Level Security, user specific filters, email subscriptions, and more. Your viewers don’t need a Microsoft 365 account, and there’s no need to deal with the cluttered Power BI interface.

Whether you’re a BI agency offering dashboards to clients or a company wanting to keep your stakeholders in the loop, DataTako makes professional report distribution easy and secure.

👉 Get started with DataTako and take control of your Power BI sharing today.