In addition to licensing for the Power BI Report Server, each user who will be publishing Power BI reports (PBIX files) to the report server's web portal will also require a Power BI Pro license. In most large deployments, these are typically a small number of BI report developers and self-service BI power users, as described in the Power BI Licenses section of Chapter 1, Planning Power BI Projects.

Users who only view and optionally interact with reports published to the Power BI Report Server do not require Power BI Pro licenses or even Power BI Free licenses. This licensing structure (Premium Capacity + Pro licenses for report authors) further aligns the Power BI Report Server with the Power BI service. For example, similar to the Hybrid deployment models described in the following section, a report author with a Power BI Pro license would have the ability to publish one report to the Power BI Report Server and a different report to an app workspace in the Power BI service.