Roles in workspaces in Power BI

Workspaces are places to collaborate with colleagues and create collections of dashboards, reports, semantic models, and paginated reports. This article describes the different roles in workspaces, and what people in each role can do. For more information, see workspaces in Power BI.

To create a new workspace, see Create a workspace.

Roles let you manage who can do what in a workspace, so teams can collaborate. Workspaces allow you to assign roles to individuals, and also to user groups such as security groups, Microsoft 365 groups, and distribution lists.

To grant access to a workspace, assign one of the following workspace roles to a user group or individual: Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer. For more information, see Give users access to workspaces.

Everyone in a user group gets the role that you assign. If someone is in several user groups, they get the highest level of permission that's provided by the roles that they're assigned. If you nest user groups and assign a role to a group, all the contained users get that role's permissions. All these capabilities, except viewing and interacting, require a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. For more information, see licensing.

Workspace roles

Capability	Admin	Member	Contributor	Viewer	Notes
Update and delete the workspace
Add or remove any user in a workspace role
Allow Contributors to update the app for the workspace
Add members or others with lower permissions
Publish, unpublish, and change permissions for an app
Update an app			If allowed		Contributors can update the app associated with the workspace if the workspace Admin delegates this permission to them. However, they can't publish a new app or change who has permission to edit it.
Share items in apps, including semantic models					Contributors and Viewers can also share items in a workspace or an app, including semantic models, if the app creator selected Allow users to share the semantic models in this app. See Create and manage multiple audiences.
Allow others to reshare items					See previous row.
Feature apps on colleagues' home					If your admin enabled this feature, see Manage featured content.
Manage semantic model permissions					Requires Build permission for the semantic model and at least the Contributor role on source and destination workspaces. See Copy reports from other workspaces.
Feature dashboards and reports on colleagues' home					Requires a paid license (Power BI Pro or PPU). Recipients also need a paid license unless the items are in a Premium capacity. B2B guest users can't subscribe others, only themselves.
Create, edit, and delete content in the workspace
Create a report in another workspace based on a semantic model in this workspace					Requires Build permission for the semantic model and at least the Contributor role on source and destination workspaces. If you have at least the Contributor role, you automatically have Build permission through your workspace role. See Copy reports from other workspaces.
Copy a report					See previous row.
Create goals based on a semantic model in the workspace					See previous row.
Schedule data refreshes via the on-premises gateway					You also need permissions on the gateway. Those permissions are managed elsewhere, independent of workspace roles and permissions. See Manage an on-premises gateway.
Modify gateway connection settings					See previous row.
View and interact with an item					If the items are in a workspace in a Premium capacity, you can view and interact with items in the Power BI service even without a Power BI Pro license.
Read data stored in workspace dataflows					Consuming data from a dataflow gen2 with the dataflow connector requires Admin, Member, or Contributor permissions. Viewer permissions isn't sufficient and isn't supported for consuming data from the dataflow gen2.
Create subscriptions to reports					Requires a paid license (Power BI Pro or PPU). Recipients also need a paid license unless the items are in a Premium capacity. B2B guest users can't subscribe others, only themselves.
Subscribe others to reports					See previous row.
Analyze in Excel					To allow users with the Viewer role to Analyze in Excel or export underlying data from the semantic models in the workspace, give them Build permission on the appropriate semantic models.
Download a PBIX file
Manage subscriptions created by others
Receive subscriptions created by others					Requires a paid license (Power BI Pro or PPU) for the recipient unless the items are in a Premium capacity.

Licenses

If one of the workspaces is in a shared capacity, everyone you add to it needs a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. These users can all collaborate on the dashboards and reports in the workspace. To distribute content to others inside your organization, either assign Power BI Pro licenses to those users or place the workspace in a Power BI Premium capacity.

When the workspace is in a Power BI Premium capacity, users with the Viewer role can access the workspace even if they don't have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license. However, if you assign these users a higher role like Admin, Member, or Contributor, they're prompted to start a Pro trial when they try to create an artifact in the workspace. If your admin enabled this feature, see Users can try Microsoft Fabric paid features. If you want users without Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licenses to use the Viewer role, make sure they don't also have other workspace roles, either as individuals or as part of a user group.

Publishing reports to the workspace enforces existing licensing rules. If you try to publish from Power BI Desktop or other client tools without a Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license, you see the error, "Only users with Power BI Pro licenses can publish to this workspace."

Guest users

Microsoft Entra B2B Guest users who are assigned a workspace role or granted specific item permissions can perform the operations permitted by those roles or permissions.

Considerations and limitations

Be aware of this limitation:

• A person with a Power BI Pro license can be a member of a maximum of 1,000 workspaces.

Related content

• Create workspaces in Power BI
• Give users access to workspaces
• Questions? Try asking the Power BI Community