Power BI has 4 roles. Those roles, in order of increasing access/capabilities, are Viewer, Contributor, Member, and Admin. Before granting roles to users in your environment, it’s best to have a solid understanding of what each role has access to and is capable of doing.
The table below provides a list of capabilities of each role. As you will see, each roles “absorbs” or “inherits” the capabilities of all the roles below it in the hierarchy – for example, the Contributor can do everything the Viewer can do plus more, and the Member can do everything the Contributor can do plus more.
The Power BI Workspace roles
| Viewer | Contributor | Member | Admin |
| View dashboards, reports, and workbooks in the workspace | Everything that the Viewer can do | Everything that the Contributor can do | Everything that the Member can do |
| Read data from dataflows in the workspace | Add, edit, delete content workspaces | Add other users as members, contributors, or viewers to the workspace | Update and delete the workspace |
| Row-level security applies to viewers | Schedule refreshes and use the on-premises gateway within workspaces | Publish and update the workspace app | Add and remove other users of any role from the workspace |
| Feature dashboards and reports from workspaces | Share and allow others to reshape items from the workspace | ||
| Have access to the lineage view | Feature the workspace app | ||
| Have full access to all datasets within a workspace |
A few things to keep in mind regarding roles:
- Only the Member and Admin roles can perform access related tasks and publish apps.
- Both Member and Admin roles can update workspaces, but only the Admin role can delete.
- By default, the Contributor role cannot update apps, but there is a workspace setting that allows Contributors to update apps.
- Both the Member and Admin roles can add users, but only the Admin role can add other Admins.
- A Power BI Pro license is needed to be able to fully utilize the Admin role.
This article was intended to be an easy read; more detailed information regarding Power BI roles can be found here on the Microsoft site.
Thanks for reading!
The Data Community 