A Licensing Overview of Power BI Back-End Platforms

Microsoft offers customers several Power BI back-end hosting platforms (shown here), including multiple cloud services and an on-premises Power BI Report Server. They vary by licensing model and on support for content types, client tools, capabilities, performance, scaling, and security.

Back-End Hosting Functions

The back-end hosting platforms act as repositories for several components:

• Reports
• Datasets (built using Power Query)
• Tabular semantic data models (using Analysis Services)
• Data integration pipelines.

They are also the workhorse for authenticating, executing queries, accessing external data, scheduling data refreshes, and running integration pipelines, as well as rendering, publishing, and distributing reports. They also respond to user interaction for real-time analysis.

Back-End Platforms Overview

Power BI offers the following back-end hosting platforms:

Power BI Free is designed for small businesses, individual users, and occasional consumers of reports. It lacks security controls, provides limited data storage capacity and refresh rates, and has other significant shortcomings that typically make it unsuitable for midsize and large organizations.