Choosing a Power BI Platform

• Power BI hosting platforms vary by performance, capacity, management, and supported features.
• Choosing the right platform can ensure business requirements are met and costs are optimized.
• Large-scale deployments can usually reduce overall costs by avoiding Power BI Pro subscriptions.
• Customers planning hybrid configurations might not be able to share content between the environments.

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering that contains numerous tightly integrated software and Microsoft-hosted components. They include reporting hosting platforms, report design tools, and client applications, which are used collectively to create and share reports, dashboards, and other forms of BI. Most of the report hosting platforms require an annual commitment. Choosing the correct platform is key to meeting business requirements and controlling cost.

Comparing Requirements Against Report Hosting Options

The Power BI back-end report hosting platforms, sometimes referred to as report repositories, enable publishing and distribution of reports by storing a library of report templates, pulling data from various sources (via connectors and gateways), processing the data to produce (render) reports and metrics, managing user access, and delivering reports to clients.