Options for Integrating Power BI Reports into your Website or Portal

Options For Integrating Power BI Reports Into Your Website or Portal

The purpose of this document is to discuss and explain high level options, costs, and approaches to integrating Power BI with a new or existing website or portal.

Introduction

The basic description that Microsoft gives for their Power BI product is: “Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights” (Microsoft, 2023). It is understandable why Power BI is a compelling option to create visuals for any website or portal.

Microsoft offers many options for integrating with the visuals that it can produce, and the options can vary depending on workflow, and use case. In most of the Microsoft documentation they speak about sharing content from Power BI in terms of: “For your organization” or “For your customers” (Microsoft, 2023). When considering many modern-day applications there is interest in both.

Overview of Power BI Products

Before getting into some recommendations an analysis of available products should be made.

Free

— A free user is a user within an organization that can view reports made by Pro users

Pro

— A Pro user is someone that can create and share reports within an organization. They can also export reports if the organization that they belong to has given them the ability to do so. Each Pro user is currently $10 / month. This is an Office 365 Product.

Premium Per User

— This is very much like a Pro user except there are additional abilities to simplify data management and access at enterprise scale. Premium users are $20 / month. This is an Office 365 Product.

Premium Per Capacity

— Turns on power BI Analytics for an entire organization. Implements dedicated servers to handle data requests whereas the other per user licenses are part of shared infrastructure. This is currently $4,995 per capacity per month. This is an Office 365 Product.

Embedded

— This is like the Premium Per Capacity except that the data is not directly tied to an organization. Using embedded means that you give access to an application to the Power BI data instead of individual user access to the data. This can cover both use cases of “for the organization” and “for the customer”. This is billed on an hourly basis and depends on the resources that are being used. Currently the most cost-effective product is at $1.081 / hour. As a rough estimate if the service was never paused it would run $750.00 per month. This is an Azure product.

See this table for more pricing options. Be aware that Microsoft does equate the Azure A3 capacity to be the same as a Premium Per Capacity from Office 365. If you look at it that way then you would be considering $3,000 / month compared to $5,000 per month. But again the Premium Per Capacity and Azure embedded products have their own niche’s and use cases.

Embedding Options

There are many ways to embed visuals from Power BI. Each has different workflows and security considerations.

No / Low Code – “For the organization”

— When a report is ready to be shared with others a report designer can select the “Website or portal” option. When this is done a link and an iframe code are provided to the report designer. When a different user clicks on that link they are required to sign-in to the organization to verify that they have access to the report and report data. This is a secure way of sharing forms with links that anyone might click on, but should or should not have access to.

No / Low Code – “For a customer”

— When a report is ready to be shared with others a report designer can select the “Publish to web (public)” option. This feature does need to be enabled on a tenant configuration level. The report that goes out will be publicly available to anyone on the internet. So careful consideration should be taken to reports that are published in this manner.

REST API Integrations through Premium Per Capacity or Embedded

— For any web portal to have the best possible, and fine-grained integration with Power BI the “Workspace” for that Power BI must be set to be a Premium per capacity or Embedded option.



The Pro and Premium per user license mode’s do not allow for all the REST API integration features that a portal developer could use. This means that for these tools to be available either the $4,995 per month for a capacity will need to be purchased or a capacity added from the Azure Power BI Embedded currently at the lowest cost of $750 / month service. Simply put: if you want the full API integration a “capacity” must be on the Power BI Workspace that will be used. Whether that capacity comes from an Organizational purchase (Premium Per Capacity mentioned earlier) or from an Azure purchase (Power BI Embedded mentioned earlier) doesn’t matter.

Use Case Options

Now that we have discussed the integration options, we are ready to discuss how these options can be used and how they affect various workflows.

Option 1: A few users with “Pro” licenses

— It does take at least one person with a pro license to create any reports. Viewers of reports are free. With this option you need to consider exactly how reports can be shared. With this option only the Export and Embed for Website or Portal and Embed Website (public) options are available after a report designer has designed their report. Certainly, that embed code could be shared with the portal or website developer and easily integrated. This option works great if you are sure that you can trust that the data you are sharing is either with people within your organization (when using the website or portal option), or you are confident that you can share the report with the public (when using the website (public) export option). What you will be missing in this option is if your website that you are integrating with has users that are outside of your organization and you want to have reports filtered based on identifiers of the users that are logged in to the portal, and not necessarily logged in to your organization. This approach is still viable, however would cause strain on report designers as a new public report for each customer would need to be generated and then the portal developer will still need to make sure that only the appropriate links are shared with the appropriate customers. However, even those links being created within Power Bi in that fashion makes the data available to the public, so in a way it doesn’t matter that the portal being developed is only showing content that is relevant to the portal user. The portal user could share the data with people that do not have a login for the portal being developed. What you may choose to do is have some reports developed for the organization and then not use Power BI for customer facing reports, rather use normal HTML and JavaScript capabilities of the portal developers.

Option 2: Purchase a Power BI Premium Per Capacity for the Organization

— This is certainly the most expensive option. However, will cover the “for your organization” and “for your customers” use cases. All the Power BI APIs will be made available to you when the capacity has been added to a workspace. Your organization will also get all the benefits from their organization of the full Power BI suite. Remember that not only with this subscription be required but also at least one pro user subscription as well. Filtering reports based on information known about the portal being developed users will be possible. Sharing reports within your organization without the portal being developed will also be easy to adapt.

Option 3: Purchase a Power BI Embedded Capacity from Azure

— This is a cost-effective way to open the Power BI APIs for portal development. While portal developers will be able to use a lot of the features of Power BI for the portal. An organization will not necessarily have all the benefits of Power BI for their entire organization. Just like the Per Capacity for the Organization at least one Pro license will need to be purchased for someone to design reports. Also the user / master account that will be used to integrate between the portal and Power BI will need a Pro License as well.

Conclusion

The available Power BI products and possible use cases for any portal have been discussed. The use cases are a little different depending on if the portal needs “for the organization” or “for customers”. There are many things to consider when it comes to price, features, and workflows.

The most cost-effective option with getting a few pro licenses is do-able “for the organization” but is not well suited “for the customers” unless the organization is willing to accept the security risks or accept responsibility for additional workflows to circumvent those security risks including creating individual reports for each customer to ensure no data is unintentionally leaked.

The most cost-effective option with getting a Power BI Embedded capacity does allow for the portal to integrate with Power BI in a great way, and the portal that is being developed can be in control of all security implications; however, the organization will be limited in sharing reports amongst each other. Unless at least some Pro Licenses were purchased or a Premium Per Capacity for the Organization was purchased.

The most expensive option still may be an effective option for the organization as the capabilities will not only cover the ones required for the portal but for other workflows for the organization that are not necessarily in the scope of the portal project.

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