Power BI has emerged as one of the leading business intelligence platforms, empowering organizations to gain valuable insights from their data and make data-driven decisions. Two approaches of building Power BI ecosystem are Power BI Report Server and Power BI Service. While both serve the purpose of delivering interactive reports and dashboards, they differ in terms of deployment options, functionality, and target user base. 

For a reminder, Power BI Report Server is an on-premises business platform that enables the creation, publishing, and management of Power BI reports and dashboards within a company’s own infrastructure. On the other hand, Power BI Service is a cloud-based platform that allows for the creation, publishing, and sharing of Power BI reports and dashboards online. 

A few years ago, many institutions were still not accepting public-cloud infrastructure elements due to their policies, hence Power BI Report Server was the right choice for them.  However, the policies and the processes have evolved and even the banking institutions are accepting public-cloud infrastructure in their architecture. 

I must admit that years of working with this tool have made me biased when it comes to choosing between Power BI Report Server and Power BI Service. In the following article, I will show you why Power BI Service is a more efficient solution and explain where and why Power BI Report Server falls behind. I hope it will impact your decision about migrating to Power BI Service from Power BI Report Server.  

MULTIPLE IMPORTANT FEATURES ARE NOT AVAILABLE 

Let’s start with the fundamental aspect of the available features in each component. 

Power BI Report Server always remains a few steps behind Power BI Service in terms of feature updates and scope of functionality.  

Updates are released less frequently (3 times per year vs 12 times per year) and with a significant delay. This is very important given that the new releases and updates of Power BI usually bring in long-awaited functionalities and ideas for improvements that have been brought up by the vast user community. 

On top of that, many functionalities which are available by default in the Web version of Power BI (ie. Power BI Service) are not available in Power BI Report Server at all: 

With more and more advanced features being progressively released in Power BI, the gap between Power BI Report Server and Power BI Service only keeps growing with time. 

REDUCED CAPABILITIES OF COLLABORATION AND REPORT SHARING 

Power BI Service has robust collaboration and sharing options. Users can share reports and dashboards with other internal and external users, collaborate on reports in real time, and publish their own reports to the web.  

However, not all options are available in Power BI Report Server: 

Publishing apps from workspaces 

Apps are the default recommended option to distribute sets of reports to a wider report audience. App view allows to separate updated versions of reports from the live version of the reports used by the report consumers, therefore safeguarding from unexpected report changes and serving as a built-in pre-prod environment. 

The lack of apps in Power BI Report Server results in greater effort and reduced efficiency of performing administrative tasks over the Power BI environment. 

Re-using datasets across multiple reports 

One of the most common development patterns and a crucial best practice in Power BI is to build reports which reuse the same datasets if possible. This significantly reduces maintenance costs, removing the necessity to replicate specific changes on multiple datasets. 

Power BI Report Server does not allow a dataset to serve multiple reports, which is by far the biggest drawback of this installation. At the end of the day, every time a new report is being built, even if it reuses the very same set of data for its visualisations, will need to be hosted separately. Not only does it bring redundancy and will saturate the memory much faster, but also represents important costs in terms of maintenance. 

Besides, this heavily impacts the capability to efficiently address self-service reporting scenarios, where usually report consumers build their own reports off a conformed, curated dataset which contains all the pre-made DAX measures applicable. 

On top of that, this means that there is no possibility to enforce the alignment between paginated reports with classic Power BI reports. 

Data privacy levels and sensitivity labels 

From a compliance perspective, data privacy levels and sensitivity labels bring in built-in functionality that allow to quickly determine what is the level of confidentiality of the specific set of data and how potential data sharing with different team members within or outside of the organization should be governed. 

Since this feature is missing in Power BI Report Server, workarounds need to be implemented in order to ensure a similar level of functionality. This, in turn, requires specific development and maintenance effort on top of the daily activities of the platform administrators. 

LIMITED DATA CONNECTIVITY  

Power BI Report Server supports only live connections to Analysis Services and Power BI datasets, or using Power BI datasets that are uploaded together with the report. 

Multiple other types of connections which are normally available in Power BI Service are missing in Power BI Report Server, just to name the most important ones: 

1. Composite models: very useful in case of large volumes of data, combining DirectQuery with Import mode within one report.
2. Automatic page refresh for DirectQuery models: the report user does not need to perform any specific action in order to see the numbers refreshed in his report, which is much more appealing in terms of user experience.
3. Embedding R/Python Scripts: this functionality allows for more robust tool capabilities and integrations. 
   

INCREASED INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT EFFORT

With Power BI Report Server, you’re responsible for all server management, infrastructure setup, updates, backups, and security. This significantly increases maintenance costs and requires IT knowledge and resources that wouldn’t be necessary with Power BI Service.  

Power BI Service operates as a SaaS (software-as-a-service), therefore greatly reducing the overall costs related to platform management, since most of administrative responsibilities are handed over to Microsoft. 

NO DIRECT INTEGRATION WITH POWER PLATFORM

Power BI Service integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft Power Platform services such as Power Automate and Power Apps. 

Power Apps allow to integrate writeback into Power BI reports, but not only. Power Apps can be used in conjunction with Power BI in order to provide lightweight application functionalities. Power Apps can be embedded into a Power BI report, enabling users to provide feedback on the data and display it right away in the very same reports.  

Also, Power BI reports can be embedded into Power Apps, fueling the application with data and insights. 

On the other hand, Power Automate will enable the automation of multiple repetitive tasks which are related to handling, serving and sharing data across the organization. Also, Power Automate interacts with Power BI in terms of custom report distribution scenarios. 

Power BI Report Server does not support out-of-the-box Power Apps nor Power Automate. This means that any automation efforts combining Power Platform components with Power BI Report Server are bound to fail. 

FULL FEATURE COMPARISON LISTING

To conclude, I have prepared a list comparing all the features of both modes, namely Power BI Report Server and Power BI Service. You already know my opinion on both of them, now it’s time for you to form your own. Good luck.