What is Power BI Embedded?

Thinking about adding interactive reports directly into your own app, portal, or website for your customers to use? That’s exactly what Power BI Embedded is designed for. This article will show you what it is, how it’s different from the standard Power BI service, and who can benefit most from using it.

What is Power BI Embedded, Really?

Power BI Embedded is a Microsoft Azure service that lets developers bake Power BI’s interactive reports and dashboards directly into their own applications. Think of it less as a separate tool you log into, and more as a powerful analytics ingredient for your own software.

Instead of building a charting library and data reporting features from scratch - a massive undertaking - you can leverage the full power and polish of Microsoft's business intelligence engine. You build the fantastic reports in the familiar Power BI Desktop, and then use Power BI Embedded to serve them up within your app’s user interface, seamlessly. Your end-users might not even know they're looking at a Power BI report, it just feels like a natural part of your application.

This approach is often called "white-label analytics" because it allows a software company (known as an Independent Software Vendor, or ISV) to provide rich, interactive data visualizations to its customers under its own branding. The end customer interacts with your application, not Power BI's.

At a technical level, Power BI Embedded is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) on Azure, which means you purchase dedicated processing power, called "capacity," to run your reports in the Microsoft cloud. You aren't buying individual user licenses, you're essentially renting a piece of the Power BI engine to power your app's analytics features.

Power BI Embedded vs. The Standard Power BI Service: Key Differences

This is where most of the confusion comes in, but the distinction is actually quite simple. It all comes down to who is going to be looking at the reports and how they will access them. The standard Power BI Service is designed for internal use, while Power BI Embedded is for external use.

Let's break down the major differences:

Intended Audience

• Power BI Service: Built for sharing insights with people inside your organization. Think employees, managers, and executives who need to track internal business metrics. These are your typical "business users."
• Power BI Embedded: Built for your application's users - the people outside your organization. Think customers logging into your SaaS platform, partners accessing a portal, or clients viewing a custom dashboard you built for them.

Licensing and Cost Model

• Power BI Service: Typically licensed on a per-user basis. To view a report, a user needs a Power BI Pro or a Premium Per User (PPU) license. This model becomes very expensive and difficult to manage if you have hundreds or thousands of external users. You don’t want to manage Power BI accounts for all of your customers!
• Power BI Embedded: Licensed by a pay-as-you-go capacity model in Azure. You pay for processing power (an "A SKU") which is billed hourly and can be scaled up, down, or even paused. Your end-users don't need any Power BI license at all, making it incredibly cost-effective for serving analytics to a large number of external users.

Authentication and Access

• Power BI Service: Users log in with their Microsoft/Azure AD credentials at app.powerbi.com. Their identity determines what reports and data they can see.
• Power BI Embedded: Users log into your application using whatever authentication system you’ve built (like email/password). Your application is responsible for controlling who sees what. It asks Power BI for an "embed token" to display a report, which seamlessly handles the permissions in the background.

Look, Feel, and Branding

• Power BI Service: Reports are viewed inside the Power BI portal, which has Microsoft’s branding, navigation, and user interface. It unapologetically looks and feels like Power BI.
• Power BI Embedded: Completely white-labeled. You embed the reports and dashboards into your app’s interface. You control the surrounding menus, buttons, and design. The analytics blend right in, matching your brand's unique style.

Is Power BI Embedded Right for You? Common Use Cases

Power BI Embedded is perfect for scenarios where you need to deliver business intelligence as a part of your product offering, rather than simply as an internal reporting tool.

For Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)

This is the most common use case. If you have a SaaS product - like a CRM, an inventory management system, or a project management tool - you can use Power BI Embedded to quickly add a rich, professional analytics module. Instead of spending a year and a fortune developing your own charting engine, you can offer your customers state-of-the-art interactive dashboards that pull data from your application. This adds HUGE value to your product and allows your customers to get insights without having to export their data to another tool.

For Large Enterprises Building Customer Portals

Big companies often need to provide data to their customers or partners. For example, a global manufacturer could create a portal where its distributors log in to see interactive reports on their sales performance, inventory levels, and order fulfillment times. With Embedded, each distributor logs into the branded portal and only sees their own data, thanks to Power BI’s row-level security capabilities.

For Developers Creating Custom Applications

Any developer building a web application that needs to display data can benefit. Imagine an app for managing personal finances. With Power BI Embedded, the developer could offer users beautiful, interactive reports on their spending habits, investment performance, and net worth, all within the flow of the application itself.

Why Choose Power BI Embedded? The Key Advantages

Adopting this model frees you from the burden of building and maintaining your own back-end analytics engine and front-end visualizations, bringing several key benefits.

Provide a Seamless User Experience

Keeping users within your branded environment is a huge win. They get powerful, interactive insights without ever having to leave your app or log into another system. This creates a cohesive and professional experience that strengthens your product's appeal and keeps users engaged.

Accelerate Your Time-to-Market

Building a quality analytics and reporting suite from scratch can take years and cost millions. BI visualization is a hard problem to solve. Power BI Embedded lets you skip that entire development cycle and go to market far more quickly with a best-in-class solution, enabling you to focus your engineering resources on your core product differentiators.

Control Costs as You Scale

The capacity-based pricing model is a game-changer. You're not penalized with per-user fees as your customer base grows. Whether you have 100 users or 100,000 users, your primary cost is tied to the computational power required to render the reports, which you can easily manage and predict within your Azure budget.

Maintain Full Developer Control and Security

Power BI Embedded provides rich client-side APIs (JavaScript, .NET, Python, etc.) that give you deep programmatic control. You can dynamically filter reports, apply bookmarks, manage visual settings, and control the entire user interaction through code. Most importantly, you can securely implement row-level security (RLS) to ensure users can only ever see the slice of data they are explicitly authorized to view.

How to Get Started with Power BI Embedded (The 30,000-Foot View)

While the benefits are clear, it's important to understand that Power BI Embedded is a solution for developers. It’s not a no-code, drag-and-drop experience. Here’s a very high-level overview of the implementation process:

1. Gather Your Resources: At a minimum, you'll need a Power BI Pro account for development/publishing, Microsoft Visual Studio (or another IDE), and an active Microsoft Azure subscription.
2. Create Your BI Content: This part is the same as any Power BI project. You’ll use Power BI Desktop to connect to your data sources, build your data model, and design beautiful, interactive reports.
3. Publish to a Workspace: Once ready, you publish your .pbix file from Power BI Desktop to a workspace within the Power BI Service.
4. Provision Azure Capacity: In the Azure Portal, you’ll search for and set up a "Power BI Embedded" resource. Here you will select your capacity tier (e.g., A1, A2). Once this is created, you assign your Power BI workspace to this capacity.
5. Register your Application in Azure AD: You need to register your app to give it a secure identity. This process gives you the credentials (like an Application ID) that your code will use to authenticate with the Power BI REST APIs.
6. Embed the Content in Your App: Now for the coding part. In your application's back-end code, you will use the credentials from the previous step to talk to the Power BI APIs and generate a unique "embed token" for your end user. This embed token securely grants that user temporary, read-only access to a specific report in your app. Your front-end code will then use this token and the Javascript API to render the report within a <div> on your web page.

Final Thoughts

Power BI Embedded is a powerful and scalable way for developers and ISVs to deliver first-class analytics inside their own applications. It offers the best of both worlds: you get to use Power BI's fantastic visualization and data modeling engine while delivering a completely seamless, white-labeled, and branded experience to your customers, all under a cost-effective, capacity-based pricing model.

While Power BI Embedded is an excellent tool for developers building customer-facing reports, sometimes you just need insights for your internal team without configuring Azure capacity or writing a line of code. For fast access to our own marketing and sales data, we created Graphed to skip past the complexity. We connect sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce, then simply ask for what we need in plain English to build real-time dashboards in seconds, which lets our team focus immediately on insights, not setup.