Power BI Reporting Service Hosted Cloud vs PBI Services Cloud?

[rodneyc8063]

My company is currently exploring Power BI as a potential reporting solution

I was doing a bit of digging and came across this article

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/report-server/compare-report-server-service

The article specifies that Power BI Report Server can be deployed on premises, hosted cloud and there is also Power BI service which is cloud based.

I was just wondering, if PBIRS can be deployed via hosted cloud, then what is the difference with Power BI service which is also on the cloud? 

Does PBIRS allow for a custom reporting portal?

Sorry for the naive question, I see the word cloud thrown around a lot and havent been able to find anything concrete describing the differences. 

[d_gosbell]

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@rodneyc8063 wrote:

I was just wondering, if PBIRS can be deployed via hosted cloud, then what is the difference with Power BI service which is also on the cloud? 

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For the "hosted cloud" option all you would do is "rent" a windows server from a cloud provider (eg. Azure, AWS, etc) then logon to that server and install PBIRS. So you are then responsible for maintaining and updating that instance.

With the Power BI Service it is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, so all you need to do is setup and account (or purchase a subscription to access the pro features) and then logon to PowerBI.com. The software and servers are completely managed and maintained for you, there is nothing that you need to do in that regard. There are also some cloud specific features available only on PowerBI.com and the cloud version is also updated more frequently (PBIRS only gets 3 updates each year)

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@rodneyc8063 wrote:

Does PBIRS allow for a custom reporting portal?

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It does. At the simplest level you can add your own company logo and upload a custom theme file to change the color scheme of the portal. Or if you want a completely custom solution the Power BI Portal UI itself is build on top of the Power BI REST API, so you could build a completely custom portal using that API if you wanted to (although it would be a lot of work to completely re-build the entire portal)

[rodneyc8063]

@d_gosbell- Thanks so much!

Another naive question/clarification

Is it safe to assume, since PBI service that its pretty much "what you see is what you get" in terms of customizing for a company portal? So pretty much cant do much at all since its hosted and maintained by someone else?

So if my company wanted more control over the look and feel/customizing with a company logo we would need to look at the PBI reporting server option

Thanks so much again for the concise answer!

[d_gosbell]

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@rodneyc8063 wrote:

@d_gosbell- Thanks so much!

Another naive question/clarification

Is it safe to assume, since PBI service that its pretty much "what you see is what you get" in terms of customizing for a company portal? So pretty much cant do much at all since its hosted and maintained by someone else?

So if my company wanted more control over the look and feel/customizing with a company logo we would need to look at the PBI reporting server option

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Yes and no. So the service has recently added (or is about to add) a customizable navigation option, which is a feature that is not yet available in Report Server. And the service also has it's own set of REST apis which you can use to build custom apps. And it also has an embedding option where you can embed reports directly into other apps. But I have not delved too much into these areas myself as I'm currently using the on-prem PBIRS. You could try asking about the customizing options in the Service forum

But I think with the services REST APIs you can pretty much  build your own custom portal if you like. A friend of mine works on a product called Enterprise BI Portal which is a 3rd party portal that will integrate with the Power BI Service (as well as Report Server, Cognos, Tableau and a number of other reporting solutions) to give you a single integrated reporting portal which itself has it's own branding and customization options