If you've decided to deliver Power BI analytics to external users, partners, or customers, you're facing a fundamental question: do you build the infrastructure yourself, or do you use a platform like Embedsy? This post walks through what building actually involves — and helps you decide which path makes sense for your situation.
What building your own solution actually involves
Power BI Embedded is Microsoft's API for embedding Power BI reports. It's powerful — but the API is just the starting point. To deliver a working solution to real users, you need to build everything around it.
Authentication and access control
You need to handle how users log in, how their identity maps to Power BI access, and how you enforce Row Level Security (RLS) at scale. This typically means integrating Microsoft Entra ID, managing service principals, and writing custom logic to generate embed tokens per user. It's not trivial — and it needs to be secure from day one.
Multi-tenancy
If you're delivering analytics to multiple customers or partners, each needs to see only their own data. Building proper tenant isolation — at the data, report, and access level — is one of the more complex engineering challenges in this space. A misconfiguration can expose one customer's data to another.
Branding and portal experience
Reports embedded via API appear inside whatever interface you build. That means designing and building a full frontend: navigation, user management, branding controls, responsive layouts. If you want it to look professional and feel like a real product, expect significant frontend effort.
Administration
Someone needs to manage users, assign roles, control which reports are visible to whom, and handle onboarding. Without an admin interface, that means direct database edits or custom tooling — which becomes a support burden as you scale.
Capacity management
Power BI Embedded runs on Azure capacity. Managing that capacity — scaling up and down, monitoring usage, avoiding unexpected costs — requires its own tooling and ongoing attention.
Ongoing maintenance
Microsoft updates Power BI and Azure regularly. Your custom solution needs to keep up: API changes, security patches, dependency updates, and feature requests from your users. This is an ongoing engineering cost that's easy to underestimate upfront.
Bottom line
Building your own Power BI Embedded solution gives you maximum flexibility — but comes with real costs in time, engineering effort and ongoing maintenance. For most organizations, the right answer is to use a platform for the infrastructure layer and focus their energy on the analytics itself. If you're unsure which path fits your situation, we're happy to talk it through.
