Build or buy
The decision, not the pitch
Building your own Power BI portal is a real option. Here is what it involves.
Power BI Embedded is Microsoft's API for putting reports inside an application of your own, and it is good. It is also only the starting point: a report inside an empty page. Everything that turns that into something you could give a customer has to be built around it. This page lists what that is, says plainly when building is the right call, and then explains what a ready-made portal changes.
What building involves
Authentication and access
How people sign in, how their identity maps to what they may see, and generating an embed token per request with the right row-level security identity. It has to be correct from the first day, because the failure mode is one customer seeing another's data.
Keeping customers apart
A workspace per customer, or one model with row-level security, and the code that enforces whichever you choose. The decision is easy to make implicitly and expensive to change later.
The interface
Power BI Embedded gives you a report inside whatever you build around it. Navigation, branding, responsive layout, a home page, a way to switch reports: all of it is yours to design, build and keep consistent.
Administration
Adding people, giving them roles, deciding who sees which pages, removing leavers. Without an admin interface this becomes database edits, and whoever can do those becomes the bottleneck for every new customer.
Capacity
Everything runs on a Fabric capacity you pay Microsoft for. Sizing it, pausing it when nobody is using it, watching consumption and avoiding a surprise bill is its own ongoing job.
Maintenance
Power BI, the embedding SDK and Azure all change on their own schedules. Dependency updates, API changes, security patches and the feature requests your users will have: this is an engineering cost that continues for as long as the portal exists.
Build it yourself when…
- Analytics is the product you sell, and the experience has to be integrated with your application's own logic rather than sit beside it.
- You have engineers who know Power BI Embedded, and the capacity to keep the portal maintained for years, not just to launch it.
- You have requirements no platform can meet: an unusual identity setup, a proprietary infrastructure constraint, or an interface pattern that has to be exactly yours.
- You operate at a scale where a subscription genuinely costs more than the team you would need. That threshold exists, and it is higher than most people first assume.
Use a ready-made portal when…
- You need to be live in days rather than after a development project, and the reports are ready now.
- Your organisation's strength is the analytics, not the software around it, and you would rather spend the effort on the reports.
- You share analytics with clients, partners, franchisees or members as part of a wider relationship, not as a software product with its own roadmap.
- You want a known monthly cost rather than an engineering estimate, and you want someone else to carry the maintenance.
- You want the data and the portal to stay in your own Azure subscription, under your own control.
Side by side
| Build it yourself | Embedsy Portal | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | A development project, typically months | Days |
| Sign-in and access control | Designed and built by you | Built in: Microsoft accounts, roles, page access |
| Keeping customers apart | Designed and enforced by you | Roles and row-level security, either model |
| Branded interface | Front-end development | Ready, with your branding and domain |
| Administration | An admin tool you build, or database edits | Built in |
| Maintenance | Ongoing engineering, indefinitely | Carried by the platform |
| Flexibility | Total | Configuration, plus custom development where needed |
| Where it runs | Your Azure subscription | Your Azure subscription |
| Capacity cost | Paid to Microsoft | Paid to Microsoft, not to us |
What stays yours either way
Both routes sit on the same Microsoft foundation, so the things that matter most do not change with the decision. Your reports and semantic models are yours. Your row-level security roles are yours. Your Fabric capacity is yours and billed to you by Microsoft. With Embedsy the portal itself also runs in your Azure subscription, so there is no third environment your data passes through. The decision is about who builds and maintains the layer around those things, not about who holds them.
Common questions
Is it cheaper to build a Power BI portal ourselves?
It depends on what you count. The Power BI Embedded API is free to use and the capacity costs the same either way, so building has no licence cost. What it has is engineering time to build and, more significantly, engineering time to maintain for as long as the portal exists. Building is cheaper when you already employ engineers with capacity to spare and analytics is central to your product. It is more expensive than it looks when the maintenance is counted.
Does using a platform mean giving up control of our data?
Not with Embedsy. The portal deploys into your own Azure subscription, alongside your own Power BI tenant and capacity. Your data does not pass through an Embedsy environment, and the capacity is billed to you by Microsoft directly.
Can we start with a platform and build our own later?
Yes. Both approaches sit on Microsoft's app-owns-data embedding model, so your reports, semantic models, row-level security roles and capacity carry over unchanged. What you would build is the layer around them. Starting with a platform is a reasonable way to learn what your users actually need before committing engineers to it.
What if we need something the platform does not do?
Custom development is part of what we offer. In practice the question is whether the gap is a feature the portal should have, in which case it often gets built into the product, or something specific to you, in which case it is scoped and quoted as a project.
Comparing more than these two? Six ways to share Power BI externally, compared covers Publish to web, guest users, secure embed and email subscriptions as well.
If the gap is something specific to you, see custom development. For what the platform side of the table looks like in practice, see the Embedsy Portal, and for the capacity cost that applies either way, our Fabric and Power BI Embedded pricing guide.
Talk it through before you decide
Tell us what you are trying to deliver and to whom. If building is the better fit for you, we will say so.
Prefer a live walkthrough? Book a free demo