# Microsoft Power BI — Business Intelligence & Dashboards

Microsoft Power BI by Microsoft Corporation holds a panel rating of 2/5 from 6 AI judges (category median 3/5), as of 2026-11-01. Provenance: Rest of world; sovereignty: not determined.

- Vendor: Microsoft Corporation (https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/power-platform/products/power-bi)
- Category: [Business Intelligence & Dashboards](https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence.md)
- Provenance (editorial classification): Rest of world
- Canonical page: https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/microsoft-power-bi
- Alternatives: https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/microsoft-power-bi/alternatives ([markdown](https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/microsoft-power-bi/alternatives.md))
- Data as of: 2026-11-06 · evaluated 2026-11-01 · oldest source captured 2026-11-01

**AI-generated.** Every score, rationale and verdict here is written by a panel of AI judges from public evidence — an analysis, not a hands-on test. Every fact quotes the vendor page it was read from. No score can be bought. How scores are made: https://whats-best.ai/methodology

## At a glance

- Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
- Headquarters: Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 1 Nov 2026
- Data hosting: Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 1 Nov 2026
- Free plan: Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 1 Nov 2026

## The panel's verdict

Power BI is strongest here on governance and portability, where scores cluster at 5–6: Report Server is a documented on-premises edition behind the company firewall, and a REST API covers administration, users, gateways, pipelines and service principals. Sharing and embedding follows at 4–6, with embedding endpoints and tokens, a.NET SDK and embedded capacities managed through Azure APIs. Self-service and modelling scores cluster at 3 — drag-and-drop Desktop authoring and a Power Query connection layer are shown, and the captured pages carry no public information on a shared metric layer, a SQL editor, natural-language questions or version-controlled definitions. Data connectivity and dashboards hold a flat 4 — a documented connector framework that names no individual connector, and authoring basics without chart, filter or format detail. The genuine split is sovereignty, spanning 3–6: judges weighed the published data processing addendum and the EU Data Boundary's fifteen named European datacentre countries against a US provider of record and conditional scope. Pricing transparency scores span 2–3: the product page states no prices, only a "Preise anzeigen" link.

**Speaks for it:**
- Power BI Report Server is a documented on-premises edition that distributes reports behind the company firewall, with folders and access management.
- The REST API covers administration, users, groups, gateways, capacities, dataflows, pipelines and template apps, authenticated through Azure AD with service-principal support.
- Embedding is documented as a first-class capability — embedding endpoints and tokens, a.NET SDK, and Power BI Embedded capacities managed through Azure Resource Manager APIs.
- Both interactive and paginated report types are documented, scaling to thousands of users, with consumption on web and mobile devices.
- Each data-source article in the Power Query documentation states whether DirectQuery live queries are supported, and caching behaviour is explained.

**Held against it:**
- No individual connector, refresh interval or multi-source combination is named on the captured pages, so fit against a specific warehouse or ERP cannot be checked.
- The captured pages give no public information on a shared metric layer, a SQL editor, natural-language questions or version-controlled definitions.
- Scheduled email or chat delivery and export to PDF or Excel are not described on the captured pages.
- Row-level security, single sign-on for report readers, audit logs and export of dashboards and definitions on exit are not described on the captured pages.
- The provider of record is Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, and the EU Data Boundary applies only to designated services under signup, billing and configuration conditions, excludes Multi-Geo customers and reserves limited continued transfers outside the boundary; no subprocessor list or security certification appears on the captured pages.

**Best for:**
- You need reporting on your own servers behind the firewall — Power BI Report Server is a documented on-premises edition with folders and access management.
- You are embedding analytics into your own product — embedding endpoints, embedding tokens, a.NET SDK and Azure-managed embedded capacities are documented.
- You administer BI programmatically — the REST API covers administrator operations, users, gateways, pipelines and service principals under Azure AD.
- You need paginated, print-ready reports alongside interactive dashboards — both report types are documented, scaling to thousands of users.

**Avoid if:**
- You must verify a connector for a specific warehouse, ERP or accounting system before signing — the captured pages name no individual connector and state no refresh interval.
- You need one centrally defined metric reused across departments — self-service and modelling scores cluster at 3, with visual authoring and Power Query the extent of the public evidence.
- Your compliance requires that no customer data leave the EU under any circumstance — the EU Data Boundary pages reserve limited continued transfers and state that request and response data may be processed in datacentres outside the tenant's home region.
- You plan to serve every source you model in Desktop through Report Server — some data sources are documented as unsupported by Report Server after publishing.

## Scores by judge and criterion

Scores out of 5, each judge scoring independently against the published rubric (v1). "n/r" = not rated: the vendor publishes no price, or the judge found no public information on that criterion.

| Criterion | The Finance Controller | The Managing Director | The Data Analyst | The IT Administrator | The SaaS Product Lead | The Skeptic |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Data sources, connectors & refresh | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 |
| Dashboards, charts & interactivity | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 |
| Self-service analysis & shared metrics | 1.5/5 | 1.5/5 | 1.5/5 | 1.5/5 | 1.5/5 | 1.5/5 |
| Sharing, scheduled reports & embedding | 2.5/5 | 2.5/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 3/5 | 2/5 |
| Access control, administration & portability | 3/5 | 2.5/5 | 3/5 | 2.5/5 | 3/5 | 2.5/5 |
| European sovereignty | 2.5/5 | 2/5 | 3/5 | 2.5/5 | 2.5/5 | 1.5/5 |
| Pricing transparency | n/r | n/r | n/r | n/r | n/r | n/r |
| **Weighted verdict** | **2/5** | **2/5** | **2/5** | **2.5/5** | **2.5/5** | **2/5** |

### The judges

- **The Finance Controller** (v1.0): Head of controlling at a 250-person machine builder in Baden-Württemberg. Closes the month from DATEV, the ERP, the CRM and a dozen Excel files that colleagues still mail around, and spends two days a month copying numbers into the management report. Wants the sources connected and refreshed on a schedule, one definition of contribution margin on every page, a report that prints cleanly for the advisory board, and data that stays where the auditors expect it.
- **The Managing Director** (v1.0): Runs a 40-person service company with HubSpot, an online accounting tool, a help desk and a project management app, and no one whose job is data. Wants revenue, pipeline, utilisation and open tickets on one screen in the office and on their phone, set up in an afternoon from ready-made connectors, a weekly summary in the inbox on Monday morning, and a price that does not double when the whole team wants to look.
- **The Data Analyst** (v1.0): The first data hire at a Hamburg e-commerce scale-up, with orders, marketing spend and customer data landing in a PostgreSQL warehouse every night. Answers the same question three times a week because every department computes revenue differently. Wants a SQL editor and a query builder for colleagues, metrics defined once in a model that lives in Git, natural-language questions that show the query they ran, and a way out that does not mean rebuilding every dashboard.
- **The IT Administrator** (v1.0): IT lead at a mid-sized healthcare supplier whose reports touch customer, pricing and employee data. Is asked to approve a BI tool after a department has already started a trial. Reads where extracts and caches are stored, whether the tool reaches the ERP database through a gateway or wants it opened to the internet, whether sales sees only its own region, and whether single sign-on and an audit log come with the plan or behind a sales call. Prefers an edition they can run themselves.
- **The SaaS Product Lead** (v1.0): Product lead at a Vienna software company selling fleet management to 600 business customers, each of whom asks for reports the team keeps building by hand. Wants dashboards embedded in the product under its own brand, every customer seeing only their own rows, customers building their own views without a ticket, and an embedding licence whose cost they can put into the product's price before signing.
- **The Skeptic** (v1.0): Has seen "connect any data source" on a tool with eight connectors and a CSV upload, "self-service" that ends with every department defining revenue its own way, "free viewers" that need a paid licence to open a shared link, and "AI insights" that never show the query. Asks where the extracts are stored, whether dashboards and definitions can be exported in a format another tool reads — and what leaving would cost.

## European sovereignty — proven facts

Built only from facts on the vendor's own pages; a dimension we could not prove is left open, never scored as zero. Headline: not determined.

| Dimension | Finding | Points | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legal entity | Not determined | — | — |
| Hosting location | Not determined | — | — |
| Hosting options | Not determined | — | — |
| Open source | Not determined | — | — |
| Data processing agreement | Not determined | — | — |
| Transfer impact assessment | Not determined | — | — |

## Key facts

Each fact is the vendor's own statement, cited to the source page it was read from ([S*n*] → Sources).

**Compliance**
- DPA addendum to product terms: The DPA is an addendum to the Product Terms site (formerly OST); current and archived editions are available for download [S6]
- DPA applies to subscriptions: Data processing and security terms for products subscribed under the Product Terms site are defined in the Microsoft Online Services Data Protection Addendum (DPA) [S6]
- Pseudonymization GDPR art4: pseudonymization defined per GDPR Art. 4(5) [S5]
- Usk membership: Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited is a member of the Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK) [S7]

**Hosting**
- Azure arm required: yes [S5]
- Azure regional config: yes [S5]
- Datacenter locations: Austria · Belgium · Denmark · Finland · France · Germany · Greece · Ireland · Italy · Netherlands · Norway · Poland · Spain · Sweden · Switzerland [S5]
- Dynamics power platform config: tenant + all environments in EU/EFTA macro region geo AND billing address in an EU Data Boundary country required [S5]
- EU boundary countries: Liechtenstein · Iceland · Norway · Switzerland · 27 [S5]
- M365 multi geo exclusion: yes [S5]
- M365 signup location: EU Data Boundary applies to customers with signup location in EU or EFTA [S5]

**Integrations**
- Dotnet sdk: .NET SDK available as next step resource [S3]
- Operation groups: Administrator · Apps · Verfügbare Features · Kapazitäten · Dashboards · Dataflow-Speicherkonten · Dataflows · Datasets · Einbettungstoken · Gateways · Gruppen · Importe · Pipelines · Push-Datasets · Berichte · Vorlagen-Apps · Benutzer [S3]

**Legal**
- Not representative: Microsoft Deutschland GmbH is not the provider of Microsoft products or services and not authorized representative of Microsoft Corporation [S7]
- Provider: Microsoft Corporation · One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399, USA [S7]
- Publisher: Microsoft 2026 [S1]
- Reception representative juschg: Empfangsbevollmächtigter for JuSchG notifications · SKW Schwarz Rechtsanwälte, Wittelsbacher Platz 1, 80333 München [S7]
- Ubi: 600 413 485 [S7]

**Pricing**
- Link only: Preisliste nur per Link ("Preise anzeigen"), keine Preise auf der Seite [S1]

**Product**
- API capabilities: manage Power BI content · admin operations · embed Power BI content [S3]
- API purpose: REST API provides service endpoints for embedding, management, governance and user resources [S3]
- Auth azure ad required: register an Azure AD application to use the Power BI REST APIs [S3]
- Auth methods: Azure AD v1.0 (ADAL) · Microsoft Identity Platform v2.0 (MSAL) [S3]
- Behind firewall: yes [S1]
- Cloud compatible: yes [S1]
- Cross region processing: request/response data may be processed in datacenters outside the tenant's home region [S3]
- Customer data definition: customer data excludes Professional Services data and configuration information [S5]
- Data storage location check: The 'Info' link in the help pane shows the default region where your data is stored ('Ihre Daten sind gespeichert in') [S4]
- Desktop authoring: Power BI Desktop · yes [S1]
- Directquery documentation: Each data source article in Power Query docs describes connector capabilities such as DirectQuery support; if not listed, unsupported [S2]
- Embedded capacity APIs: Power BI Embedded capacities managed via Power BI Embedded Azure Resource Manager REST APIs [S3]
- EU data boundary scope: Azure · Dynamics 365 · Power Platform · Microsoft 365 [S5]
- Free trial: free_trial_download · yes [S1]
- Groups workspaces: workspaces are referred to as groups in some APIs [S3]
- Home region definition: A Fabric home region is the Azure datacenter region linked to the tenant, selected when the tenant was created [S4]
- Home region importance: Home region matters for feature availability, data residency, performance and compliance [S4]
- Ie10 auth requirement: Many Power BI Desktop data connectors require Internet Explorer 10 or higher for authentication [S2]
- Included in fabric: yes [S1]
- Last updated: 2025-02-26 [S5]
- Limited transfers: limited circumstances allow transfers outside the EU Data Boundary [S5]
- Log retention minimization: yes [S5]
- Mobile and web consumption: web · mobile_devices [S1]
- Multi region capacities: Workspaces may use capacities in different regions [S4]
- Multiple queries behavior: Power BI Desktop and Power BI service may send multiple queries to retrieve schema info or data depending on caching; intentional [S2]
- On premises reporting: Power BI Report Server ist die lokale Lösung für Berichterstellung [S1]
- Power query connectivity: Power BI uses Power Query to connect to data sources; connectors documented in Power Query docs [S2]
- Professional services data at rest: yes [S5]
- Publish and manage: yes · yes · yes [S1]
- Report server limitation: Some data sources appear in the Power BI Report Server-optimized Power BI Desktop but are not supported by Power BI Report Server after publishing [S2]
- Report types: yes · yes · yes [S1]
- Service principal support: scopes not required when using a service principal · yes [S3]
- Throttling: yes [S3]
- Throttling 429: Retry-After · 429 [S3]

## Questions

### Is Microsoft Power BI European?

No. whats-best.ai classifies Microsoft Power BI as Rest of world.

### Where does Microsoft Power BI store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 1 Nov 2026.

### Does Microsoft Power BI have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 1 Nov 2026.

### What are the best alternatives to Microsoft Power BI?

As of 1 Nov 2026, the panel rates [Metabase (3.5/5)](https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/metabase), [Preset (Apache Superset) (3.5/5)](https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/preset) and [Holistics (3/5)](https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/holistics) highest among the other 15 Business Intelligence & Dashboards products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is [Luzmo](https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/luzmo) (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: [how scores are made](https://whats-best.ai/methodology#ordering). The full list, with European products first: [Microsoft Power BI alternatives](https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/microsoft-power-bi/alternatives).

## Head-to-head

- [Microsoft Power BI vs Qlik Sense (Qlik Cloud Analytics)](https://whats-best.ai/compare/microsoft-power-bi-vs-qlik-sense.md)
- [Microsoft Power BI vs Google Data Studio (Looker Studio)](https://whats-best.ai/compare/looker-studio-vs-microsoft-power-bi.md)

## What this page leaves out

- 3 compliance facts could not be confirmed on the vendor’s page as captured and were left out of this page and of the panel’s material.
- 2 product facts could not be confirmed on the vendor’s page as captured and were left out of this page and of the panel’s material.
- 1 support fact could not be confirmed on the vendor’s page as captured and was left out of this page and of the panel’s material.
- 4 sovereignty dimensions could not be confirmed on the vendor’s own pages and are shown as unknown.
- 6 of the readings below were written against an earlier fact sheet — a fact has been corrected, added or pulled since. Until the panel next runs on this product you are reading the older judgement.

## Sources

- [S1] Features page (Report Server, on-premise): https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/power-platform/products/power-bi/report-server (checked 2026-11-01)
- [S2] Documentation (data sources): https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/power-bi/connect-data/power-bi-data-sources (checked 2026-11-01)
- [S3] API documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/rest/api/power-bi/ (checked 2026-11-01)
- [S4] Documentation (tenant home region): https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/fabric/admin/find-fabric-home-region (checked 2026-11-01)
- [S5] Documentation (EU Data Boundary): https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/privacy/eudb/eu-data-boundary-learn (checked 2026-11-01)
- [S6] Data processing agreement (dpa): https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/view/Microsoft-Products-and-Services-Data-Protection-Addendum-DPA (checked 2026-11-01)
- [S7] Legal notice: https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/rechtliche-hinweise/impressum (checked 2026-11-01)

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Cite as: whats-best.ai, "Microsoft Power BI — Business Intelligence & Dashboards", AI panel analysis, as of 2026-11-06. https://whats-best.ai/software/business-intelligence/microsoft-power-bi

Corrections: https://whats-best.ai/correct/1258?target=page