What is report bursting in Power BI? Why is it important?
In Power BI, 'report bursting' refers to the process of running a single report, filtering it for different recipients (e.g., by region, manager or department), and automatically distributing those personalized versions.
Businesses routinely need to send reports to their stakeholders. Automating report bursting enables consistent and reliable business engagement and allows business intelligence and reporting teams to focus on analysis and insights rather than repetitive manual tasks. BI Helper is a SaaS application that automates report bursting in Power BI.
Does Power BI offer any automated report bursting options?
Power BI offers two methods to automate report bursting and deliver user-specific PDF or Power Point files to users - Subscribe to email and with Power Automate.
This article covers Subscribe to email and compares it with BI Helper. For a comparison of report bursting using Power Automate versus BI Helper, see this article.
Users with Power BI licenses can subscribe to reports and dashboards from Power BI Service. Every subscriber needs a Power BI Pro ($14 per month per user), Premium Per User ($24) or Premium capacity/ Fabric (starts at $4,995 per month) license.
Premium Per User or Premium/ Fabric licensees receive the complete Power BI report as a multi-page PDF or Power Point attachment to their email. However, external subscribers (e.g., customers and vendors) need Premium capacity/ Fabric licensing to be subscribed to email.
Power BI Pro users only get one selected report page embedded in an email along with a link to the report URL in Power BI Service. This works for simple cases when users need to view a single page of a report with a common information set. It fails when report recipients need personalized versions filtered for them.
For personalized reports, the Power BI report needs to be saved multiple times with different filter values and individually subscribed for each recipient. Further, Power BI allows only 24 subscriptions per report. Besides being a tedious and error-prone manual process, this limit is a serious constraint even for low volume reporting.
For details on Subscribe to email, see this Microsoft Learn article.
BI Helper is a browser-based application which generates and distributes PDF and Power Point reports from Power BI. It is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and supports scheduled and on-demand report delivery.
BI Helper is integrated with Power BI and delivers multi-page PDF/ PPTX files as email attachments to internal and external users. Report recipients do not need Power BI licenses, making it highly cost-effective. The report sender needs one Power BI Pro license at $14 per month, and a BI Helper plan starting at $50 per month. There is no restriction on the number of recipients.
BI Helper is easy to use, and scales from a handful of reports to enterprise volumes of 1,000 PDF/ PPTX per hour. Advanced features include email authentication, secure access, automated filter input and workflow automation.
Filter values and recipient email IDs can be uploaded to BI Helper in an Excel file, making the process fast and error-free.
Here is a quick comparison matrix of BI Helper and Power BI > Subscribe to email.
Feature BI Helper Subscribe to email
Filter and email input Automated/ batch Manual
Monthly cost $64 $700
(for 50 subscribers)
Multi-page PDF/ PPTX Yes PPU/ Premium capacity only
External subscribers Yes Premium capacity/ Fabric only
Subscriptions per report No limit 24 users
Advanced features Yes No
Given the limitations described above, Subscribe to email is not feasible for medium and large volume report bursting, while BI Helper scales easily to support all reporting volumes.
While Subscribe to email may work for low volume reporting, BI Helper offers far better features and benefits. It is secure, easy to use and cost-effective and delivers reports to external users with no licensing costs or security overhead.
Learn more about BI Helper and sign up for your 7-day free trial!
