In this I would like to go through some detailed comparisons between Reporting Services, and Power View. That I’ve chosen to focus on Power View rather than Power BI as a whole because Power View is the primary visualization component within Power BI.
Overview:
| Reporting Services | Power View / Power BI |
Primary purpose | Traditional structured reporting (pre-defined queries and drill paths) | Data discovery / interactive exploration |
Architectural mode | Native Mode Or SharePoint Mode | Power View for Excel Or Power BI Designer Or Power View for SharePoint Or Both Excel and Power BI Design can be used standalone or in conjunction with the Power BI portal (SaaS cloud app) |
Installation components | Native Mode: Report Manager with ReportServer SharePoint Mode: SharePoint with ReportServer Client: Visual Studio with SSDT or BIDS And or Report Builder (click-once app) | Power View for Excel (enabled in Excel) Or Power BI Designer (standalone download) Or Power View for SharePoint (part of SSRS in SharePoint) |
Features:
| Reporting Services | Power View / Power BI |
Parameterization | Parameter pane | Slicers (placed on the report body) Or Filters pane (page level or for individual table/chart) Or
|
Color palette | Standard color selections for individual charts
Can customize colors using custom color palettes, expressions, or custom code | Style selections applicable to entire report |
Pixel-perfect formatting control | Yes | No |
Switch chart types on the fly | No (potential workaround with parameterization and show/hide properties) | Yes |
Interactive cross-filtering and highlighting behavior | No | Yes |
Calculations and expressions | Many options within the dataset, expressions, and custom code | Straightforward options (Sum, Avg, Min, Max, Count) |
Built-in maps | Bubble map, Filled map, Line map, Marker map, Custom ESRI shapefile | Bubble map, Filled map, Uses Bing Maps API |
Multiple data sources allowed per individual report / dashboard | Yes (one data source per dataset is general rule, though a tablix expression can reference another dataset and/or lookups can be utilized) | No (workaround is to integrate data first in underlying data model) |
Shared datasets (i.e., reusable queries across multiple reports / dashboards) | Yes (embedded dataset can be promoted to be a shared dataset) | Yes (In V2, datasets published to the Power BI service are independent objects from reports and dashboards |
Shared report elements (i.e., reusable charts and tables across multiple reports / dashboards) | Yes (report parts which are elements such as tables, charts, gauges, images, maps, parameters, etc. published for reuse) | Yes (Power BI v2 portal supports the ability to ‘pin’ a report element onto one or more dashboards after the report has been published to the Power BI site) |
KPI repository | Indirectly (a KPI can be used from the underlying SSAS or Power Pivot data model, or an indicator can be defined inside of an individual report) | Indirectly (a KPI can be referenced from the underlying SSAS or Power Pivot data model) |
Drill-down (additional detail on the same report) | Yes | Yes (basic; affects single object on page only) |
Drill-through (additional detail on a different report) | To another report Or To custom URL (incl to other reporting tools) | Custom URL (only on Dashboard tiles) |
Alerts | Yes (data-driven alerts in SharePoint mode only) | Yes (simple high/low alerting on a single numeric tile - available in v2 mobile app only) |
Subscriptions / automated report delivery | Yes(E-mail, file share, SharePoint doc library, preload a cache) | No |
Snapshot reporting | Yes (report execution snapshot to improve performance, or report history snapshot to store report as of a point in time) | No (even a Power Point export from SharePoint retains a live connection so it’s not an ideal tool for a point-in-time snapshot) |
Pinning of report elements | No | Yes (in Power BI v2 portal, an item on a report can be pinned to one or more dashboard pages) |
Support for Analysis Services Multidimensional | Yes (requires a flattened dataset with only two axes) | Yes if data brought into embedded model first (i.e., not direct connect in Power BI V2). Live connectivity supported in Power View for SharePoint |
Support for Analysis Services Tabular | Yes | Yes |