The Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit and Power Insights: what each does best
Microsoft's CoE Starter Kit is the reference toolkit for a Power Platform Center of Excellence, and many tenants run it well. Power Insights covers some of the same ground and none of some of it. This is a plain account of which does what, written for the administrator who has to decide whether they need one, the other, or both.
LogiSam··7 min read
A Center of Excellence for the Power Platform is a set of practices — knowing what exists, who owns it, what it touches, and what the organisation has decided is acceptable. Microsoft's CoE Starter Kit is the best-known toolkit for those practices: a free, open-source set of solutions you install into your own tenant. Power Insights is a hosted service that reads a tenant from outside. They are built differently, and the differences decide which questions each answers well.
Where they overlap
Both inventory environments, apps, flows, connectors and connections. Both show ownership and sharing. Both can tell you where premium connectors are in use. If the only thing you need is a list, either will give you one — the kit after its first full sync, Power Insights after its first assessment.
What the Starter Kit does that Power Insights does not
- DLP policy impact analysis and editing. The kit models what a data-loss-prevention change would break before you make it. Power Insights shows connector reach but does not model or edit DLP policies.
- Compliance processes. Developer compliance requests, app archival, inactivity notifications, business-justification workflows — the kit runs these as flows inside your tenant, addressed to your makers.
- Maker nurture. Welcome emails, training pathways, the maker assessment. This is a community function, and it needs to run where the makers are.
- Power BI dashboards over its own Dataverse tables, for teams that already report in Power BI.
What Power Insights does that the Starter Kit does not
- Migration planning. Per-app dependency detection, a kanban with stages and notes, refresh plans that scan definitions for SQL statements, SharePoint URLs and Power BI references, and collections that span environments.
- Reading inside packages. Searching
.msappfiles and flow definitions for a string — a hostname, a table name, a stored procedure — across the whole tenant. - Solution creation from a collection. Preflight, publisher choice, conversion of non-solution flows, then a Dataverse solution built from the selection.
- Several tenants from one account, for partners and managed-service providers.
- Nothing installed and nothing to upgrade. The assessment is read-only through admin APIs; there is no solution in your tenant to maintain.
Effort, honestly
| CoE Starter Kit | Power Insights | |
|---|---|---|
| Prerequisites | Dedicated Dataverse environment, service account with admin role, Power Automate premium licence for it, Power BI Pro for dashboards | An administrator account and a browser |
| Initial set-up | Typically 1–3 working days; 1–2 weeks elapsed with approvals | About 10 minutes |
| Ongoing | Monthly releases to import; sync flows to monitor — typically 2–4 hours a month | None on your side |
| Skills | Solution import, Power Automate, Dataverse, Power BI | Using a web application |
Those are typical figures from our own deployments and Microsoft's set-up guidance, not promises. A small tenant with a keen administrator will beat the kit's numbers; a large one with change control will not.
Which to choose
If you need DLP impact analysis, compliance workflows addressed to makers, or a maker community programme, install the Starter Kit — it is good at those and nothing else does them. If you need the inventory today, a migration plan, or to read what is inside the apps, use Power Insights. Many teams run both: the kit for process, Power Insights for the picture. The two do not interfere with each other, because one of them never writes to the tenant.
Keep reading
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