Problem
We’re a relatively small shop that has been using Power BI for our analytical needs for years now. We’re very pleased with the product, but the recent introduction of Microsoft Fabric has made us a bit anxious. When comparing Microsoft Fabric vs Power BI, it all seems very complex and we’re not even sure we need it. What will happen with Power BI? Will it be replaced with Fabric?
Solution
Power BI is a popular data visualization and business intelligence tool by Microsoft that has been around for about a decade. It allows you to create reports, charts, and dashboards and share them inside a cloud environment known as the Power BI Service. For years, it has been consistently in the Leader in the Magic Quadrant of Gartner. It has widespread adoption, mainly because it’s easy to use and has a low price point, making it an ideal tool for self-service analytics.
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft’s new cloud data platform, introduced in 2023. Like Power BI, it tries to democratize data and make it easier for users to get things done in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) manner. Fabric allows you to build modern data platforms using services such as lakehouses, warehouses, SQL databases, Spark/Python notebooks, etc.
What do these two platforms have in common? Fabric is – like Power BI – a cloud platform. Even more, it’s hosted in the exact same service as Power BI. If you browse to app.powerbi.com and log into the Power BI service, it seems like you’re also logging into the Fabric environment. Both products are managed in the same browser experience, and this might lead to confusion by people who were exclusively working with Power BI before. Their familiar environment suddenly has different colors (green instead of yellow), there is a whole new bunch of icons, and when you open the service, the Fabric icon is shown instead of the Power BI icon.
In this tip, we will try to shed some light on the different roles of Power BI and Fabric, and hopefully take away most of the confusion.
Power BI is Part of Fabric
Once Microsoft Fabric was released, Power BI became part of the platform. Fabric offers multiple services, and Power BI is one of them. (It’s also part of the Power Platform at the same time, which can be a bit confusing).
If you come from the Power BI world, you might look at it as if Fabric is a big extension of Power BI. Suddenly, your platform isn’t limited to self-service data analytics and lightweight ETL (with dataflows Gen1). Instead, you have a whole suite of tools available that allow you to do so much more with your data.
This might seem overwhelming at first because some of these services are probably not directly relevant to your current function role. You have two options:
- Ignore Fabric and carry on with Power BI just like you’ve always had, or
- Try to understand what these additional services offer and how they can help your company realize its goals.
Both options are perfectly fine. People with less of a technical affinity might not want to write Spark notebooks or dabble with SQL in a warehouse. On the other hand, people coming from a technical space who have been building data platforms before (using tools such as Integration Services, SQL Server, Azure Data Factory, Databricks, Snowflake, etc.) will probably be much more at ease with the Fabric data platform.
Most of the services in Fabric are in some way or another available in Azure, and the similarities with Azure Synapse Analytics are not that farfetched. For those people, Fabric is just another cloud data platform, but this time more centralized and with a bigger focus on SaaS.
In the beginning of Microsoft Fabric, personas were used to differentiate between the various workloads in the service. After some feedback, they were reduced to only two: Fabric and Power BI. If you only want to use Power BI, make sure this persona is selected in the bottom left corner.
Will Fabric replace Power BI?
The answer is no. Power BI is a crucial part of the Fabric platform. But who knows? After some time, Power BI will be embedded more and more into Fabric. Will Power BI Desktop stay yellow and keep its own icon? Time will tell.
You Can Turn Off Fabric
If you’re using Power BI and have no desire to use any Fabric features, no problem. If you have a Power BI Pro or Premium-per-user (PPU) workspace, you can just carry on like before. To use Fabric, you need to create a capacity in Azure. If there are no capacities, you can’t use Fabric except for the Fabric trial.
You can even go a step further and disable the option to create Fabric items in the tenant settings found in the Admin portal:
It’s also possible to limit the use of the trial:
It’s a good idea to browse through the various tenant settings from time to time as they tend to change occasionally.
What About Licensing?
We’ve mentioned it a couple of times before: you can keep using Power BI like before. This is true when using Power BI Pro or PPU. However, if you’re using a Power BI Premium capacity (P-SKU), this is not entirely correct. Premium capacities are retired and should be replaced with Fabric capacities (F64 or higher). For more information, check out this blog post: Important update coming to Power BI Premium licensing.
If you replace your Power BI Premium capacity with a Fabric capacity, you can still do the same in Power BI and enjoy all the additional Fabric features. The Fabric capacities are more expensive if you purchase them “pay-as-you-go.” But, if you use reserved pricing, the cost should be about the same as a Premium capacity.
Conclusion
Power BI is now part of the Microsoft Fabric data platform and not going away anytime soon. Existing Power BI users can carry on with business like before. Only Power BI Premium capacities need to migrate to Fabric capacities. If you do purchase a Fabric capacity, it is worth checking out what all those powerful services can do for you.
Next Steps
- There have been interesting discussions online about Fabric and Power BI, such as this LinkedIn post, Reddit thread, and Bluesky discussion. Let us know what your thoughts are on this topic in the comments!
- If you want to learn more about Power BI, check out this online training or this overview for more tips.
- You can find an overview of all Fabric tips here.
