From insights to impact: Exploring Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and everything in between

Following Fabric’s release, Microsoft announced the retirement of Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs. As per the announcement, existing customers with a renewal date after 1 February 2025 will have to migrate to Fabric capacity at the end of their agreement. You probably have many questions – What is the difference between Power BI and Microsoft Fabric? Should you or should you not migrate to Fabric? Let’s try and understand what Microsoft Fabric migration can mean to your business in this blog. 

Power BI vs Microsoft Fabric – How are they different? 

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence (BI) platform that helps you integrate data from your diverse sources and model it. Power BI helps you simplify huge volumes of data and make it easily consumable for business users. Using the visualization capabilities on Power BI, you can build interactive reports and dashboards to extract actionable insights and make data-driven decisions. 

Types of Power BI licenses

Based on your requirements, as an individual or an enterprise, you can purchase the suitable Power BI license, such as Free per user, Pro, Premium per user, and Premium capacity. The capabilities available to you depend on the license type. Let’s break down the license types and available capabilities from the following table: 

License Type	Key Capabilities
Power BI Free	– Connect to data sources   – Create personal reports and dashboards
Power BI Pro	– All Free capabilities   – Publish and share dashboards and reports – Share and collaborate with other Pro users
Power BI Premium Per User (PPU)	– All Pro capabilities   – Access to Premium features – Share content with PPU users
Power BI Premium Per Capacity (Retiring from 1 Jan 2025)	– Dedicated resources   – Unlimited content sharing for Free users

From 1 February 2025, Power BI Premium Per Capacity users will have to move to a suitable plan on Microsoft Fabric. 

What is Microsoft Fabric?

In March 2023, Microsoft launched a unified data analytics platform, Microsoft Fabric – a repackaging of some best-of-breed data and analytics tools. Fabric solves a very specific challenge for data professionals – complexity. 

A data project requires the seamless integration of numerous tools for data integration, engineering, warehousing, visualization, and governance. Purchasing licenses for each of these tools, integrating them, and managing the infrastructure together is complex and cost-intensive. To address this key challenge, Microsoft stitched together a suite of products, including Azure Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Warehousing, Synapse Real-time Analytics, Power BI, Data Activator, and Purview – all connected to a single data lake called OneLake. With Fabric, you don’t have to worry about complex workflows and high licensing and integration costs.  

Microsoft Fabric pricing

Unlike other platforms, you will have great flexibility with Fabric pricing with the pay-as-you-go and reservations models. All your data and analytics workloads on Fabric consume the same set of Capacity Units (CUs). So, you don’t have to worry about the CUs for each workload individually and can focus on building innovative data solutions. Fabric allows you to scale capacity as needed – you can pause or resume operations on the platform, to optimize costs and achieve higher ROI. 

Are Power BI and Fabric different?

Fabric consolidates Power BI and six other workloads to facilitate end-to-end data management. So, you can do everything you can do on Power BI on Fabric, too. In fact, Fabric is a superset of Power BI and enables you to do even more with your data.  

With Power BI alone, you can only perform data modeling and transformation for visualization. On the other hand, Fabric includes workloads that perform data engineering, processing, and data science too. So, from disparate raw data to advanced analytics, your entire data journey will be more streamlined and faster with Fabric. The end-to-end data platform deeply integrates with Azure and offers great scalability and high performance. 

For business that want to tap into the full potential of their data and drive innovation, Microsoft Fabric offers more advanced capabilities. Each data and analytics solution from Microsoft is good in its own right. Unifying these solutions on the Fabric platform allows you to do even more. For example, with Power BI in Fabric, you can analyze large volumes of streaming data in real time to extract actionable insights. You can enrich your Power BI reports with real-time predictive analytics capabilities using the data science workloads and ML tools on Fabric. 

Migrating from Power BI to Microsoft Fabric – A conscious business choice

Whether to migrate your SKUs from Power BI to Fabric or not is solely dependent on your tailored business needs. If your requirement is only to create and access reports and dashboards on Power BI, you can still use the renowned BI platform even after the retirement of PPC. But, if you want to get more value from your data and drive consistent innovation, migrating to Microsoft Fabric can be a strategic move. 

Migration to Fabric would also bring a couple of benefits. One, you can apply your Fabric consumption against Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). As a Fabric user, you will get exclusive access to Managed Private Endpoints for Spark and Trusted Workspace Access for OneLake Shortcuts. 

With Trusted workspace access, you can securely access your data without exposing it to public networks and enhance performance and scalability. Using Managed Private Endpoints, you can securely access data sources behind firewalls. These features are accessible only to Azure users. 

How to migrate to Microsoft Fabric from Power BI?

When you purchase Microsoft Fabric capacity, you will have all your content on Power BI, including the dashboards, reports, and workspaces. The Power BI user interface, too, will be the same and remain unchanged. Let’s see the migration process in a few simple steps: 

• Log in to the Power BI admin portal. 

• Select and reassign the workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. You’re done. You can also perform bulk assignment of the workspaces to speed up the migration process. 

Even after your Power BI Premium license ends, you can still access your artifacts on Fabric and Power BI for 90 days. This grace period allows you to migrate all your data without the fear of losing it and ensures a smooth and successful migration. 

Fabric capacity is a pool of all the resources allocated to you. You can measure the consumption of your capacity and monitor their performance using the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app. The app offers autoscaling capability to efficiency manage shifting demands. 

Will Power BI Premium per Capacity retirement impact other licensing?

Microsoft confirmed that the end of life for Power BI Premium per Capacity will not have any impact on Free, Pro, or Premium per User licensing. 

Would you need Microsoft Fabric consulting?

The answer is depends. Until your next Power BI Premium license renewal, the decision of migration can hit a pause if you ask us. However, based on your business needs, or the outweighing benefits of fabric, you may want to migrate to Fabric.  

Confused? You can find your answer of whether to migrate or not in a 2-hour free no strings attached consultation with us. We help you discover the possibilities with Fabric in your business and assess your readiness to implement the platform. The expert-led consultation uncovers industry perspectives on Fabric and gives a view of how other businesses are using the unified data and analytics platform. 

To ensure a seamless transition to Fabric from any platforms and maximize value from your data, we at Saxon AI have offering tailored to your organization scope and need. Don’t miss to check out our data migration services.