Microsoft Fabric and the Future of Power BI

Microsoft Fabricis a software as a service (SaaS) platform that lets users get, create, share, and visualize data. It builds off of the success of Power BI, most notably by adding backend database and data warehousing capabilities that were previously unavailable when working Power BI.

With the emergence of Microsoft Fabric as Microsoft’s end-to-end data engineering and analytics solution, Power BI’s role in this space should be reviewed.

Microsoft Fabric offers several features and workloads that cover the diverse stages of storing, processing, and analyzing data. These workloads include:

• Data Engineering: Create lakehouses and operationalize workflows to build, transform, and share your data estate.

• Data Factory: Ingest, transform, and orchestrate data.

• Data Science: Detect trends, identify outliers, and predict values using machine learning.

• Data Warehouse: Combine multiple sources in a traditional warehouse for analytics.

• Databases: Create and manage databases with tools to insert, query, and extract data.

• Industry Solutions: Use out-of-the-box industry data solutions.

• Real-Time Intelligence: Process, monitor, and analyze streaming data.

• Power BI: Create reports and dashboards to make data-driven decisions.

Microsoft Fabric Trial

As of March 2026, you can create a Microsoft account and enroll in Power BI and Fabric trials.

Purchasing Microsoft Fabric

If you take the step of deciding to purchase Fabric, you will need an Azure subscription. This will require you to create a free Azure account.

A Fabric subscription allows you to access Fabric workloads with charges accruing based on resource consumption.

Type of Fabric Licenses

There are two types of Fabric licenses:

• Capacity license - An organizational license that provides a pool of resources for Fabric operations. Capacity licenses are divided into stock keeping units (SKUs). Each SKU provides a different number of capacity units (CUs) which are used to calculate the capacity's compute power. Capacity licenses are most suitable for organizations that have hundreds to thousands of employees.

• Per user license- Per user licenses allow users to work in Fabric. Per user licenses are most suitable for organizations that have 100 or less employees.