Microsoft Fabric was announced by Microsoft in 2023 immediately sparking a million questions in the Power BI community. Everyone was interested to find out what the key differences of Microsoft Fabric vs Power BI. As of now we already have a lot more information from Microsoft and we can give a more extensive answer.
As a Power BI consultancy, we have had a chance to deliver client projects using both of these technologies. We are summarizing our practical experience in working with them in this article.
In short, Power BI is a part of Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft Fabric is an online platform uniting multiple data processing and analytics technologies whereas Power BI is the business intelligence technology inside of this platform.
Now before we go any further let’s quickly discuss what Microsoft Fabric and Power BI are separately.
Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft that provides interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards. It allows users to connect to various data sources, transform data, and create rich, interactive reports. Power BI offers several licensing options, including a free version, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium
Power BI is famous for its user-friendly interface and powerful data processing capabilities, making it an essential tool for data-driven decision-making. If you want to learn more about Power BI, check out this Ultimate Power BI Guide-Vidi for a helpful guide. It explains everything you need to know in an easy way!
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end data analytics platform designed to unify data management, engineering, and science within the one ecosystem. Before Microsoft Fabric we had multiple separate technologies including Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory, Power BI and Data Activator.
Microsoft Fabric also introduced One Lake which is a data lake where all the data within your organization would live. You don’t need to do anything to set One Lake up, once you publish your data to Microsoft Fabric, it would go to One Lake automatically. This way you can use your Azure Data Factory datasets for Power BI and your Power BI datasets for Azure Synapse. This way you don’t have to apply your data transformation steps multiple times across different technologies.
Flow of data inside One Lake
Microsoft Fabric also provides advanced AI capabilities through Microsoft Co-pilot. You can build dashboards, format them and explore the data inside of your data models by using Microsoft Co-pilot. We recommend watching the official Microsoft demo of Co-pilot inside of Microsoft Fabric below:
Let’s now consider 2 different case studies. The use of Power BI is more appropriate for the first one whereas the second one requires Microsoft Fabric.
Scenario: An organization needs to improve the inventory management process by keeping track of their data and making more data-driven decisions.
Solution: The company uses Power BI to create interactive and automated management reports that analyze the inventory management process. These reports were built by a single data analyst and shared with the team of 5 people in the operations department.
A use-case like this does not require any large-scale implementation to solve the problem that this organization faces. A data analyst can simply load the data to the report, analyze it and provide the management reporting to the operations team.
If the operation team has any new business questions as they work with the Power BI report, they will send an email to the data analyst and ask to create additional analysis. A day later they would receive a new version of their Power BI report with the new graphs.
Scenario: A sales and finance department of a large organization is striving to create a self-service platform. The goal is enable the sales staff to answer their questions from data themselves without requesting more analysis from the finance team.
The finance team also uses the same datasets as the data science team for their analysis. There is some overlap in the way the 2 teams transform data for their analysis
Solution: The organization implements Microsoft Fabric to improve collaboration between teams. As a result shared datasets are prepared and loaded to One Lake. These datasets can now be used by the finance and data science team for their analysis.
The sales team start to use Microsoft Co-pilot to find answers to their data-related questions. Microsoft Co-pilot give the sales-team a chat-like functionality where the sales staff can ask questions and AI responds to them instantly. The sales team can also explore the data themselves by using Microsoft co-pilot to build new graphs and dashboards.
We ‘ve analysed Microsoft Fabric VS Power BI, and noted that both offer distinct advantages for businesses looking to enhance their data analytics capabilities. Power BI excels in data visualization, ease of use, and quick deployment, making it ideal for business users who need to create interactive reports and dashboards. On the other hand, Microsoft Fabric provides a comprehensive data platform with advanced data management, real-time analytics, and extensive AI capabilities, catering to more complex and technical data needs.
If you need help deciding or want solutions using Microsoft Power BI or Microsoft Fabric, we’re here to provide robust and insightful solutions tailored to your business needs.
