Choosing Power BI in a Fabric-Centric World: A Guide for New and Existing Customers

• Choosing the right Power BI back-end platform (or platforms) dictates where customers spend most of their Power BI budget.
• Platform selection requires combing through a matrix of features, scaling, and purchasing options.
• The decision process has not changed with Fabric’s involvement and still requires full analysis to avoid mistakes.
• Most Premium customers will be forced to migrate to Fabric and should evaluate new purchasing options to control cost.

Power BI is Microsoft’s primary business intelligence (BI) and reporting platform. From a cost perspective, the most important process in choosing Power BI is deciding on which combination of Power BI platforms are required, based on their differences in features, data limits, and the ability to scale and grow. The back-end platform is also where customers will spend most of their Power BI budget and where administrators spend most of their time managing deployments. 

Recently, Power BI was added as a component to Microsoft Fabric, a new data and analytics platform. In this transition, Fabric has taken over some of Power BI’s licensing options, which impacts existing customers who must reevaluate the right Power BI deployment purchasing options using Fabric.