Understanding Fabric Licensing (Including Changes Made Through Aug. 2024)

• Microsoft licenses its Fabric collection of data and analytics services as a suite, which can help optimize usage and cost.
• Purchasing options vary depending on length of commitment and other variables that require evaluating trade-offs.
• Fabric deployments can include Power BI, but the licensing relationship has dependencies based on Fabric deployment size.
• Knowing the licensing and purchasing options available can help customers effectively size and scale deployments to control cost.

Microsoft Fabric provides several data and analytics services (called experiences) to import, process, model, and store data for use by machine learning pipelines, Power BI reports, and other types of analytic systems. The Fabric services are licensed together as a suite with all services sharing compute and storage resources, although there is no requirement to use all the services. This configuration simplifies purchasing and removes the need to license the services separately, although using Power BI in a Fabric deployment brings additional user licensing requirements that vary based on the size of the Fabric deployment. To decide among the purchasing options and deployment sizes, customers must consider their expected usage levels, need for flexibility, and Power BI user licensing requirements to choose the ideal licensing approach.