Forum Discussion
Fabric & powerBI
Hi,
I fail to understand the Fabric and PowerBI relationship. Why we must upgrade PowerBI for using items in Fabric trial ?
Hi dfaber,
When Microsoft Fabric released, it was built on top of Power BI Premium Capacity, so a lot of the infrastrucutre and licensing was re-used.
THe Power BI Premium license (which should at this point be renamed to Fabric premium I think) is the license that allows users to create, share, and view Fabric items.
If the Fabric item is hosted in an F64 or above capacity, the license is not required for viewers.
THis page explains the licensing in more details: Microsoft Fabric concepts - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Hope this helps.
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6 Replies
- tayloramy
Super User
Hi dfaber,
When Microsoft Fabric released, it was built on top of Power BI Premium Capacity, so a lot of the infrastrucutre and licensing was re-used.
THe Power BI Premium license (which should at this point be renamed to Fabric premium I think) is the license that allows users to create, share, and view Fabric items.
If the Fabric item is hosted in an F64 or above capacity, the license is not required for viewers.
THis page explains the licensing in more details: Microsoft Fabric concepts - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Hope this helps.
If you found this helpful, consider giving some Kudos. If I answered your question or solved your problem, mark this post as the solution. Hi dfaber
I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the information provided by users. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.
- Mauro89
Hi dfaber,
Fabric runs on top of Power BI Premium capacity. That’s why enabling the Fabric trial looks like a Power BI upgrade — the same capacity unlocks both Power BI features and all Fabric experiences.
I hope this clarifies it a bit more. If not feel free to add some more context.
BR!
- AntoineW
Hello dfaber,
Just to complete tayloramy and Mauro89 answers, Microsoft Fabric and Power BI are closely related, but they are not the same thing:
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end data platform. It provides everything you need to ingest, store, transform, and analyze data, including data engineering, data science, real-time analytics, and machine learning.
Power BI is the visualization and reporting layer of Fabric. It can be used independently (without Fabric) if you just need dashboards and reports connected to your data sources.
However, when you use Fabric items (Lakehouses, Warehouses, Dataflows Gen2, Notebooks, etc.), they require a Fabric capacity (either a free trial capacity or a paid one).
That is why you must enable the Fabric trial or have a capacity assigned — otherwise, you cannot access these Fabric-specific items.Hope it's more clear !
Best regards,
Antoine
- odtJitendra
Advocate I
Power BI is use for Design and develop Dashboard and report and Microsoft fabric use for end to end solution like ingest the data and user different migration techinics like Data pipelines , Dataflow , Notebook etc.
