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Microsoft Fabric: Features, Capacities, and Saving on Power BI Pro Licenses

May 1, 2025 Comments Off on Microsoft Fabric: Features, Capacities, and Saving on Power BI Pro Licenses

Microsoft is changing the game in analytics with Microsoft Fabric, a unified data platform that extends far beyond Power BI. If your organization relies on Power BI Pro licenses for business intelligence, you might be wondering what Fabric brings to the table. In this article, we’ll explore what Microsoft Fabric is, the feature set it offers, and how its Fabric capacity model (F2 to F64 and beyond) works. We’ll also compare Power BI Pro vs Fabric, and show a concrete example of how an organization with more than 50 Power BI Pro users can save on Power BI licenses by leveraging Fabric capacity with DataTako.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end data platform unifying integration, engineering, warehousing, science, real-time analytics, and BI. It goes beyond Power BI to cover the full data lifecycle—ingestion, storage, transformation, analysis, and visualization. Fabric delivers integrated analytics, OneLake unified storage, AI-driven features, and centralized governance, enabling seamless collaboration without disparate tools.

Key Features of Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric offers a rich feature set that caters to various data roles and tasks:

  • Unified Analytics Workloads: Fabric includes multiple analytics workloads out-of-the-box, such as Data Factory (for data integration pipelines), Data Engineering with Spark (for big data processing), Data Warehouse (for scalable SQL analytics), Real-Time Analytics (for streaming and log analytics), Data Science (integrating machine learning), and Power BI for visualization. All these are accessible in one SaaS platform.
  • OneLake Data Lake: Fabric introduces OneLake, a single, unified data lake storage for all your data. OneLake is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant, eliminating silos and enabling easy data sharing and consistent governance across the organization.
  • Seamless Integration: Fabric deeply integrates with Azure services and Microsoft 365. For example, data from Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, or even third-party sources can be mirrored into Fabric’s OneLake in near real-time. Users can move from data ingestion to ETL to analytics without leaving the Fabric environment.
  • End-to-End Governance and Security: With Fabric, governance is unified (leveraging Microsoft Purview). Security and permissions are consistently applied across all data items in Fabric, so administrators have a central point of control.
  • AI and Advanced Analytics: The platform is infused with AI capabilities. Fabric’s data science experience integrates with Azure Machine Learning, allowing data scientists to build and deploy ML models whose predictions can be infused into Power BI reports for advanced analytics.

In short, Microsoft Fabric can be seen as the “all-in-one” evolution of Power BI and Azure analytics. It provides “end-to-end integrated analytics”, unifying experiences that were formerly separate. This is a big step up from Power BI Pro, which is focused mainly on visualization and sharing of reports.

Fabric Capacities Explained (F2 to F64 and Beyond)

A core concept in Fabric is capacity-based licensing. Instead of licensing individual users for premium features, you allocate a Fabric Capacity- a dedicated pool of compute resources measures in Capacity Units (CU’S). Microsoft offers capacities in various sizes, ranging from F2 (2 CU’s) to F2048 (2048 CU’s). Each capacity size equates to a certain level of performance.

What do these capacities mean? In practice, having a Fabric capacity means you have dedicated resources to run all Fabric workloads (Power BI, dataflows, spark noteboots, etc.) without having to share resources with other tenants (customers). Key benefits of Fabric capacities include the ability to scale up/down as needed and even pause a capacity when not in use, to save costs. Fabric capacites can be purchased in a flexible pay-as-you-go model with no long-term lock-in.

Fabric capacity and Power BI content sharing. However, one critical thing to understand is how capacity size affects Power BI content sharing. Microsoft’s licensing rules state that only capacities of F64 or larger allow you to share Power BI content with free users (users without Pro licenses) inside your organization. In other words, if you have at least an F64 capacity, content in those workspaces can be viewed by anyone in your tenant with a free Fabric license (Viewer role), no Pro license needed. But SKUs smaller than F64 (F2, F4, F8, etc.) still require Pro or PPU licenses for consumers if you share content via the normal Power BI service. This is similar to how Power BI Embedded or Premium Per User work – smaller capacities alone don’t exempt users from needing a license.

Why does this matter? Cost and scale. An F64 capacity delivers powerful features (such as large model sizes up to 100 GB, more frequent refreshes, AI capabilities, etc.) and eliminates the need for each viewer to have a Pro license. But it comes at a price – roughly $8.4k per month for F64 on pay-go. Not every organization can justify that. The good news is Fabric offers smaller capacities (F2, F4, F8, etc.) that cost a fraction of F64, making it accessible to smaller teams. For example, F2 on pay-as-you-go costs only around $260–$270 per month. These smaller SKUs let you dip your toes into Fabric’s features and even run premium Power BI features (like paginated reports, AI visuals) – but by default, you’d still need Pro licenses for your users to consume the content.

This is where creative solutions come in (as we’ll see with DataTako). Some organizations combine a small Fabric capacity with a minimal number of Pro licenses to get the best of both worlds. In fact, one expert notes that an organization was able to use an F2 capacity and reduce the amount of Pro licenses for report views to 0 – while also unlocking Fabric’s additional services. Fabric capacities thus give you flexibility: you can start small and only scale up if needed, and you have options to optimize for cost.

Cost-saving example: 100 Pro users vs. Fabric capacity with DataTako

To make this concrete, let’s consider a specific example. Suppose an organization currently has 100 Power BI Pro licenses to enable its team to create and view reports. Out of these, say 5 are report creators (power users who build datasets and dashboards) and the other 95 are consumers who only view the published reports. This setup costs roughly $1,400 per month (100 users × ~$14 each). What happens if we switch to a Fabric capacity model?

Let’s explore an alternative approach using Microsoft Fabric capacity plus DataTako (a Power BI distribution platform):

  • Fabric Capacity: Instead of 100 Pro licenses, the company could purchase a small Fabric capacity – for example, an F2 or F4 SKU – to host the Power BI content. An F2 capacity costs around $260–$270/month on pay-as-you-go, while F4 would be around $520+. We’ll use F2 for this example. The 5 creators would still need Pro licenses to author and publish content (5 × $14 = $70). The 95 consumers would not have Pro licenses.
  • DataTako Portal: Using DataTako, the organization can share Power BI reports from that capacity to all 95 consumers without requiring each consumer to have a Pro license. DataTako achieves this by leveraging Power BI’s embed capabilities under the hood – effectively, consumers view the reports through a secure, white-labeled web portal with embedded Power BI content. Users won’t require additional Power BI licenses to access shared reports, yet they can still interact with the live reports. In other words, the usual requirement for Pro licenses is removed for viewers.

Now, let’s compare monthly costs:

  • Original approach (100 Pro): ~$1,400 per month in Pro license fees.
  • Fabric + DataTako approach: ~$70 for 5 Pro licenses + ~$263 for F2 capacity = $313. DataTako itself has a subscription cost of 199,- for 100 users, but it’s designed to be cost-effective. In fact, we are confident that you can save up to 60% on licenses with DataTako.

Even after accounting for DataTako’s fee, the total is typically much lower than $1,000. In this scenario, the company could be saving on the order of 60-70% in Power BI licensing costs every month by eliminating 95 Pro licenses. This isn’t just a theoretical calculation – real users have reported significant savings. For example, one Power BI leader noted “we saved 50% in licensing costs by switching from regular licenses to a Fabric capacity using DataTako.”. The larger your viewer base, the bigger the potential savings when you don’t have to pay per user.

Importantly, the 95 consumers in this scenario lose no functionality. They can still securely access the reports they need, either by logging into the DataTako portal or even receiving report links, and they don’t need to be in the corporate Power BI tenant or have any special setup. DataTako handles the heavy lifting of authenticating against Power BI and serves the interactive report to the user. From the user’s perspective, it’s seamless: they click and see the report with all the slicers, filters, and drill-downs working. There are “no licensing issues or complicated permissions” for the organization to worry about. This greatly simplifies distribution, especially to large audiences or external stakeholders.