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Microsoft Fabric passed 31,000 paying customer organizations in March 2026, less than three years after reaching general availability, making it the fastest-growing data platform in Microsoft’s history. If you run Power BI, Excel, or anything in Azure, Fabric is now the foundation most of your new analytics and planning work will sit on.
This guide covers what Fabric is, how it works, how it compares to Power BI, what it delivers for planning, and where Acterys fits in.
What Is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is a unified software-as-a-service (SaaS) analytics platform. It combines data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, business intelligence, and AI workloads into one environment built on a shared data foundation called OneLake. Fabric replaces the fragmented stack of separate tools most enterprises have accumulated for data movement, storage, analysis, and reporting.
For finance and data teams inside the Microsoft ecosystem, Fabric is the foundation most new analytics and planning work sits on from here forward. Power BI runs inside it, along with Azure Data Factory and the former Synapse Analytics capabilities. Governance and identity flow through a single model across all of them. Microsoft launched Fabric at Build 2023 and made it generally available in November 2023, and adoption accelerated through 2024 and 2025 to make it the platform’s strategic center for enterprise data and analytics.
Key Features of Microsoft Fabric
Fabric is organized around seven core workloads. Each one handles a specific part of the data lifecycle, and all of them share OneLake as the common storage layer.
OneLake: The Unified Data Foundation
OneLake is a single logical data lake built on Azure Data Lake Storage. Every Fabric workload reads from and writes to it, which means data doesn’t get copied between tools. A finance team loading general ledger data and a supply chain team adding inventory data both work inside the same governed environment.
The Seven Core Workloads
Each workload serves a specific user persona, but all of them operate against the same data in OneLake:
- Data Factory handles ingestion and orchestration through over 150 connectors to cloud and on-premises sources, with pipelines and dataflows that move and transform data.
- Data Engineering provides Spark notebooks, lakehouses, and large-scale data transformation for building the pipelines that prepare raw data for analysis.
- Data Warehouse delivers T-SQL-based analytics for structured data, separating compute from storage so query performance scales independently.
- Data Science supports machine learning model training, deployment, and experiment tracking, integrating with Azure Machine Learning and MLflow.
- Real-Time Intelligence runs streaming analytics with KQL databases and event streams for high-velocity data from IoT, telemetry, and transaction logs.
- Power BI is the reporting and visualization layer, with every Power BI report in a Fabric environment reading from OneLake directly.
- Data Activator provides event-driven automation, triggering actions when data crosses defined thresholds so operational workflows run without human monitoring.
Governance, Identity, and AI Built In
Three capabilities run across every workload. Microsoft Entra ID handles identity, Microsoft Purview handles data lineage and policy enforcement, and Copilot runs across the platform for AI-assisted analysis.
At FabCon 2026, Microsoft announced that Fabric Data Agents reached general availability, and Fabric IQ expanded as the semantic intelligence layer giving AI agents the business context they need to reason correctly over enterprise data. OneLake Security, reaching general availability in 2026, brings unified row-level, column-level, and object-level access control across every Fabric workload from one configuration point.
Common Ground
Both tools are part of Microsoft’s data and analytics strategy. Both integrate with Copilot for AI-assisted analysis. Both run on Azure infrastructure, and both work natively with Microsoft 365, Teams, and Excel.
Distinctive Differences
Power BI focuses on the reporting and visualization layer, turning data into dashboards, interactive reports, and KPIs that business users consume. Fabric handles the entire data lifecycle upstream of Power BI: ingestion, storage, transformation, warehousing, real-time processing, and machine learning. Power BI answers “what happened?” while Fabric answers how to get all the data that question depends on into one governed place, visualize it, run ML on it, and trigger automation from it without copying data between tools.
Choosing the Right Tool
For teams whose only need is dashboards and reports off a few data sources, Power BI alone can be enough. For organizations running multiple data sources, needing AI or ML workloads, or consolidating separate tools like Azure Synapse and Data Factory, Fabric becomes the natural foundation. And because Power BI is part of Fabric, the decision isn’t really either/or.
Benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Extended Planning and Analysis
xtended planning and analysis (xP&A) spans finance, operations, sales, workforce, and supply chain. Fabric changes the economics of running this kind of cross-functional planning by eliminating the integration work that usually consumes most of the effort.
Consolidated Data Across Functions
Finance data from the ERP, operations data from the supply chain system, sales data from the CRM, and workforce data from HR systems all land in OneLake. Variance analysis stops waiting for data preparation because the numbers in the CFO’s dashboard match the numbers in the controller’s close report.
Faster Planning Cycles
When ingestion, transformation, and reporting share one platform, monthly close, budget rollups, and ad hoc variance requests all move faster. Finance and operations teams that used to wait for IT to prepare data for new reports can work directly against governed datasets in Power BI and Copilot.
AI-Ready Data Foundation
AI forecasting, anomaly detection, and scenario modeling all depend on clean, structured, consistently defined data, which most planning teams don’t have today because their data lives in too many places. Fabric gives them one place to build it, which is the prerequisite for any AI initiative to produce reliable outputs.
Consumption-Based Cost Model With Built-In Reliability
Fabric uses Capacity Units rather than per-seat licensing, letting organizations scale planning and analytics workloads across entire teams without the per-user cost drag of legacy CPM platforms. The platform runs with a 99.9% uptime SLA and encrypted data transactions governed by Microsoft Purview, which matters for finance workloads where downtime translates directly into missed deadlines.
How to Improve xP&A With Microsoft Fabric, Power BI and Acterys
Microsoft Fabric provides the data foundation. Power BI provides the reporting and visualization layer on top of it. What neither provides is the planning application layer: the capability to edit forecasts, adjust budgets, run scenarios, and write all of that back into the governed data environment with full audit trails and production-scale concurrent user support.
That’s where Acterys fits in. Chosen by Microsoft over 25 competitors to embed in Dynamics 365 and named a Golden Champion by Software Reviews for two consecutive years, Acterys extends the Microsoft stack into full planning without replacing the tools finance teams already use.
Writeback-Enabled Power BI Visuals
Acterys ships nine Power BI visuals, including Matrix, Smart XL, Table Edit, Variance, and Reporting, that let users plan and write data back from inside Power BI reports. The report users read from is the report they plan in, with no switching tools and no exports to Excel and back.
Excel-Native Planning and No-Code Modelling
The Acterys Excel Add-in and Smart XL visual turn native Excel into a planning front-end with real-time writeback to the Fabric data layer. Writeback Functions (AWFs) trigger real-time API calls from inside cells, and the Acterys Modeller provides a drag-and-drop no-code environment that puts model creation in the hands of business users rather than IT.
Pre-Built Finance Models and 1-Click Connectors
Acterys ships pre-built models for P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, workforce, and consolidation, with 1-click connectors to Dynamics, SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce, HubSpot, Xero, and QuickBooks. With Rapid Results Packs and pre-built templates, organizations can deploy their first planning solution in under an hour. What takes months to build custom on Fabric alone is production-ready in weeks.
The Enterprise Planning Engine Behind the Scenes
Acterys visuals and the Excel Add-in connect through a SOC2 Type 2-certified API to a planning engine built for concurrent users at scale. The engine handles approval workflows, multi-level commenting with rich text, full audit trails, and millions of transactions processed in seconds. This is what makes the writeback production-ready rather than just functional.
AI and Copilot for FP&A
The Acterys CoPilot for FP&A runs alongside Microsoft’s native Copilot and Fabric IQ, adding planning-specific AI like natural language prompts for scenario generation, variance explanations grounded in the planning model, and predictive forecasting trained on the underlying data. Teams get AI that understands planning context, not just reporting context.
Governance and Deployment Flexibility
Acterys operates inside the Fabric environment, with identity flowing through Entra ID and governance policies from Purview applying across the data in OneLake. For regulated industries, Acterys also supports full deployment on Azure, hybrid models, and fully on-premises configurations, which keeps everything inside the Microsoft architecture and reduces SaaS sprawl and shadow IT instead of adding to it.
Set Your Business Up for Success
Microsoft Fabric’s biggest advantage is its ability to integrate and manage large amounts of data from many sources while giving business leaders the platform to act on what the data shows. For finance and data teams already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s the foundation most new analytics and planning work will run on going forward.
Combining Fabric with Acterys extends that foundation from analytics into planning, budgeting, and forecasting without adding tools outside the Microsoft stack. Finance teams get a production-ready planning environment in Power BI and Excel, and IT keeps one architecture with unified governance. Book a demo to see Acterys running inside the Microsoft Fabric environment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Microsoft Fabric used for?
Microsoft Fabric is used to unify data engineering, data warehousing, analytics, business intelligence, and AI workloads in one platform. The most common use cases are enterprise reporting, data consolidation, real-time analytics, financial forecasting, and AI-driven decision-making across large organizations.
Is Microsoft Fabric replacing Power BI?
No. Power BI is one of the workloads inside Microsoft Fabric and continues to be Microsoft’s primary business intelligence tool. Fabric adds data engineering, warehousing, and other capabilities around Power BI so teams can run more of their data stack in one environment.
What’s the difference between Microsoft Fabric and Power BI?
Power BI handles reporting, dashboards, and visualization. Microsoft Fabric is the broader platform that includes Power BI plus data ingestion, storage, transformation, AI, and real-time analytics. If you’re using Power BI today, you’re already using part of Fabric.
How much does Microsoft Fabric cost?
Fabric uses Capacity Units (CUs) on a consumption-based model rather than per-user licensing, with pricing starting at the F2 SKU for small workloads and scaling up through F2048 for large enterprise deployments. Organizations running Power BI Pro or Premium alongside Azure Synapse and Data Factory often find Fabric more cost-effective on a total-cost basis.
What are the seven workloads in Microsoft Fabric?
The seven workloads are Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Real-Time Intelligence, Power BI, and Data Activator. Each one handles a specific part of the data lifecycle. All of them share OneLake as the common data foundation.
Does Microsoft Fabric support planning and writeback?
Fabric includes native writeback options through Translytical Task Flows and User Data Functions, and Microsoft announced Planning in Fabric IQ as a preview capability at FabCon 2026. For production-ready planning with Excel-native interfaces, pre-built ERP connectors, and full concurrent user governance, dedicated planning applications like Acterys extend the Fabric foundation into full FP&A workflows.
Can I use Microsoft Fabric with Excel?
Yes. Fabric works with Excel through Power BI integrations, and the Acterys Excel Add-in turns native Excel into a full planning front-end with real-time writeback to the Fabric data layer. Finance teams plan in Excel using familiar formulas, and every input lands in the governed data environment.
