What is Microsoft Fabric used for?

Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's unified analytics platform combining data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, data science and Power BI in one SaaS service. It is a good fit for consolidating analytics tools on one platform, building a lakehouse with Power BI reporting and migrating from separate Azure analytics services.

How much does Microsoft Fabric cost?

Microsoft Fabric is a paid product with no free plan.

Is Microsoft Fabric open source?

No. Microsoft Fabric is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Microsoft Fabric include Apache Spark and Dremio OSS.

What are some alternatives to Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric competes with Databricks, Snowflake and Google BigQuery. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Microsoft Fabric alternatives.

Microsoft Fabric: features, pricing and alternatives

About Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is an analytics platform from Microsoft that brings several data and analytics services into one software-as-a-service product. Microsoft describes it as an AI-powered platform that unites data and services, from data lakes to data science, so teams can work on shared data rather than juggling separate tools.

The platform is organized into workloads: Fabric Data Factory for integration and pipelines, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, Data Science, Databases and Power BI for reporting. Microsoft OneLake provides a common storage layer underneath, and security and governance features apply across the workloads. A newer Fabric IQ offering and a managed application backend are also listed.

Fabric is proprietary and delivered as a managed cloud service from Microsoft, with no self-hosted edition. A free trial is offered, a pricing overview is published on the vendor site, and organizations can contact sales for larger deployments.

Key features

Data Factory pipelines for data integration
Data engineering and data warehouse workloads
Real-Time Intelligence for streaming data
Power BI reporting and dashboards
OneLake shared storage layer
Security and governance across workloads

Good fit for

→Consolidating analytics tools on one platform
→Building a lakehouse with Power BI reporting
→Migrating from separate Azure analytics services

Tags: analytics; microsoft; data-platform; power-bi; data-warehouse; lakehouse; data-engineering; cloud-service

Microsoft Fabric: questions and answers

What is Microsoft Fabric used for?: Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's unified analytics platform combining data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, data science and Power BI in one SaaS service. It is a good fit for consolidating analytics tools on one platform, building a lakehouse with Power BI reporting and migrating from separate Azure analytics services.
How much does Microsoft Fabric cost?: Microsoft Fabric is a paid product with no free plan.
Is Microsoft Fabric open source?: No. Microsoft Fabric is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Microsoft Fabric include Apache Spark and Dremio OSS.
What are some alternatives to Microsoft Fabric?: Microsoft Fabric competes with Databricks, Snowflake and Google BigQuery. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Microsoft Fabric alternatives.