What Happened to Power BI?

by Ginger Grant | December 29, 2025

Data visualization is a big part of how companies monitor how their organizations are performing. Since 2015, Power BI has been the tool that currently 97% of the Fortune 500 uses to get that information. Things have changed with Power BI, as you can no longer purchase premium user licenses, and Microsoft is focusing on Fabric. So, what happened to Power BI?

Power BI is definitely alive and kicking. The latest update was released December 2, 2026 and Microsoft is still adding many new features to it. Microsoft announced they will change the file suffix from PBIX to PBIR to better accommodate source control. The development team added more AI features to Power BI as well. Microsoft profiled updates to Power BI at their most recent conference, Ignite.

Based upon the media they see, many people believe that Power BI is no longer a stand-alone product. This is not true. Power BI remains a fully functional stand-alone product. There's a community of users who continue to successfully use Power BI without Fabric, particularly in the government cloud where Fabric isn't yet available. Just because the premium licensing has switched to Fabric licensing doesn’t mean that you must use Fabric, you can continue to use Power BI just as you always have.

Microsoft created Fabric in part to help users scale their Power BI reports. While Power BI is a powerful data visualization tool, it is lacking when it comes to large scale data manipulation. The Power Query tool is not designed for modular development by a development team, and users were looking for a better way to include their data for Power BI reporting. Fabric separates the data gathering, organizing and security aspects of reporting from the reports themselves. If you move these tasks from inside of Power BI to Fabric, you will be able to create more robust development processes using pipelines and notebooks. The processes you can create are more modular than putting everything inside of Power BI making it easier for multiple people to work on the tasks and better monitoring of the development process and the production implementation.

Power BI has a feature named Direct Query which has let Power BI do real-time reporting for years, but the performance is less than stellar. What is worse is that with Direct Query, when an increased number of people use it, the worse the performance is. Microsoft fixed the performance issues for real time reporting in Power BI with Fabric. The Direct Lake feature in Fabric allows Power BI users access to data as soon as the data is updated in OneLake, the Fabric data store. There is no refresh. Power BI will display the latest data The speeds are the same as the import method. What’s more, Fabric provides the ability to mirror databases including Snowflake, Azure SQL DB, and on premises SQL Server. When an application updates the data, Power BI can report on it in seconds. And unlike the previous iteration of real-time reporting with Direct Query, Direct Lake can scale to provide reporting to as many users as want to use it without any decrease in report performance.

Microsoft is not mandating a move to Fabric, but you may decide to do so to take advantage of the features the move would provide. Adding Fabric to Power BI improves visual reporting. The processes used to store and transform the data are more robust and designed to scale. Real-time reporting works much better with Fabric, finally delivering on the promise of rapid access to continuously changing data. Fabric's centralized data store makes it easier to secure. Fabric has comprehensive monitoring capabilities to transform the data and provides many more methods for validating and ensuring everything is running without issue. If you are interested in improving performance and development at scale, you will incorporate Fabric with Power BI.