Why Fabric Planning and the Market Opportunity

Planning is ready for the same shift Power BI brought to BI, and Fabric Plan is built for it. This session covers what Fabric Plan can replace, how activity-based licensing keeps costs down and how to get a first plan live in weeks, and it ends with live Q&A.

Key takeaways

1. Planning is still a silo. Most planning tools copy data out of the BI platform and back in again. Fabric Plan reads actuals straight from your Power BI semantic model, so you start with your dimensions, measures and hierarchies already in place.
2. One Plan item has three sheet types. Planning handles budgets, forecasts and scenarios. PowerTable handles tabular data and data apps. Intelligence handles reporting and storytelling. Together they cover finance, S&OP, sales, HR and PMO planning.
3. It replaces more than planning tools. PowerTable can take over from Master Data Services, Airtable, Smartsheet and Access apps. The Intelligence sheet can help retire older reporting tools that run on Power BI semantic models.
4. It's bought like any other Microsoft service. Microsoft is the vendor of record, it's billed on Fabric capacity and supported by Microsoft. There's nothing to procure or install, and MACC commitments can pay for it.
5. You pay only in the months you use it. Sessions last 30 days and are billed as Planner, Stakeholder or Viewer, based on what each person does. Once a model is built, most users move to Stakeholder. If you use only PowerTable or Intelligence, you never pay for a Planner session.
6. Most of the work is in the semantic model. If you have a good semantic model and pick the right modeling method, a first plan can go live in weeks rather than the 6 to 12 months typical of traditional EPM projects.
7. Plan for headroom. Use reserved capacity dedicated to Fabric Plan, and budget for more Planners at the start. Small F2 pay-as-you-go trials are the usual cause of throttling complaints.

On cost: compared with other planning software, Fabric Plan can save 55% to 90%. This is illustrative: a blended $450 per user per year, Planners and Stakeholders only, on reserved capacity. It is not a measured benchmark.

FAQ

• What if we don't have a semantic model yet? You can still start. Bring a starting point from Excel or CSV, build the dimensions in PowerTable, and create a semantic model from them. Some customers have built a semantic model from dimensions alone, without actuals, and gone live that way.
• How complex can the planning logic get? Fabric Plan has a full formula engine and allocation engine. Business rules, assumptions, validations and allocation keys are all built in. What matters is choosing the right method: a row model, allocation rules held in PowerTable, or Cube for complex multi-view plans.
• How accurate is the capacity estimator? It's accurate if you allow headroom. Budget for more Planners at the start and add an overhead allowance. A common mistake is sizing for the steady state you expect after go-live.
• Are there costs beyond the sessions? Yes, two. Automation jobs, such as cascading updates between plans, use 2 CU-hours each. Fabric SQL, OneLake and XMLA also consume capacity, so budget about 30% on top of the session estimate.
• Do we need two sets of governance if we also use Databricks? That isn't the aim. Plan data lands in OneLake, and mirroring and shortcuts make it available to Databricks or Snowflake.
• Why isn't Fabric Planning in a Gartner Magic Quadrant? Fabric Planning went GA at the end of July 2026, and Magic Quadrant coverage usually takes a year or two. Lumel, the co-engineering partner behind it, was named Best Overall Vendor in BPM Partners Pulse 2025.

Resources

• Capacity estimator: https://lumel.com/fabric-planning-capacity-pricing/
• Related webinar, Billing, Pricing and Capacity Estimation (Sep 25): https://community.fabricplan.com/webinars/fabric-plan-understanding-billing-pricing-and-capacity-estimation/
• Part 2, Best Practices and Modelling/Implementation Options (Oct 23): https://community.fabricplan.com/webinars/fabric-plan-best-practices-and-modelling-implementation-options/
• Documentation: https://community.fabricplan.com/docs/
• Ask a question: https://community.fabricplan.com/forums/