BPP or Plan in Fabric — the licensing decision nobody explains
Microsoft ships two planning products for organisations on Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. They overlap heavily. Microsoft does not say which one you should pick, and the difference is not in the functionality — it is in the licence.
What the two are
Business performance planning runs on Dataverse and writes budgets back to the F&O budget register. Plan in Fabric runs on Fabric, with planning sheets and cubes, and writes back to Fabric SQL.
The difference that matters
BPP requires Finance Premium on the tenant. Without that licence the app does not even appear in the Power Platform admin center. Finance Premium costs €260 per user per month against €182 for Finance — a difference of €78 per user per month, excluding VAT.
Plan in Fabric requires no Finance licence of any tier. Only Fabric capacity.
Work it out yourself
- BPP per year
- € 18.720
- Plan in Fabric per year
- € 4.028
- Difference per year
- € 14.692
All amounts exclude VAT.
Discuss this calculationPower BI licences are separate on both routes: below F64 capacity, every report consumer needs at least Power BI Pro (€12,1/user/month) — included in Microsoft 365 E5. Premium Per User (€20,8/user/month) is only needed for Premium features without an F-capacity.
Capacity requirement is your assumption, not a Microsoft-published figure. Microsoft does not publish CU consumption per Fabric planning session, so no tool can size this from documentation. Measure it with the Fabric Capacity Metrics app.
What to watch
Fabric capacity doubles per step: F16 goes to F32, not to F20. If you sit at eighty percent of an F16 and planning pushes you over, you do not pay a little more — you pay about €16,100 per year more (reserved, West Europe, excluding VAT). BPP scales linearly with user count and is therefore more predictable.
What nobody knows: Microsoft does not publish how much capacity a planning session consumes. The meters exist — Planner Sessions, Stakeholder Sessions, Viewer Sessions — but the consumption rates are published nowhere. So nobody can derive your F-SKU from documentation. Measuring is the only way.