March 27, 2025

Accelerate your Tableau to Power BI (Fabric) migration with MigrateFAST

Share


Organizations today face a rapidly changing business landscape, where data is the key to staying competitive. As the demand for scalable, cost-effective solutions grows, many companies are making the shift from Tableau to Power BI. With AI-powered capabilities embedded in the Power BI workload within Microsoft Fabric, businesses can harness automation, self-service analytics, and advanced decision-making tools at a lower total cost of ownership.

The migration process from Tableau to Power BI can be overwhelming due to the complexities of planning, minimizing business disruptions, rebuilding reports and dashboards, adapting to a new interface, and managing costs—all while maintaining operational efficiency. MigrateFAST simplifies data and report migration through automation, reducing time-to-market and enabling a smooth transition with minimal disruptions.


6-step migration process with MigrateFAST

Transitioning from Tableau to Power BI can be smooth and efficient with the right approach. MigrateFAST’s highly automated process enables a seamless migration across six key stages, reducing costs and time-to-market.

1. Inventory Analysis: Laying the Foundation

Before the migration can take place, a complete inventory of Tableau workbooks, extracts, data models, and reports is essential to evaluate what needs to be migrated, what can be retired, and what may require re-engineering. Accurate and thorough inventory analysis ensures that you know exactly what you’re working with before diving into the migration process.

This step alone can take weeks without automation. MigrateFAST automatically analyzes Tableau data models and connections and accelerates the creation of metadata documents with a few clicks.

2. Estimation & Planning: Clarity from Day One

Successful migrations require a clear estimate of costs, risks, and unknowns. A well-laid-out plan can help prevent unexpected issues during migration and ensure that the project remains within scope and budget.

MigrateFAST automates the estimation of licensing costs, infrastructure requirements, and the creation of a detailed migration timeline. Using historical data and pre-built migration pathways, MigrateFAST reduces uncertainty, providing a clear and actionable plan for each phase of the migration.

3. Semantic Model & Report Creation: Delivering Consistent Insights

Recreating semantic models and reports is the most visible part of the process for end users. It is essential that reports in Power BI look and behave the same way as in Tableau, if not better. Reports should be optimized for Power BI’s interface and features. Moreover, identifying and removing redundant reports helps improve the efficiency of the migration and performance of Power BI reports after deployment.

MigrateFAST reduces manual efforts by:

·       Migrating LOD expressions to DAX measures

·       Automatically creating Power BI semantic models

·       Recreating Tableau visualizations in Power BI

4. Review: Ensuring Data Accuracy and Integrity

Migrating large amounts of data and reports from one platform to another can lead to performance issues, incorrect data mappings, or errors in calculations. Without thorough review, there is a risk that your reports could deliver incorrect or suboptimal results.

MigrateFAST automates the validation of the migrated reports by running performance tests, optimizing queries, and ensuring data accuracy through validation and certification.

5. Governance: Maintaining Control and Integrity

Data governance is essential in migration to support data validation and certification processes while ensuring dataset integrity. A well-defined governance framework provides proactive alerts and real-time monitoring of capacity, usage, report availability, and platform issues.

Our approach automates performance optimization to ensure adherence to best practices and pre-defined SLAs.

6. Center of Excellence (CoE): Supporting Long-Term Success

Migration doesn’t end once the reports are deployed. Post-migration support is essential for monitoring system performance, optimizing costs, and ensuring that the organization can effectively adopt and use the new platform.

We provide ongoing support to optimize costs, monitor system performance, and improve change management. This approach drives higher adoption and long-term success—helping your organization move from reactive fixes to proactive innovation.


Customer success story

A leading retail client with 25,000+ users needed a scalable, secure, and resilient centralized data platform. Their existing infrastructure included 300+ workbooks, 350+ extracts, and a 200 TB Teradata database, supporting 200+ concurrent users. After migrating from Tableau to Power BI, the client achieved:

      •  60% reduction in overall maintenance and new development effort 
      •  35% cost savings on platform and maintenance 
      •  NSAT score improvement from 2 to 3.5 
      •  300% increase in adoption within a year through CoE setup 

With MigrateFAST, the client’s migration effort was automated by approximately 60%, dramatically reducing manual intervention and shortening the migration timeline.

  Migration Steps   Automated using toolkit     Efforts without MigrateFAST (in hrs.)     Efforts with MigrateFAST (in hrs.)  
Analyze Tableau data model and connections ✓ 10 0
Create metadata document ✓ 5 0
Create Power BI Semantic model ✓ 16 0
Understand calculations and recreate them in DAX ✓ 24 0
Validate and fix calculated columns and measure definitions   ✗ 16 20
Understand and create field parameters ✓ 8 4
Create Power BI reports with base measures ✓ 16 4
Implement field parameters in the report ✓ 4 2
Identify alternate visuals for gaps ✗ 4 4
Optimize performance (CertyFAST) ✓ 8 4
Data validation ✗ 8 8
Total 119 (~25 days) 46 (~6 days)

Figure 1: Migration effort with MigrateFAST per workbook

MigrateFAST ensures a seamless transition to Power BI, preserving Tableau’s look and feel while enhancing usability with AI-powered capabilities.

Figure 2: User interface of Tableau vs. Power BI

 

Expanding MigrateFAST Capabilities

Beyond Tableau, MigrateFAST streamlines migration from multiple platforms, including MicroStrategy, Cognos, SAP BOBJ, and more. Our customized approach aligns with your data architecture requirements, ensuring a seamless transition to help you harness Power BI’s full capabilities.

Accelerate your migration journey with our highly automated 6-step process. Contact CustomerSuccess@MAQSoftware.com to get started today.