Important: This post was written and published in 2019, and the content below may no longer represent the current capabilities of Power BI. Please consider this post to be an historical record and not a technical resource. All content on this site is the personal output of the author and not an official resource from Microsoft.

I don’t hear this question as often as I used to^[1], but I still hear it: What’s the difference between dataflows in Power BI and Data Flows in Azure Data Factory?

I’ve already written extensively on the Power BI side of things, and now the awesome Merrill Aldrich from BlueGranite has published an excellent overview of the ADF feature on the BlueGranite blog. You should check it out here: https://www.blue-granite.com/blog/ssis-inspired-visual-data-transformation-comes-to-azure-data-factory

I’m not going to summarize the similarities and differences in this post, but after you’ve read Merrill’s article, I’d love to hear your specific questions.

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^[1] This may or may not be because I’ve been on vacation for the past three weeks.