Appian and Microsoft Power Apps are key competitors in the application development sector, valued for their unique capabilities. Appian shines with its rapid application deployment and process design, ideal for organizations seeking quick turnaround. Meanwhile, Microsoft Power Apps has an edge with its seamless integration within the Microsoft ecosystem, enhancing its appeal for businesses already using Microsoft products.
Features: Appian offers a low-code environment enabling quick app development and deployment. It stands out for process automation, case management, and rich business solutions through built-in functionalities. In comparison, Microsoft Power Apps provides a no-code, user-friendly experience that integrates effortlessly with Microsoft solutions, connecting easily to data sources like SharePoint and SQL, which benefits organizations leveraging Microsoft tools.
Room for Improvement: Appian could enhance its user interface customization and enterprise integration, especially with DevOps and mobile capabilities. Microsoft Power Apps faces challenges with complex licensing, interface flexibility, and scalability, particularly in handling large data volumes and integration beyond the Microsoft ecosystem.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Appian excels in deployment across diverse cloud environments and generally offers effective customer service, despite some delays in response times. Microsoft Power Apps integrates well within the Microsoft ecosystem but receives mixed feedback on customer service, largely due to complex licensing processes affecting service efficiency.
Pricing and ROI: Appian’s flexible pricing can be expensive compared to competitors, but its rapid deployment supports significant ROI through efficient automation. Microsoft Power Apps, although sometimes costly for premium features, becomes cost-effective when bundled with Office 365, offering considerable ROI with increased process efficiency and reduced operation times.
They see return on investment in terms of cost savings, time savings, more efficient processes, and more efficient employees.
Appian is very efficient, allowing us to build a lot of applications within a financial year, making it cost-effective.
The connection between Power Apps and Power BI simplifies generating and presenting reports, alleviating the workload and enhancing productivity.
The aim is to create a cleaner interface to replace spreadsheets, thus standardizing processes and improving efficiency.
Their customer service is responsive, and the team is very prompt for support.
The technical support for Appian rates as 10 out of 10 because they have a great support team.
The technical support is generally good.
Their assistance was crucial as we developed the solutions.
Microsoft's technical support is around a seven to eight.
A few months ago, I contacted support for an issue, but the response time was longer than expected.
On a scale of one to 10, Appian rates as a nine for scalability.
Initially, without much coding, I can easily handle five thousand records.
Appian is scalable, but it depends on how you build your applications.
If it is flexible and includes premium connectors, scalability is easy.
It is quite scalable, though there are some limitations regarding the number of records.
It depends on how it has been designed and how it has been configured.
The stability of Appian would rate as nine, as it's a stable environment.
I would rate the stability of Microsoft Power Apps as a nine out of ten.
It has room to improve for use cases where the users are public facing, where anonymous users could come to a site and run a business workflow or interact with some data.
If there is a very complex process that includes a lot of data transitioning and memory-centric processes, it consumes a lot of memory.
I would like to see more enhancement in the user interface to allow more freedom in designing the sites and pages.
This would assist business process users who lack coding knowledge.
These tools should be intuitive for business users who will need at least a week of training to use them effectively.
In many use cases, applications might require importing data exceeding two thousand records, potentially reaching one hundred thousand.
On the pricier side, both Appian and Pega are enterprise-level solutions, placing them on the slightly higher side.
The pricing of Appian is based on the number of users and generally ranges from 70 to 100 USD per user per month.
The price of Appian, on a competitive landscape, is a little bit on the higher side for companies, rating maybe a 6.5.
For small to medium enterprises, it is affordable, especially with Microsoft Enterprise licensing.
For more elaborate work, an upgrade to an enterprise license, costing around $35 per license, is needed.
It is in the middle range and considered reasonable given the current price.
The zero-code integration feature is remarkable, allowing for ease of data transfer and workflow enhancement.
Appian is aiding in leveraging AI technologies in multiple ways: one way is for developers, as they make development efficient and quick by enabling developer co-pilots across various phases of the application, which helps design Appian quickly and provides suggestions along the way.
It is easy for me to define the process and create configurable workflows.
It integrates seamlessly with Power Automate for process automation and connects with email, SharePoint, Power BI, and MS Teams, facilitating everyday processes.
Canvas Apps provide complete user design flexibility with many connectors to integrate into Microsoft Power Apps, making it efficient to fetch and update information from various data sources such as Dataverse, Excel, SharePoint, and Azure.
The most valuable features for us are predominantly on the user interface front.
Appian is a unified low-code platform and solution used by businesses to build enterprise applications and workflows. This product adapts to the needs of clients and the technologies they are already using to combine their data in a single workflow and maximize resources. The platform has four main components through which it transforms the work process for companies of various sizes. They are:
Appian is utilized across a diverse set of industries, including automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, education, financial services, telecom and media, transportation, retail, insurance, healthcare, and life sciences. The most frequent use cases of Appian are customer journey, governance, risk and compliance, operational efficiency, supply chain, distributed order management, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management.
Appian Features
Appian has various features that allow users to create solutions for their businesses. These features can be separated into a few groups according to function, including automation, low-code application development, and integrations and data. Some of the most frequently used features of Appian include:
Appian Benefits
The benefits of using Appian include:
Reviews from Real Users
A practice leader - digital process automation at a computer software company values Appian highly because the product is easy to develop, low-code, and has a good user interface.
Alan G., an advisory board member at Codecon VR, Appian offers a clear application life cycle, easy to learn documentation, and comes with a fundamentals course.
Microsoft Power Apps is a rapid application development software and low-code development platform. The solution consists of a suite of apps, services, connectors, and a data platform. It provides an environment for building custom apps which is suitable for different businesses.
Microsoft Power Apps allows users to not only build applications, but also connect them to Microsoft's other sources, including the underlying data platform Microsoft Dataverse, as well as online and on-premise sources such as SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365. The applications built using Microsoft Power Apps have a responsive design that makes them suitable for work in browsers and on mobile applications on different devices.
The no-code side of the product makes it suitable for complete beginners to app building, allowing them to easily create fully functional applications with many features. The solution also has a specialized platform for developers where specialists can access data and metadata, create custom connectors, integrate with external data, and apply business logic. The solution allows users to create three types of apps: canvas, model-driven, and portal. They are made using:
Microsoft Power Apps Features
The three different design tools of the solution, Power Apps Studio, App Designer, and Power Apps Portals Studio, come with various features which allow users to utilize the tools. Some of these features include:
Microsoft Power Apps Benefits
The product brings various benefits to organizations and individuals who utilize it. Some of the biggest advantages of Microsoft Power Apps include:
Reviews from Real Users
An IT Specialist (INFOSEC) at a government appreciates this tool because it is low-code, low learning curve, and reduces manpower.
Rafael T., a data engineer at NTT Security, likes Microsoft Power Apps, because it is great for making apps quickly, has helpful support, and integrates with Power BI.
We monitor all Rapid Application Development Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
