Microsoft Power Apps Reviews

Initially, we used it mainly to wrap up Power BI reports for BetterView, creating very simple apps. About a year ago, it evolved into more robust apps for collecting information, particularly for logistics. We developed apps to streamline workflow and gather data for specific operations. We then built a more advanced app that allowed us to communicate with customers—connecting workflow issues, creating problem reports, and sharing shipment updates via SharePoint, which integrates easily with Microsoft Power Apps.

Currently, Power Apps is used mostly locally, within one or two departments. Each app is developed locally, and it’s not really used for enterprise-wide purposes. In our organization of about a thousand people, around six people are developers working with Power Apps. There are likely a couple of hundred users in total across all apps.

Over time, it became a key part of our operations, and we've developed around three or four apps in total. However, the main use case remains displaying Power BI reports. By wrapping reports within Power Apps, we can present them in different formats to create better dashboards, making the process more efficient.

In my experience with Microsoft Power Apps over the past two years, the best feature is its seamless connection with the Microsoft ecosystem. It integrates well with Microsoft Teams, and you can use it with minimal programming, which is typical for low-code and no-code apps.

A downside is that Power Apps is primarily designed to work within the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s not suited for publishing apps outside of the network, so you need additional Microsoft technologies for broader use. While it’s very scalable for simple apps, it's not ideal for large-scale enterprise applications.

I’ve been using Microsoft Power Apps for about two years.

In terms of pricing, Power Apps is cost-efficient.

Overall, I’d recommend Power Apps for its ease of deployment and supportive documentation. However, it's not suited for complex, enterprise-wide applications. I’d rate Microsoft Power Apps an eight out of ten overall.

We use the solution for collaboration modules within our company. For example, we use Power Apps to handle requests when investing in projects abroad and needing approval.

The solution integrates quickly with our organization's existing systems.

We're running a campaign to encourage users to utilize the Power Apps. This is particularly challenging as we incur licensing costs, and some individuals do not use the applications.

I have been using Microsoft Power Apps for three years.

There were no stability issues.

250 users are using this solution. We have some projects for next year that we will use to increase the usage of Power Apps.

When we need support, Microsoft helps us immediately.

Positive

Deployment is easy and takes three months to complete, depending on the project. When we start using their programming, they understand easily and faster.

The solution has increased productivity due to automation. We can automate and save 30% on costs. Power Apps allows us to allocate or invest time in other activities when the apps handle certain processes.

The product is cheaper.

The solution's maintenance is easy. It is easy to use, understand, and manage.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We are a big global company that is involved in a large volume of setups involving Microsoft solutions like Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate for different environments across departments in organizations functioning at a global level. So we are involved in delivering services while focusing on the setup processes for different environments and departments. It helps the people at work since solutions like Power Apps and Power Automate function excellently.

I would say that it's a very advanced product because it empowers people to do simple things, which previously may have required people to have some technical skills. So, no matter which department or what technical skills a person possesses, it has become very easy to build or automate certain processes. In my company, we chose Microsoft Power Apps since it helps us with small and medium tasks like making certain processes, generating reports, and so on.

Though I don't remember enough details about the solution to comment on it, I think the solution does need to add some technical features to it since I remember that we had faced some gaps while trying to automate certain processes. One area where the solution lacks is the limited size of the database it offers its users. So, some businesses planning to scale up may face certain restrictions while using the solution. Microsoft Power Apps also needs to provide its users with certain specific connectors within the solution. I won't be aggressive enough to complain more about the solution since, in our company, we have a lot of specific handmade tools, and so we don't explicitly expect Microsoft to create specific connectors for Power Apps.

I have experience with Microsoft Power Apps for three years. Also, I don't remember the solution's version since I used it six months ago.

The solution is generally stable, but some limitations, such as the embedded database usage limits, can impair its functionality.

Since my previous company had a specific license agreement with Microsoft, the solution was scalable. The solution allowed for adding new licenses to the company on demand through a step-by-step procedure. This task was carried out during the first stage of the solution's deployment process after we discovered the need for additional licenses.

So, around 65,000 employees were using the solution in the environment flawlessly. Also, my previous company had plans to increase the number of users. The company had decided that since the platform was an excellent one, it should predominantly be used for small and medium processes. Management was planning to scale it up and was waiting for Microsoft to provide a more powerful capacity solution at a time when the company had around 1,00,000 employees.

Technicians from Microsoft visited our company and helped us sort out certain issues, specifically strategic issues.

In our company, we were previously using Microsoft SharePoint Dev. We, later on, chose Microsoft Power Apps since it helps us automate small and medium processes.

The initial setup process for the solution is not complex. So, the company had made arrangements to help us manage the initial kickoff and deployment processes. Since it may not be a very easy process, it is more or less a mediocre one.

Because there were a lot of employees in my previous organization, it took around one year for the deployment process to be completed. Taking into consideration the environment, the initial settings, and the need to take care of security, the entire deployment process would take around one year.

The deployment process was carried out in three stages. If we consider the deployment's first stage, it is free for one year, though I can't recollect it entirely. However, I can say that it was related to Microsoft Azure since it was about security involving steps like how to create the security levels and which levels one can create. So, this process was carried out to create, considering our structure, resources, strategies in the company, security, and environment. The second stage involved the creation of real environments and splitting environments, divisions, and departments. The third stage involved communication and promotion. We then created the specific site devoted to the tools in Power Apps before creating a knowledge base consisting of general articles, specific articles, and the general question and answer section.

We sourced the solution's version for free projects from a company, and the company was really helpful.

Regarding deployment and maintenance, our company had technical resources, promotional resources, analytics, and so on. So, we had a big in-house team using all the available resources. So, around fifteen people in a team were looking at the implementation part of the solution. Also, our sales company had a team of ten members. In short, a significant number of resources were engaged in the solution's maintenance phases.

I had not participated in the evaluation process, and our management communicated with consultants and other resources to investigate solutions, after which they possibly chose Microsoft Power Apps.

I would recommend those considering the solution give it a try. Our organization had some initial doubts, but after comparing it with other platforms in the market, we found it to be highly advanced. Additionally, since we have received excellent support from the vendors, we are confident they will not leave us to face any issues with the solution alone. Many consulting companies are also available to provide further assistance. These factors have made Power Apps and Power Automate popular. Owing to the solution's ability to solve a company's small and medium automated processes, I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Microsoft Power Apps for data collection and processing for small intergroup business applications for our internal needs. 

Overall the solution is reliable.

The scalability of the solution could improve.

I have been using Microsoft Power Apps for approximately two years.

The stability of the solution has been good in our usage.

I rate the stability of Microsoft Power Apps a seven out of ten.

We have approximately 1,000 people using the solution. There are some applications that we will increase the usage of. However, this depends on the use case.

The scalability of the solution depends on the use case of the application being used.

We have a dedicated support team at Microsoft Power Apps for our needs.

I previously used IBM Lotus.

The initial setup of Microsoft Power Apps is straightforward. The implementation depends on the complexity of the application being deployed. It can range from one week to one month. I have not implemented an application that has taken longer than half a year.

We have a team that does the implementation of the solution, such as a delivery manager.

Our enterprise contract with Microsoft Power Apps includes the application feature platform in our subscription package, so we are not incurring any extra expenses. All of our other subscriptions are also part of our license agreement.

I would recommend this platform to others if they have a dedicated internal team with the appropriate experience.

I rate Microsoft Power Apps seven out of ten.

The primary use case for this solution for us is building in-house applications rather than having to purchase them. We build fairly basic applications and we would rather use Power Apps to deploy them or create them in-house.

The way this solution helped us improve is by allowing us to collect data by combining it with phones and the tools Microsoft uses to send out surveys and also use it for a number of automation and requests. It creates forms with which people can make requests or respond to surveys and those are worked on the backend. The whole process is done using Power Apps.

The features I find the most valuable are the 365 and Microsoft applications integrations and the automation.

The area where this product can be improved is the documentation. When we get stuck it's with the documentation when we are not able to find the codes we need. The solution requires a lot of codes and understanding of the scripting language. Most of the time I end up going to forums to get them. I would like to see Microsoft come up with a knowledge base for Power Apps.

In the next release, I would like to see more integrations because there are some that are not available and we end up having to get adjacent script to work on to work with that.

I have been using this solution for two years now.

My impression is that it is very stable. I would rate it a 10, on a scale of one to 10, with one being not stable at and 10 being very stable.

We rarely scale when it comes to Power Apps. Once you deploy the application, that's it. So if you need to scale something more robust you probably have to deploy a new one.

Currently, there are over 500 users of Power Apps in our company.

We plan on expanding because it saves us a lot of cost in terms of the application that we currently use this for.

I am not even aware if there is any technical support for Power Apps because most times we have to go through online communities and forums to get what we want. I think the support for Power Apps should be something Microsoft could look into.

The initial setup was straightforward because they have a quite number of templates that you can pick from. The deployment does not take long as it comes with the Office 365. If you have Office 365, you have the Power App enabled in your directory.

The ROI is visible considering the number of applications we have been able to use it to build.

The Power Apps comes included with the Office 365. When you purchase a business standard license, the Power Apps comes included.

We use the solution to create applications. We were getting ideas, fine-tuning, and putting them in different queues that are available to the whole organization.

We have been utilizing the tool for very long. We can easily build a very small application or a large database with the tool. It also provides integration with SharePoint. Anyone can easily build a very basic application using the solution. If anyone wants to create an application to put SharePoint lists, it can be easily built using the product with a few clicks by any user.

The product's usability and the ability to fine-tune are really good. It is easier to work with compared to AgilePoint. The product is very user-friendly.

The solution must provide more integration with third-party applications.

I have been using the solution for the last eight to nine months.

The solution is relatively more stable. Loading is also good. It gets a little slower when we load large amounts of data sets. However, it is good when it comes to downtime.

The solution is very scalable. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Around 50,000 to 60,000 people are using the solution in our organization. It is accessible to the whole organization.

I did not contact support because I could get most solutions to my problems on Google.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The tool is not that difficult to maintain. We have a separate support team taking care of maintenance. The team works on tickets and closes them. People have built many applications using the solution.

Power Apps is relatively cheap compared to other low-code and no-code systems like OutSystems and Mendix.

Power Apps is more scalable than AgilePoint. It is also easier to deploy things using Power Apps. We can use the tool to deploy smaller solutions without much coding knowledge. If we use Microsoft products like SharePoint, we can integrate them easily with Power Apps.

There are buttons available in SharePoint that enable us to create and publish an app with just one click. The documentation on Microsoft's site and the learning platform of Power Apps is good compared to AgilePoint. AgilePoint has limited videos because it does not have a large working base.

The tool is good. People should definitely try it out. It can be a perfect solution for the whole enterprise. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

The solution is used internally in my company.

Flexibility, easy setup, and fairly quick results are valuable features of the product.

The fact that we couldn't share that with our other organization or outside of the organization, consisting of our colleagues in the joint ventures, was a weakness of the solution. So, it is an area that needs improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Power Apps since 2018 or 2019, so it's four or five years. Also, I am using the solution's latest version. I mainly use the cloud version. I am a customer of the solution.

Regarding stability, with the normal version of the Canvas app and Power Apps, and for fairly simple apps, it's perfect. But if you need a more nested or layered system in your app, setting them up takes a little time. And it also takes a lot of manual maintenance of the items in your product.

Stability depends and varies from case to case. So, what I do is mainly internal and feedback collection and everything to manipulate how the data comes in, which is great. The interface or setting could be better, but they would have compromised all the other things, including the lead time for development. So, for that level of work, the performance would be about eight on a scale of one to ten.

Scalability depends on the knowledge and skill set of the users. My user community has been in range from seventeen hundred to five.

Given the size, I think that support from the technical team is acceptable. I have had problems with SharePoint, including stalling and throttling of the back end and everything. It took me quite a long time to get an answer from Microsoft, which I understand, as they are big companies, and so they are not going to fix it for you the next day even when they know something, so I would say it's considerable and understandable. There are things that are up there, and they probably are not such a technical hassle to be developed or to be resolved. Now, considering the fact that they have already been around for a few years, it can be a bit disappointing. But, well, given the user community and the forums and everything, I think that it is forgivable.

I use Mendix. Mendix has more of everything in one place, and you can see your process actually as in a flow instead of ready code or work with the objects in the front end. So that's definitely a pro of the solution. The problem is that it's much less configurable with the other solutions than Power Apps. Power Apps by itself is not configurable, but it is pretty much configurable when connected to a database, Azure or SharePoint.

The solution is deployed on a corporate cloud, so it is for the organization's private use. The time taken for deployment depends on the complexity. But, when I was working on Power Apps, it took me days. When they were responsive or needed to form a table, I needed to manually add blocks on top of each other, including everything in that, and that was taking a long time.

Usually, the free licenses of Power Apps come to normal corporate users for free. If you do not use the premium workspace and are employed in a big company already using E3 or E5, then Power Apps would be something for free, and that's a trick. For normal users within a corporate firm with licenses, it's totally favorable. But I don't know how it would be if you were outside a company or using it yourself.

The overall performance of the solution depends on the use cases. So, Microsoft Power Apps is perfect for smaller things or smaller assignments. For very big things, the solution's overall performance also depends on the education level of the people using it. But if you want it to be super reliable and whatever, I would say that it has some constraints. And I was using a version of the solution with SharePoint and all. I was still working on the database and things like that. I understand that they will probably be performing much better. The normal version is not a super reliable tool.

Microsoft Power Apps has been very useful. With Mendix, I have been a user of the developed solutions, but because of the tool and the license you need to get or the training you need to get before starting with the development, it has been hindering, so I cannot really say. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The one that we currently have is only to SharePoint Online as we want to be able to have analysts be able to maintain data, and we want a graphical user interface, a GUI front end, to do that. Especially if it's interfaced with PowerBI, it allows analysts to have a research tool to identify what data needs to be updated right there, and to then be able to do that through PowerApps is a huge benefit. Right now, we're only able to write back to SharePoint Online.

Right now, it's only write-back to a SharePoint Online list, however, I have proof of concepts. I've got a business case that I'm currently trying to get pushed through. I've got other services within our organization that I need to get buy-in from so that we can get this business case approved and get the funding.

The write-back capability right now is just SharePoint Online, however, hopefully, we'll get the funding and subscriptions so that we can get write-back to our SQL server database. Of course, this is for our analysts within business architecture so that they can maintain the metadata, the relationships, and the mappings. Those are the biggest things that we need to have analysts able to do - the research, analysis to identify what data needs to be updated for those relationships and giving them a front end, a form to go in and edit, either create rows or modify existing, whatever needs to be done to the table.

We're one of the administrations within a governmental organization and I wish that they would make it and just provide it to those environments that are still on-premise for their relational databases, which we are. We're stuck on this on-premise environment, however, we don't have the premium connectors subscriptions for those. It's something we require.

As far as dealing with SharePoint, it'll allow you to ha manage up to 2000 rows, however, performance-wise, they're recommending that you just keep it at the default of 500 rows. Beyond that though, I don't know too much about its limitations. Having to do export and import from SharePoint Online and then in the SQL server, the solution is obviously there, if you can get the premium connection.

I'd much rather have the gallery set in a tablet or a normal computer, more of a landscape setting than what you would think you would see for a cell phone.

We just started pursuing the solution with our write-back capability. We have not used it for more than three months. We've actually put a proof of concept together.

The solution works great and is stable. My obstacle is being able to demonstrate it and show its value to other leaders within the organization. I don't have issues with it crashing or freezing, for example.

While we're still in the early days and need to develop it more, I'll be asking for 30 subscriptions initially. Within business architecture here, we're probably going to be somewhere between 10 to 15 analysts. Right now, we may only have ten as we are still building the business case.

It's unlimited where you can implement this. The scalability just depends. With the continued support within an in-house setup, you can make it what you want. It's my understanding that the scalability is really unlimited.

We have an office within OIT and they have office hours. They've got a site, however, it's specifically for PowerBI. I don't know that there has been a whole lot of movement to get support for PowerApps, maybe since the value hasn't been realized we haven't really explored support options.

If more people saw how you could utilize PowerApps integrated with PowerBI to maintain data, we might have more questions and need more support.

BISL is the name of the support group we use. They have weekly meetings and office hours and are more focused on PowerBI. They've got a contract with Microsoft personnel that support this BISL team and specifically PowerBI. I don't know if they're going to expand that level of support and also include PowerBI. I would hope so. 

We used asp.net. The main platform we are using has asp.net, Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, Hypertext Markup Language, HTML5, jQuery, and JavaScript Library. It's a high code solution. Having to put an IIS web and app server and develop all this and HTML and C# and all these other languages that you would end up having to learn, it's a huge learning curve compared to putting something together in PowerApps. The learning curve for PowerApps for whatever you're trying to do is going to be under two weeks, whereas trying to learn ASP.net, that environment and all the other suite of stuff that you have to have and get resources too and all that, you're talking months. There are a lot of costs involved when it's so high code, and a lot of time. Using PowerApps would save time and money. There's also the risk that if the person you assign a task to goes away, you lose all of their work or cannot continue it. 

There's a learning curve with any new tool, so it's going to be somewhere between a three and a four out of five in terms of ease of setup. It just depends on the person's experience and working with these types of tools, as to how well they understand and are able to work through that.

Once you have a concept of what to do, I'd say it takes less than two weeks to implement. With that initial building out of your very first PowerApps set of forms to accomplish what you're trying to do, you're going to tweak and enhance in the end. I just put this filter or search capability and sort capability on a couple of columns. Implementing new features and adding additional buttons, et cetera, will be something you are going to be doing along the way. You're going to continue to enhance it when you discover new capabilities you want to implement. It's a work in progress to roll it out and it's continual. That said, for the initial rough draft of something, from concept to actually putting it together, it's going to be just a week to maybe two weeks to do.

There is a learning curve for the initial cost of doing it. That said, I would definitely consider this a low-code job. It's definitely not high code. There's low to mid-level coding involved.

We're very limited in terms of users for deployment and maintenance. Staff within my office that would actually develop the PowerApps forms and implement and train up the other analysts are only going to be somewhere between three and four. They are program analysts themselves. They aren't IT.

We handled the initial setup ourselves in-house. We didn't use any outside assistance.

We have not yet witnessed any ROI. It is early days. Not until we're really up and running with it will we be able to look at that aspect.

That said, if I were to compare it to other solutions, I'd rate the potential for ROI five out of five. The workload and what you save on manpower will likely be impressive.

We're a federal entity, so we've got a government rate, and this is per user, which is unlimited apps for PowerApps. 

Typically, it's $20 per user, per month, commercial. For the government,  on a per user basis, what we were looking at is $11.23 per month.

I'd rate the pricing five out of five in terms of affordability. It's way cheaper than the commercial price. That said, I know if that's just an introductory price to get you into it. Then they're going to boost the price up. It won't stay at $11.23.

I'm not aware of any other costs above and beyond the licensing. 

We are a customer and end-user.

We're likely using the latest version. We just started using the product a few months ago and then we likely also have the IT team keeping everything up to date. 

I'd advise new users to not be in an on-premise environment; be in the Azure Government Cloud.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

If you're looking for a GUI front end to maintain your data, that interfaces with PowerBI, this has to be up there in terms of best options. And the learning curve is low. It is very compatible with whatever you're doing in the Power Platform environment.