Microsoft Power Apps Reviews

We use Microsoft PowerApps for internal business solutions that eliminate the need for Excel workbooks.

To keep track of which accounts our project managers were working on so that we could charge time back to those other lines of business.

The UI functionality is the most valuable aspect of this solution.

If the price was reduced and the quality of the user interfaces was improved it would be beneficial.

I have been using Microsoft PowerApps since 2019.

Microsoft PowerApps is a stable solution.

The scalability of Microsoft PowerApps is limited.

We have a few thousand users in our organization. They are completely different. Most are individual contributor roles, but who uses what for what varies greatly.

It is being used extensively, and I'm sure there are plans to expand its use even further.

I would rate technical support a five out of five.

I also have experience with OutSystems.

I would rate OutSystems a five out of five, and I would highly recommend them.

The initial setup was straightforward. I would rate it a five out of five.

Deployment took about a month once it was at my level and I fully understood it.

My implementation strategy was to meet with various business owners to identify a solution for them, then build and deploy that solution for them.

I did not work with a third-party integrator, consultant, or reseller. I completed the deployment by myself.

I had some help from YouTube and Google.

I'm not familiar with the maintenance aspect. I know there is a reference center and a few others from our IT department. I would guess that there is a team of a  few hundred people to maintain this solution.

There has been a return on investments. I would rate the ROI a five out of five.

Whatever the cost of licensing is, it is in the millions.

I would rate the licensing costs a one out of five.

My recommendation is to first investigate OutSystems.

I would rate Microsoft PowerApps a seven 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.

Our use case for the product revolves around financial applications, including account services, a service portal, asset transfers, and additions for the organization. It involves multi-level approval processes for stakeholder identification and managing entries in the DLP lecture.

The platform's most valuable feature includes the gallery for displaying data for managing approval flows, which is useful for our multi-level approval processes. Additionally, the 360 payments feature is valuable for its default hierarchical approach.

One area for improvement in the platform is enhancing the user experience, especially for less tech-savvy users, by simplifying complex features and controls. Additionally, adding more functional options and features could further improve its usability.

I have been working with Microsoft Power Apps for the past six months.

The platform has been a stable product for us. Despite occasional updates and transitions, it has consistently met our needs and requirements.

I would rate the scalability of the product as seven. While it generally scales well, occasional issues arise.

The response time of the support services has been satisfactory for our business requirements.

Positive

Compared with competitors like PegaDM, the platform, and Power Automate offer a more versatile platform that is particularly suitable for workflow applications like ours.

The platform's pricing is reasonable compared to competitors like Apigee. It offers good value for the quality of the product.

Data integration with the platform has been relatively easy for us. We have integrated data from external systems without facing any significant challenges.

I rate the platform as an eight overall. It meets our requirements well and has proven to be a valuable tool for our organization.

We use the product for sales and customer service features.

The platform has valuable features for opportunity and finance management. It has all the essential features for customer service.

Sometimes, the opportunity includes two products, and the outcome for each product is different. It would be beneficial to have a feature that allows users to split the opportunity into separate logs for each product.

We have been using Microsoft Power Apps for more than 15 years.

We never encountered system downtime issues.

It is a scalable platform.

We contacted the technical support services in case of functionality unavailability during the trial version phases.

Positive

We used Microsoft 365 Dynamics CRM earlier. Later, we switched to Microsoft Power Apps for faster speed and availability of on-cloud infrastructure.

The initial process is simple. We need to create a trial and start working. It takes half an hour to complete. Later, we can purchase the licenses further.

The product is inexpensive. I rate its pricing a three to four out of ten.

We evaluated ServiceNow. We decided to use Microsoft Power Apps, as we already used the Microsoft platform. It was easier to onboard the product into a trial environment, and premium support was also available.

I rate Microsoft Power Apps a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to integrate our apps, and send processed data via the different connectors it provides.

This solution has allowed us to offer our customers to integrate with our platform platform to send documents, and for them to be processed with a digital key network solution, without having to use the platform directly.

We like that this solution allows us to fully define our test environments, and link them using different code. This means we can do different tests, but with one basic structure, and then export the data and use it in other platforms.

We would like to see the period for viewing executions within this solution to be extended beyond its current limit of 28 days.  We would prefer to be able to offer our customers an infinite amount of history to search.

We have been using this solution for nearly a year.

We have found this to be a generally stable solution, and have only experienced issues when there are a large amount of registers involved.

This is a very scalable solution.

We did not previously have a single solution, but instead we used a component that worked using Java.  We switched to this software because it was less complex to maintain.

The initial set up of this solution is fairly straightforward.

We implemented this solution using our in-house team.

We would advise organizations that this solution has a high-price point. However, the cost is justified for how comprehensive the package is, and all components of the solution are available under the standard license plan; there are no hidden costs involved.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for workflow automation.

Power Automate has been the most valuable feature. 

The set up of the solution could be simpler. 

We have been using this solution for three years. 

I would rate the stability of this solution an eight out of ten. 

The customer support for this solution could be faster. 

Positive

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

The whole life cycle takes two months to develop, test, implement and deploy.

It is possible to make use of free licences for the sake of a POC. 

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

My primary use case for Microsoft Power Apps are mostly demos for my customers and in trainings. I am a Microsoft Registered Trainer.

The most valuable feature is the completeness of the concept. It is not restricted by where you are allowed to use it and that is its greatest strength.

There is room for improvement in error handling and debugging. I would appreciate it if Microsoft created something like the social network graphs Facebook sometimes shows you (potential connections). It would be great for Microsoft to take a similar point of view regarding the data and data flow in Power Apps. It would help us see which field is changing and which is influencing the follow-up field or display or workflow, etc.

As a chief financial officer, I would like to see the mark of chain retracement and where the money flows. Imagine dropping a little drop of ink onto a handkerchief and seeing the ink sucked into the fibers of the handkerchief and distributing itself. Similar things happen to money if you put it into a small market and a chief financial officer needs to have that information. 

I have been working with Microsoft Power Apps since 2018. 

Microsoft Power Apps is definitely stable. It is as stable as SharePoint and this app model has been in place since 2013. Essentially, it requires you to put code onto a SharePoint site which is not executed there, but rather on a client or on specific workflow codes, which are client. If code executions are well work-flowed, it is capable of saving your script and of the global resources. That capability to take off where you left off, including external resources, is a great strength.

Microsoft Power Apps is scalable. SharePoint is a farm. It is a big forest of machines interconnected by a messaging system, Windows Azure Service Bus. It can be understood as a telepathic network between the machines. As long as one machine is running, the system's running and as soon as more machines are adding the capabilities, the load is distributed automatically.

Microsoft's technical support is at a high level. 

We did previously use a different Microsoft workflow operating system, but it was complicated to program and difficult to provide interactions with the users. All of that is much easier now that we use SharePoint platforms like Teams. Microsoft has the best of all worlds. I am confident that it will rock the market.

I have an MSD end subscription; it's a flat rate subscription.

My advice for anyone looking to implement Microsoft Power Apps is: please have a closer look at the Azure infrastructure and do not underestimate the complexity of Azure Active Directory and SharePoint. I recommend spending a week or so letting someone informed like me introduce you to the complexity of Azure Active Directory, SharePoint, and Windows Azure. Not having this information is like driving a car without having put oil into the motor and air into the tires. In other words, it would not be wise.

We use Microsoft PowerApps for the typical use cases including website creation and a work portal, covering all the operations involving the manufacturing side of my customers.

There are three app-building interfaces available in PowerApps. Canvas is model-driven. Power Pages, which was Power Portal, which has more low-code, no-code capabilities and makes web design easy for the everyday user to create a website. Lastly, Power BI reports, or Microsoft DataWorks, which we have integrated with our data provide us the option to work collaboratively.

Most of the people in our organization using this solution are business people. They are not experts in technology and are not familiar with how to use the application. They use Excel and other documents to collaborate. Moving Excel to the application helps them access different data sources. It allows us to provide all the information in one single place. Everyone can view the data based on their role or access level.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft PowerApps is the ease of use to create an application. For example, if you use the Canvas app, there is a feature that you can upload an image, and it will easily identify it and convert it into the application.

The solution is convenient for using Power Effects so we can write customized business logic.

Microsoft PowerApps is not responsive in nature. For us to make an application responsive, it requires some effort. We need to work with CSS, HTML5, or JavaScript.

I would also like to see improvements made to the integration with other data sources, including Azure Databricks or Spark. When we connect from DataWorks, CDS, SharePoint, or OneDrive where the actual Excel file is kept, it is easy. However, if we connect with other data sources, we need to do a no-data filter, particularly when there are in-built integrations available. 

Out-of-the-box connectors, like dataflow, would help to load the data from those data sources into CDS.

For future releases, Microsoft PowerApps should add more templates that help bring more experiences to the websites.

I work as an IT analyst. I have been using Microsoft PowerApps for two years.

In our organization, PowerApps is used by program managers, IT engineers, IT analysts, assistant consultants, and delivery partners.

The initial setup of Microsoft PowerApps is straightforward. 

For deployment, we use the ALM CoE kit, and GitHub through the pipeline. It is done through the team, creating a Dev environment for each pre-Dev and production environment. When we have completed testing and validation, we proceed with staging and then production.

We have not implemented using an automatic deployment through Azure Pipeline as there are a lot of bugs. We are still doing the implementation manually.

Deployment is done by our customers' teams. They are handling the pipeline activities.

The ROI is always positive. Our customers who use this solution can quickly create and circulate through a group. For example, for an innovative idea, you can create an idea zone, QC, or something similar. You can create a form and circulate it via email through PowerApps.

PowerApps has been adopted by all major partners and Microsoft is widely used. We use Microsoft Teams to collaborate. You need to have licenses. E1 plus Intune or E1 plus licenses is enough for everyone to use PowerApps as it's free, even if you are using data sources like SharePoint.

If you want to deploy something with RPA or Power Virtual Agents, you will need to think about the licensing model and the capabilities of the AI builder. AI can deploy the AML model, so you can use the capabilities, meaning you need the licensing.

For an organization looking to implement Microsoft PowerApps, they should consider the timeframe required and the experience they would like. 

Responsiveness is a concern with PowerApps. If you want to build an application for your desktop, tablet, or mobile, the application needs to be responsive on all screens. PowerApps is not responsive to these requirements. If responsiveness is not a concern, then I recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We had a new requirement from a business in the clinical domain and the business wanted to identify risk at a study or site level. We created an application using PowerApps, which works well as we usually interact with the SQL Server on Azure.

I did some POC for another application. We’re expecting we'll get it in a new project in the near future. It is a really good tool. We can run programming knowledge, we can learn the PowerApps and we can interact with applications.

It is user-friendly. Anyone can easily learn and work on this tool.

The solution is easy to implement.

It’s a stable product.

Not much coding is required.

I don’t have much hands-on experience with PowerApps. I’d need more time with it. As of now, I can’t think of an area for improvement.

We did a POC with the solution. We’ve used it for the last 12 months.

It’s very stable. It’s reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze.

I cannot speak to how scalable it would be. However, it may work best with a lesser amount of data.

We might have about 100 people on the solution.

I don’t have any experience using any other tool.

It’s straightforward to set up the solution. It’s not overly difficult or complex.

We did the integration ourselves. We didn’t need the help of any consultants or integrators.

I don’t have any details in relation to the pricing or licensing.

The tool was suggested to us, and we decided to try it. We did not evaluate other options.

I’m not sure of the exact version number. However, we are using the latest version.

I’d recommend the solution to others.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. There may be other tools that are easier to work with. However, I’m not sure. In general, it works well, and we have been happy with it.

The solution is for rapid application development software.

There is a specific environment, in part a platform of PowerApps, in which you can just deploy the solutions and then you share the link with the users and they are able to open them using iPads or mobile devices, or even a computer.

We have been working to build a maintenance events app for assets, it's an app to manage and show all the assets that have been working or down for maintenance in an operation, inside one bigger mining company. They have many trucks and many other, let's say, machines in the operation and sometimes they have to put these machines just through a maintenance mode, to see what's happening, or to change some part specifically, or even if the machine is having some kind of issue. That's due to the fact that if it's down, they have to manage how long it's down and what was the part that was the issue, the cause of the issue. They have to change the parts and everything's very costly in terms of money for the company when we have one specific asset that's down.

Previously, they were using a board in a room, just to manage all these statuses.  Instead of this, now we have one specific app that is working in live modes in almost real-time. Just getting the data from the services and showing it on a big board in PowerApps can show what's happened, what's the status, and what's the reason for the issue. This app allows for adding some comments. It's a collaborative app where many people can just go there and add comments and notes about what's happening with the machine.

There are many things there that I like about the solution. I like the galleries, which are really powerful. I like the way that we can build forms very quickly. 

In terms of timing to develop, PowerApps is very fast. We can integrate with Power BI. You can just show the Power BI report embedded in PowerApps, and it works really nicely.

In my experience, the solution's deployment can be tricky.

In my experience, it was not good as it was giving errors around the tables and I couldn't find what was happening. I had to break it down into different solutions - one solution containing all the tables and the second solution containing the application, plus the power domain that I had for this particular application. It's something that's not good, in terms of the way that things work. 

When I added Power Automate into the solution, for some reason it disappeared from my Power Automate page, as it was added inside the solution. It was very, very weird. It may be a bug. 

There's a primary interface and integration feature and we build some HL processes there. However, suddenly after adding this part, and automating the solution to deploy it, it was just not available for me anymore and I had to go inside the solution and open the MS files from there instead of the usual place where all the Power Automates are created. It was like a bug and also. In terms of the issues that I have with the solution feature inside PowerApps, I didn't like it. I've seen this too complicated. It's something that Microsoft has to improve.

The speed and performance could be better. PowerApps sometimes gets stuck, gets slow and I don't have any reason for why it's happening. Suddenly you are trying to see the rows on your screen and you just have a wait to get the results back, then there's nothing happening. These things look like an environmental issue, however, I don't know if it's something about the localization or something else.

We'd like our option in terms of licensing that can be paid by the app and not by users. That could be something good. Just the way that they charge the license, it's too much. There are not many options. They could give a little bit more flexibility to choose in terms of options for a license.

I've used the solution for six months. 

It's stable, however, sometimes it is slow.

There are no issues about the connection falling. Just, when you are using it, suddenly the page is broken. There is no issue yet, sometimes it gets a little bit frozen and you're waiting a little bit more time to gather results. The table is not a big table with many, many rows, so why is it taking so long, so much time to get the answer back from the app? That's the main issue. There's a performance problem. It's not a stability question.

It's scalable if we're talking about the database, about data warehouse, however, not about PowerApps. PowerApps is not scalable. It's scalable, in the sense that the app you can share for many users, however, you have to pay by user. Scalability isn't really applicable.

We're still not running it fully. We're just prepared to start testing. 

We've dealt with technical support in the past. 

We had some little situations where we couldn't get the help as we needed, however, that was a limitation in the tool - it was not an issue with them.

For the most part, they are really good.

Positive

IN terms of the initial setup, we have to choose which kind of approach we are going to use in PowerApps, as PowerApps has different strings. You can choose PowerApps Canvas, or you can choose a driving app, and that's a little bit different. In my case, I chose a PowerApps combo as I needed a little bit more in terms of flexibility and in terms of how I build this topic they screen. 

In terms of the development, it's quick, really it's quick, however, it's not the fastest way to develop and there are some other solutions in the market that are faster in some ways. In terms of deployment, in my experience, when you're going to deploy perhaps an application, you have to build a solution and a solution and it's a little bit tricky. You have to add all the components to the solution and, after that, you have to export the solution and import the solution into the production environment. We have an environment for development and a second environment for production.

The application is deployed, however, it's not in use yet. They are just preparing to start testing the application and once they finalize the test, the app is going to go live.

After I passed over all these little issues that I had, it was quick to deploy. It was just a question of minutes. When we export the solution and import the solution back, it's easy. However, all the processes to be able to finally get over these issues and everything, it took me four weeks just to realize what was going on and handle it. 

I was the one that deployed the solution. 

In terms of ROI,  I didn't see any. However, if you look at the cost of building an app, the coding costs would be much higher without this solution. You can save months of development time and the money needed to deploy the solution. In that sense, the ROI is awesome. 

The licensing is restrictive and can get expensive as you have to pay per user, not per app. It's a range of users. For example, if you go above 50 users, you need to pay more. 

If you compare it with competitors like Google, they are more expensive than Google. Google has another option that's a PowerApps competitor called AppSheets and AppSheets is cheaper than PowerApps.

We are Microsoft partners. 

I'm using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

There are some things that need improvement in some ways to make the tool better. However, it's very powerful and it's very fast to deploy something. It's great.