Microsoft Power Apps Reviews

Power Automate is like process automation.

Any task which you do on a recurring basis or a daily basis, you can simply automate. For example, if you have a use case where every day when you go home you need to book a cab. What I can do is I can automate that task through Power Apps at a scheduled time every day. If I'm leaving at about four o'clock in the evening, by 3:30 I can run that Power task and book a cab every day.

With Microsoft, the main benefit that we get is it's easy for a layman to understand it. That's the advantage of it, it's user-friendly. 

The way it integrates with the other applications is very good. The experience is seamless; there are no hurdles. Connectors are easily available, which can help you connect with some third-party apps if required. 

The initial setup is easy.

It is stable and reliable. 

We can scale it. 

They probably need to improve intelligent document processing. In terms of reading the documents, whether it's a Word document, an Excel, a PDF, an HTML, or a webpage. Identifying the key things with its own intelligence is something that Power Automate and Power Apps need to improve.

I've used the solution for close to a year now.

It is quite stable.  It gives you that assurance since it is from Microsoft. The stability, the reliability is definitely there.

It is scalable. We have a lot of ground for it to scale it up, and add more and more apps or users can be added as per our business requirements.

It's being used widely by many people, in fact. However, it's hard to pinpoint the exact number of people who benefit from it. Anyone can quickly learn how to use it as well. 

I'm aware of UiPath and Automation Anywhere which take a longer time to implement. 

It's very easy to set up. You should have all the licenses available. It's quick and easy to implement, and you can get your hands on it immediately. It doesn't take too much time to get up and running. In contrast, its contemporaries like UiPath and Automation Anywhere are not so quick and easy to implement.

The cost depends on which bundle you get from Microsoft. For example, if you go with the standard Office 365 with the other packages around it, it's good enough. However, if you go for anything specific, you'll have to think about it and customize your requirements. If you go for 365, your cost would be less. If you go for Dynamics 365 with Azure, then it's a complete package that will be expensive.

We are Microsoft partners. 

My advice for those people in tersted int eh product would be to try it if they are looking at implementing something very quickly with minimum cost and minimal training. If these are their objectives, then Microsoft Power Platform is a very viable solution.

I'd rate the solution eight 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.

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.

I had to upload a form, an invoice, specifically, and then using an Azure function, I had to get that form from the Dataverse database and feed it to an Azure form recognizer and write the data back to the Azure Power App.

I like that you can quickly click together a user interface. For all no-code platforms that let you create a front end, you can click together something very quick. 

My problem with solutions like Power Apps and Betty Block blocks and probably with every no-code platform out there is that, as soon as you want to do something custom, something that's not provided by the environment you're using, it gets really tough. You have to work around the constraints of the platform. No-code platforms have constraints. I'm a developer myself, so I tend to not use no-code. I tend to code a lot. 

The notion people have is that no code equals no knowledge, and that's simply not true. Even though you don't have to write codes, you still have to know what you're doing.

I had some trouble interfacing with the Dataverse database. If I could, I'd make the couplings with other software easier. The integration with other software could be better. Any developer who had to work with an application made in Power Apps would find that useful.

There are limited use cases. 

I've used the solution within the last 12 months. 

The solution is a lot more stable than Betty Blocks. I haven't had any crashes or lost data or anything. That said,  haven't used it thoroughly. While I say it's pretty stable, I can't say how it performs under heavy use or big projects.

I've never had to reach out to technical support in the past. 

I've also used Betty Blocks. With Power Apps, you can quickly click together a user interface, that's also the case with Betty Blocks. However, both being no-code have constraints. For example, Betty Blocks was using jQuery one, and at the time we had jQuery three. I wanted to use a front-end framework. That was just not possible since it would mess up the Betty Blocks designer. And that's also the case with Microsoft Power Apps.

The ease or difficulty of the initial setup varies. For me, it wasn't that hard. However, I already had an Azure subscription and a Microsoft account. If you don't have any of that, it's not that easy - especially if you're not very technically inclined. It can be a daunting task.

I'd rate the ease of setup six out of ten. 

The deployment is fast and takes almost no time at all. I developed the application, and I pushed the publish button, and it was published.

I handled the initial setup myself. I did not need outside assistance. 

The license for the solution comes with my professional license, so I'm not sure actually if you pay by the user. For me, it was free to develop with a professional license, which is about 70 euros a month. That said, if you get a lot of users using it, it's not included. I don't know how much that would cost.

Whether it is worth the cost or not depends on the use case. 

We initially chose the solution as it was a customer specification. They wanted to use a Microsoft Power App.

I'm an end-user. 

I have been using the latest version of the solution. However, I don't even know if you can switch between versions.

If you want a complex system with lots of custom work done, then it is not ideal, as you are going to have to face the limitations of the platform. If what you want is a simple tool where you just need to upload some files, or you need to store some data to make a custom CRM application, then it's very easy to use.

It's certainly not a replacement for actual development work, and it's not a replacement for developers.

I would recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. In terms of no-code, it's pretty good, especially when you use it with a Logic App, which is part of the Power platform. When I compare it to Orbis or Betty Blocks, it's just a really good product. It has a small learning curve, however, it should be really easy for people who have no previous experience.

We use this solution to provide a cloud-based platform for our clients to develop, connect, and store data from across the full Microsoft suite.

We particularly like the workflow connectors in the forms, for information introduction purposes.

Our customers appreciate the fact that the licensing for this solution is also connected with Office 365, making it a it's less expensive overall system.

It is also very user-friendly in terms of learning curves; it can be picked up very quickly by new users and provides good interoperability between Teams, Outlook, and other solutions from Office.

We would like to see some improvement in the cost of the solution when an organization has a more complex network structure. The advanced connectors are very expensive, which discourages our customers from implementing it.

We would also like to see a more robust library of uses for different system roles to be built into this solution, such as for authorizations.

We have been working with this solution for nearly three years.

The stability of this solution is okay, and really depends on the clients architecture and infrastructure.

When the solution is properly designed at the implementation stage, the scalability is incredible, and the only limiting factor is the cost involved with scaling.

The initial setup for this solution is very easy.

We would recommend this solution to organizations of all sizes. However, the level of investment needed may mean that it is better suited to medium to large organizations.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We predominantly use the product for a lot of intake forms. There is a lot of data collection and a lot of intake forms. We use Power Application for validation rather than using spreadsheets. It's good for automation, where we need a data repository of the input, which we get from the resource.

It's extremely user-friendly. It's easy to use. Of course, it's a local tool, however, if you're aware of some of the basic Microsoft products, you can really get on with it. That's something which is really wonderful. 

Even a beginner can set up a Power App and run with it. That's one of the most important features when it comes to the adoption of Power Apps.

The solution becomes easier the set up once you get used to it.

It's a stable product.

The solution has the potential to scale. 

I would like to see some of the connectors which they have right now to be more basic. The ones they have right now, they claim, are premium connectors. They should make that a little more affordable and have it in the free version. Some of the basic databases like SQL should be part of their normal connectors, and it should necessarily be premium.

It can be a bit more difficult to set up the first time.

They have a feature that integrates well with Power BI, however, it is not seamless. We'd like a better, more seamless integration with Power BI in the future. 

They need more of a font selection. If I'm in Excel and I'm using a particular font, I'm limited in terms of which I can use. It should allow for use of any fonts under Microsoft 365.

We've been using Power Apps for the last two years or so.

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is scalable if we integrate with other applications like Power Automate and connect it with some other applications or some other databases like SQL. That said, in the current arrangement with SharePoint, we have some limitations. The moment the data increases, if we're able to integrate Power Automate, then surely it becomes a scalable application. Right now it can be scaled, however, it's not something that we are looking to do. 

There are maybe 60 to 70 users at this point of time actively giving us data, however, there could be other applications that people are using.

In terms of technical support, we do have a governance team. The IT governance is a security team who helps us navigate through issues. We raise requests internally within our organization to help us see where the issue is, and they will escalate as required. They might reach out to Microsoft support to kind of get it sorted. That said, we have not found any major issues so far. If we do, our internal team is the first team to go to.

We previously used mostly manual consolidation using Excel, emails, and things like that. There was no other tool before. That said, we used normal Office productivity tools like Excel and Outlook. We went with Power App since we were already using Microsoft and Office 365, which helps us to integrate multiple other Microsoft solutions. That's the reason we thought Power Apps would be the best way for us. It also integrates with SharePoint and is easy to build in. 

The initial setup was not straightforward, however, once you get a hang of it, then it's pretty simple to create things. From a documentation perspective, it's kind of a good guide that they have as far as Power Apps is concerned. It's easy to get started. Like any tool, you have to spend some time understanding and navigating around it. There is just a normal learning curve that is required as with application. You won't really find it that difficult if you are ready to invest the time to learn the tool. There's a moderate level of complexity.

It was not that effort-intensive, yet it definitely took us close to three weeks to create our first app on Power Apps, which was mostly SharePoint driven and had pretty decent complexities. It was not a very straightforward application. It took a fairly decent time. It was not a very long-term project, it was short-term, and we could manage to do it in three weeks.

We have not found it difficult to maintain Power Apps. It's pretty straightforward. We haven't had any challenges so far.

Everything was handled in-house. 

Right now, we are using an enterprise license without the premium connectors at this point. For Power Automate, we are definitely going to need some licenses which we're exploring. 

Depending upon the user requirements, we're still exploring the licensing requirement. Most of the applications that we leverage are without any cost other than the normal license which we are paying for as part of Office 365. We'll take additional licenses depending on the solution and the need.

We have performed a lot of other projects on the Power platform, which is a Microsoft product. So we have used Power App and Power Automate to do many of our automation initiatives.

We are working with the latest version of the solution. 

I'd advise potential new users to have the UI designed well in advance. Articulate the flow in which you want to create your Power Apps so that you can save time. Then, do a dry run using Excel as well. It's important when you're using Power Applications, to have your UI design and the BRD clearly articulated, otherwise it might take a little longer to implement Power Apps. Once you have everything in readiness, it will be easy. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.