Microsoft Power Apps

Great custom app building tool but expensive and not entirely easy

Comments: Good app building, but when you reach a certain level of use and complexity you have to pay for a mind blowing licence that most small and medium business won’t be able to afford. That’s why for small and medium business I’ll probably continue to recommend AppSheet instead of Power Apps.

Pros:

Thanks to the integration of Figma, you can give great look to your apps. The ability to create both desktop and mobile apps is great. It is easy to deploy. It easily connect to SharePoint lists and librairies.

Cons:

If you want to setup specific behavior, the coding language of Power Apps is not really easy and many times you’ll have to turn to Power Automate to complete the business flow wanted for your app. Also the personalization options of Power Apps are limited, that’s why I recommend designing your app in Figma and import your Figma in Power Apps.

Powerful yet simple, low code application building

Comments: Developing in Power Apps has been really enjoyable because of the ability to achieve quick outcomes that are also powerful and therefore can be used meaningfully within my organisation.

Pros:

If you can imagine it, you can build it. Power apps has a simple interface for designing and deploying applications that is flexible and lead to beautifully designed applications with minimum effort. Coupled with Power Automate, Power apps is a powerful tool that, with a small amount of simple code, can produce powerful outcomes. Also, as part of the Office 365 suite Power Apps can make use of staff user information and through Power Automate, perform complex actions across all most other apps across the suite.

Cons:

Form field creation is simple but time-consuming without the ability to template a form field for re-use. Power FX, the coding language behind Power Apps is simple for basic applications but can quickly become difficult to master as you begin to do more with your app. Though often you can offload the processing to Power Automate where you can do more without having to type code.

Experience on this app.

Pros:

The thing I like the most about this software is the simplicity of the design, easy to navigate.

Cons:

What I least like about this now, is that I have to verify myself every single day before I can use it which consume my time.

Low-code, but daunting and sluggish

Comments: We attempted to use Power Apps to create a tracking app for external trainees.

Pros:

Power Apps offers real strength in its integration with SharePoint and the rest of the Office ecosystem. Pricing is reasonable, as some access is included with some tiers of Microsoft 365,

Cons:

We found that running an app on top of a SharePoint list resulted in a sluggish experience that discouraged our external users. In addition, designing a Power App seems a little more daunting than in a competitive no-code/low-code product.

A great low-code platform

Comments: As a smaller organization, we don't have access to tons of resources or the money to gain that access. Power Apps came out at the perfect time for some direct needs we had and we haven't looked back. While it took (and is still taking) a bit of time to learn the platform and the constant state of change it is in, there is no way we could have created the tools that we now have in any other platform. We are able to get the right information to the right people at the right time and have them take meaningful action on it in a way that we can customize and make "our own". This is far better than any out-of-the-box solution as we don't have to make many compromises and it can be tailor-fit to our needs and refactored as those needs change. While this tech comes at a cost, it has saved us literally tens of thousands of dollars per year in employee hours, preventative loss due to near-real-time data being at our fingertips, and even helping us to realize income faster. It has been a force multiplier that allows us to compete on a level that a company of our size probably wouldn't be able to otherwise.

Pros:

The thing I like most about Power Apps is the fact that a person can go from problem to solution in a short amount of time, and share that solution with anyone in the company who needs it. While that is a bit simplified, it's mostly the way things work. Of course, the caveats begin with all the licensing and data source considerations but, generally speaking, it is super easy to get a solid tool into production and get back to business.

Cons:

The main issues I have with Power Apps are how difficult it can be to style apps. There are precious few ways to implement a pre-defined design (and frankly, I'm not a fan of any of them) so there is a good amount of front-end work if you want your apps to be consistent and follow a system. I think this could be viewed as a small issue, but I think it is one that doesn't need to exist in the way it does. There are other gripes I could post as well about how difficult it can be to do seemingly simple things. For instance, there is no way to fit text horizontally. To do this, you have to create an HTML text object, rotate it 90 degrees, use the vertical fit to get the size, and apply that to a horizontal text control. Of course, the realist in me chalks this up to the low code nature of the tool and that there are going to be some blind spots. I've not found an issue that couldn't be hacked around in some way and while this isn't ideal, it is still faster and cheaper than building the tool in something else.