Microsoft Power Apps Reviews

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.

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 to integrate with enterprise solutions like SAP and other enterprise solutions. It's highly integrated and highly secured. 

Externally or internally, we have several business processes that need to be automated. We write evaluations and also evaluate business procedures to see how they can be simplified. Power Apps is one of the solutions that we mostly use in our company to automate processes. We also have several clients who use it to automate SAP processes. This is the most critical business function in clients' core mission.

It's easy to use. We create great user experiences.

The track-to-use function is great.

It is easy to design automation processes.

The initial setup is mostly pretty simple. 

Users don't have to have any technical competence in order to begin creating automation. 

We'd like to have access to previewed content and preset options. If we could preview content for specific software, that would be ideal.

The user experience could continue to be improved upon. 

We'd like more features and less to no coding. 

I've been using the solution for three to four months. 

It is s stable product and I have found the performance and reliability to be good. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. It's also adjustable. 

We have around 200 people using the product.

We do plan to increase usage. 

The product is fully supported by Microsoft. We have a ticket for tracking issues. There's also a community around it that can assist. They are quite responsive. 

Positive

We've also used Blue Prism and UiPath. Since most of the automation processes are based on Microsoft technology like Excel and other Microsoft-related solutions, and Power Apps is based on Microsoft technology and is highly integrated with those solutions, it made sense to switch.

It's a stand-alone solution and uses connectivity to the software we want to automate. It's not hard to set up or to start automating things.

I'd rate the solution a four out of five in terms of ease of setup. It's not overly difficult. 

We were able to deploy the product in about a week. 

We have 50 to 100 people maintaining the solution. 

I handled the implementation myself as I started out using it for testing purposes. I did not have outside assistance. 

I don't handle the licensing aspect of the solution. It's handled by another team. 

It's my understanding we pay around $150 to $200 USD per user. 

We're using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd recommend the solution. It works so well with other Microsoft solutions. It also could reduce the workforce and release employees from redundant daily tasks.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I'm working for a company that provides services and develops projects for our clients. I am a solution architect and I use Microsoft PowerApps.

In Microsoft PowerApps the most valuable features are the fully customizable design that we can control everything that we would like to control. For example, the integration between Microsoft and third-party services through pre-built connectors, and the functionality to create custom connectors.

The solution could improve by having more connectors for different solutions in a way to create custom connectors. Additionally, they should make HTTP Connectors free again because it was not always a premium feature. These HTTP connectors allow you to send API requests which can be important.

I have been using Microsoft PowerApps for approximately four years.

The performance and the stability of Microsoft PowerApps are great because it is based on the Microsoft platform. We are able to use a lot of other features, we have no problems with the performance.

The technical support from Microsoft PowerApps is quite good because they respond in a few hours. They provide comprehensive support as well. If you do not buy any support package, SLA agreement, et cetera, and only have a standard license, you are able to raise a ticket with them and they will support you.

The initial setup is very easy.

There are areas of Microsoft PowerApps that can be improved. For example, the license policies are expensive to purchases the premium connectors. If a company would like to use the premium features, they have to pay a lot of money. The Microsoft PowerApps portal could be easier to use when there are a lot of external users because if a company has 1,000 external users, it is too expensive to use the Microsoft PowerApps portal.

I would recommend people to pay attention to not only the documentation of the solution but Microsoft provides a lot of video and text documentation. They give step-by-step guides on how to use different features and how to start and complete the implementation. Microsoft documentation is a good way to start for non-familiar people to Microsoft PowerApps.

I rate Microsoft PowerApps a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as a general business process improvement. We use it as more of a digital transformation to eliminate some archaic manual processes that the business has built up over time. We're working to make everything more streamlined.

The solution has allowed us to remove a lot of manual redundancies and to update and streamline our processes.

It's easy to use due to expert UI. It is great.

The initial setup is easy.

There's a lot of online knowledge on the solution, to the point where new users can basically teach themselves how to use the solution.

The solution is limited in a very specific way. One of the major problems with it is what PowerApps calls the delegation warning. Regardless of what platform, data source, et cetera, that you're using, you can't retrieve more than 2000 records.

I connect to an Oracle server that has well over 150,000 records that business users want to see or could use at any given time. The only thing that I could surface in the app is a portion of up to 2000 records at one data call.

Due to this limitation, I have to build in options for the user to refine the search, to go back out to the server, and then pull back records that match that search as opposed to offering all 150,000+ records. You need to filter quite extensively. Microsoft refers to is as a "delegation issue".

I've only been using the solution for about a year. It hasn't been too long as of yet.

The stability has been very good. We've been pretty satisfied with it. It's not buggy. It doesn't crash.

You cannot scale with PowerApps. PowerApps is still very much a point solution. The size is the size.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. Everybody that we've worked with at Microsoft is phenomenal. They are always willing to help troubleshoot and get to the bottom of issues. That said, with PowerApps and even Power Automate, sometimes the teams at Microsoft still don't know why some issues occur or how to work around them.

I joined the company a year ago in September. I don't think they used anything prior to that beyond the citizen developer level. There might have been a solution that the actual coders used, however, I can't recall the product's name. It was a pretty standard Microsoft application in any case. It may have been Visual Studio.

The initial setup is not complex. It's quite straightforward.

For me, just using it on my own, I just used Google searches or YouTube to figure out how do this or fix and tie items together. After about a month of learning and experimenting, I had a pretty good handle on how PowerApps works.

The company as a whole used Microsoft consultants to set up a center of excellence. 

The solution is free if you have a Teams account, or Office 365. 

If you start to use any premium connectors that are not stored in a SharePoint list or on an Excel workbook, then it costs $4 per user per month. If you want unlimited, it's about $16 per month for unlimited apps and unlimited connectors.

There might potentially be a few other extra fees, however, I'm not sure what they are. Microsoft is one of those organizations that manage to nickel and dime its customers on everything.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Microsoft.

We are most likely using the most recent or updated version of the solution, however, I'm unsure of the exact version number.

While Microsoft is an option, I'd recommend users check out OutSystems first and see if it makes sense for them to use that before looking into Microsoft.

Overall, I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

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 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 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.