Caspio vs. Power Apps

Caspio is excellent when you are looking to not only have a CRM but even more. We utilize many of the features to now having our membership forms, adding new member varieties connected with Caspio which we had to manually add ourselves. Our search button for new varieties and display gardens, as well as combination designs, are all done through Caspio. Caspio has really helped us become more efficient and now part of the 21st century!

Incentivized

PowerApps is well suited for "quick-wins" and fast prototypes of business solutions. It also is beneficial for situations where business partners and developers work together - it allows the business folks to provide a "quick-and-dirty" prototype which is then fleshed-out by developers that are trained experts on the platform. The interactive and easy to understand representation of the solution allows business partners to "see" the solution and add, remove, or correct aspects of it themselves. It provides a common view and understanding of the actual solution across business units and tech teams. PowerApps, being a low-code\no-code platform is not well suited for business processes that require many complex computations or large amounts of custom code - such as solutions that are better architected as Web Site or "full-blown" desktop solutions. There are solutions that are just not easy or quick to accomplish in a low-code\no-code platform. Enterprise Architects should know the difference, however business partners often try to create a solution and only when stuck because it becomes too complex do they engage a tech team for assistance - at which point there are sunk-costs involved and hinderences to re-platforming the solution

• Easy to use.
• Excellent help when needed - never says the questions are too small or "stupid."
• Can continue to add new data pages and uses all the time.

Incentivized

• Power Apps has formats that are pre-built that don't require any coding which makes it easier to achieve your vision. This does become a challenge if your App needs don't fit into that format.
• We deal with a ton of data so the fact that you can connect to any data source in addition to their pre-stablished data connections makes the process a breeze.
• The online learning resources and tutorials are helpful as well for those who are tech savvy.

Incentivized

• While I do think Caspio is easy to use, it wasn't at first. Making the user interface a bit friendly would be great!

Incentivized

• PowerApps has a great coding option, but there are some pieces of the tool that the requirement to understand code is a barrier to fun if the user doesn't code.
• MUCH time can be spent looking for solutions on this young platform and the body of forum/help/lessons learned is not as robust as it will be in a few years.
• Like many early-stage Microsoft products, PowerApps is a relatively blank slate that will be improved by the feedback of their users and ongoing feature development. Right now it seems that the product lacks a critical mass of use-case driven templates (there are some, but I haven't yet found one that didn't require more work to customize it to my need that it would take to build my own tool).

Incentivized

We are committed to Caspio Bridge. We could migrate to another product, but we would not be able to do so quickly. I estimate that we would need about a year (maybe more) to convert all of our forms and processes if we were to switch to some other product

Incentivized

PowerApps is a great solution and I have spent the last year familiarizing myself with the platform and building custom applications to complete a whole range of tasks such as asset management, custom invoice generation, and item restriction tracking. We as a company have barely begun to scratch the surface of what can be achieved with PowerApps.

Incentivized

I've had some instances where my team and I discovered a bug in Caspio. We alerted the company, and the bug was fixed in the next regular update of the software. The few times that I've had to contact support, it was a pretty good experience. They're not terribly quick to respond and take action, but they don't ignore you, either.

Incentivized

The community forums are extremely responsive to questions asked, there is a good body of online documentation and many community posts to draw from. Although the platform has changed, which means some of the posts are out of date and the solutions provided aren't relevant. Of relevance, I read over 400 articles plus documentation to get this first app built in SharePoint, move it to SQL and make it work exactly the way it should.

Microsoft is a really great tool for databases though its biggest drawback is that it is really difficult to share the data via the web. Caspio helps by not only mimicking databases, views (similar to queries) and forms for entering data, but also allows for online reports. Creating web pages and being able to place it within our own website pages is great.

Incentivized

1. PowerApps functionality comes with E1 over E3 License without adding extra costs 2. For Nintex you pay (at the beginning) for each workflow, so my intention would be, to do no workflows to prevent additional costs, but I want a platform with a fair price that allows me to create workflows without thinking about the price for each workflow and we use only some workflow and relative easy workflows and forms as a medium-sized company. 3. PowerApps provides a lot of functionality without needing to invest in premium features directly.

Incentivized

• For over 10 years Caspio has been a great tool by allowing our users to retrieve data they have submitted in the past to update data to be used for current surveys.
• The system is used by over 80% of our users instead of the usual online forms.
• Fees have always been low, especially helpful for a small department of 3 members. Always reliable and affordable.

Incentivized

• Automation of manual processes brings an ROI on labor costs.
• Intake of data provides clean database design.
• Connectivity to data-lake provides insights and trends into the data.
• Able to scale operations with efficiencies provided by the app.
• Can mature the process and workflows to do more.

Incentivized