Power Apps vs. Salesforce Lightning Platform

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

We use Salesforce Lightning Platform in everyday business as sales coordinators. By using this tool, we are able to send new requests to clients and communicate regarding pending proposals in real-time. This also tool holds many of our client accounts where we are able to monitor their sales and revenue.

• 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

• Reporting and Dashboards are thorough and can show a wealth of important data to inform and scale processes. It's helpful in a high volume sales cycle to be able to quickly identify weak points in performance and productivity so that adjustments can be made.
• Highly customizable. We are able to customize just about everything which allows us to track very specific things and in theory create better efficiency.
• Parent/Child account hierarchy exists which is helpful.
• Contact records can be associated with multiple accounts and opportunities. This, in theory, should minimize duplicates and mismanagement of contacts.
• Console helps a lot with data nesting. Having a fairly comprehensive look at an account without searching through various tabs and sections speeds up an otherwise cumbersome platform.

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

• Can be cumbersome: takes multiple clicks to get where you need to go
• Lightning is slower than original Salesforce, and it is very noticeable
• The UI change means sometimes I can't find what I need, so I have to switch back to the Classic version to find it

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

UI can be quite complex, but the more that is required will bring more complexity. Can handle complexity and variety very well, but makes ground-level views harder when not knowing full extent of functionality. Finding new functionalities can be difficult to pinpoint on some pages

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.

Salesforce's support is top-notch. They have subject-matter experts that are accessible at all times to address needs as they come up. They let you know in advance when there are system updates and enhancements so that you are prepared for upcoming changes. I've never had an issue that wasn't addressed immediately when reaching out for support.

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

We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. Certain reps were chosen to experiment with it and from there a decision was made to move forward. We've been customers ever since.

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

• Better visibility of Accounts and Contacts interactions makes it easier to maintain during employee transitions.
• Tracking of current jobs and relating them to past jobs is very useful.
• More efficient use of Sales Reps time.
• Sales Managers have good visibility into how their people are working.

Incentivized