Power Apps Vs Power Automate: Key Differences

In this blog post, I want to provide expert insights into the comparison between Power Apps Vs Power Automate as well as showcase how both platforms stack up against FlowForma Process Automation. 

From speaking with IT and business leaders, there are key recurring themes discussed when their organizations have Office 365 in place and have experimented with Microsoft’s Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate (formerly known as Microsoft Flow). The conversations usually pertain to functionality, technical comparison and ROI.  

There is still a grey area around the strengths and weaknesses of Power Apps and Power Automate, as well as the potential alternatives for digital transformation. In this blog, I will distil the myths and provide a valuable Power Apps Vs Power Automate guide for your organization to follow.  

Let's get started with an introduction to the tools.

Microsoft Power Apps is primarily a design tool for forms while Microsoft Power Automate is an automation and integration tool. They’re individual products but can be combined.

Let's discuss Power Apps in more detail.

What is Power Apps?

Microsoft Power Apps is one of the applications contained within the Microsoft Power Platform. Microsoft's Power Platform includes:

• Power BI

• Power Apps

• Power Automate

• Power Pages

Power Apps supports users to create business applications to solve business challenges. Users create applications using formulas and expressions to generate applications.

Power Apps is a low code platform. This means that while don't need to be an Advanced Code Developer to create business applications, you'll still need extensive coding knowledge to produce applications using formulas and expressions.

The three key components of Power Apps include:

Canvas apps

As the name suggests this component allows you to start designing your app with a blank canvas. Canvas Apps is a freeform-style application of Power Apps, for designing from the ground up using an interface similar to other Microsoft products like Excel or PowerPoint. It has drag-and-drop functionality that simplifies the app building process.

Users build out business applications using a combination of components and formulas. If you're handy with Excel formulas, this will give you an advantage in getting familiar with Power Apps. Data API connectors allow the passing of business data for over 400 different third-party data sources.

Model-driven Apps

The model-driven Apps support users in building data models. The App is a data-driven complement of Power Apps that uses third-party data to allow users to visualize, produce and interact with forms, views, charts and dashboards. The interface is drag and drop and provides functionality to manipulate the data sets.

Some of the key applications of the model-driven App include:

• Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM)

• Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS)

• Inventory Management System

• Employee Onboarding System

Portal

A Power Apps Portal is essentially a website that is integrated with the data available in the rest of the Power platform. The portal is hosted within the Power Apps environment and extracts from the database to form the contents of the portal.

Users can log in to the Power Apps Portal and see the data that you choose to show or input data directly into your database.

Both internal company users and external users such as contractors or suppliers can login to the Power Apps Portal to interact with and submit data.

Some examples of Power App Portals include:

• Customer support

• Community portal

• Booking pages

• Employee self-service portal

For a side-by-side comparison, check out the Comparative Guide to FlowForma Process Automation vs Microsoft Power Apps. 

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate is a platform that supports users to automate tasks and streamline business processes. Power Automate workflows focus on automating repetitive tasks, and complex business processes and streamlining operations.

Microsoft Power Automate can create workflows to synchronize data across various apps and software, generate real-time notifications to alert stakeholders, update databases with new information, and collect data from Power Apps or other sources.

Some example processes Power Automate automates include:

• Employee onboarding

• Expense approval

• Inventory management

• Sales intake

• Site inspections

• Service desk

• Task automation

Uses cases of Power Apps and Power Automate

Process Automation

When considering Power Apps Vs Power Automate, process automation should be a key factor. What’s important to consider before you take on any process automation solution, is the scale and ownership of your process automation project. How soon do you want or need to digitize and who will be responsible for maintaining processes that are built that may require changes further down the line.

If it’s a few pain point solutions that the business needs, then IT can build and maintain these processes with Power Apps and Power Automate.

But if you are automating multiple processes, then IT's ability to turn these processes around quickly and commit to their continued maintenance can be problematic. This is when it's worth evaluating Power Apps and Power Automate alternatives for digital transformation. 

Process Automation Considerations for Power Apps and Power Automate

When exploring Power Apps Vs Power Automate, usability should be a key factor. The fact that neither platform has no code functionality as its core should be taken into consideration. You may ask why?

Considering No Code

There are many benefits to using a no-code platform, the main one being that the barrier to entry is lowered for digitizing processes and more people can create workflows than with a product that requires coding and working with multiple products.

IT professionals comment on the challenges they face in meeting the demand for business process automation and digital transformation from within their organizations.

Feedback suggests that process owners find it difficult to build solutions themselves using Power Apps and Power Automate and are knocking on IT’s door to get it done.

User Experience

The user interfaces are undeniably slick and have all the appeal that you expect from any Microsoft product but when you get under the hood it is clear that you need coding experience and a lot of free time to learn both products so that you can make them work together to meet the needs of the business. You quickly realize that it’s outside of your skillset and a ticket/project needs to be logged with IT.

Because of these challenges, IT is often left carrying the workload for process automation when using Power Apps and Power Automate. Given that this resource is usually overstretched, organizations are then left with no alternative but to bring in a partner to implement process automation solutions.

Cost

This can be a costly exercise, as not only do solutions need to be built externally, but they also need to be maintained. It’s common for organizations to encounter other issues i.e. if there is a change in personnel within that partnership. The person who once used ‘their’ logic to create Power Automate workflows may have moved companies and their coding is often not ‘logical’ to another coder which can introduce delays. This should be a key consideration when reviewing Power Apps Vs Power Automate or other tools to automate repetitive tasks.

Forms

Another key feature to analyse when reviewing Power Apps Vs Power Automate is forms. When designing forms using Power Apps, you need to use Excel-like expressions to add logic to the forms you are designing. These formulas can become quite complex. So, when problems are encountered, it’s not always a quick fix and often requires IT personnel to resolve them.

Forms and Workflows

Power Apps forms also need a workflow component (Power Automate) to engage the different users in a business process, such as:

• form initiators/requestors

• approvers (often different people at many different stages in a single process)

• fulfilment resources (the people that complete the process by carrying out tasks e.g. HR and finance staff, site operations staff, etc.)

Integrating Power Apps and Power Automate to deliver a smooth-running business process can be very challenging. You need to consider:

• How Power Apps form will record the progress of a process through its stages?

• How the progress will be updated at each stage between Power Apps and Power Automate?

• How the transfer of responsibility will occur?

• How the communications will be handled between the resources involved in the process?

• How access to data will be managed between Power Apps and Power Automate?

• How documents are generated and managed?

• How document management tasks are recorded and reported to stakeholders?

And many more, depending on the complexity of the business process and the ability of the user to handle the technical features of the Power Apps and Power Automate platforms.

What can we take from the process automation challenges that IT Departments have faced? And what about alternatives to Power Apps and Power Automate for digital transformation at scale? I will be discussing both later on in this blog.

How Power Platform Compliments FlowForma Process Automation

There are scenarios where organizations use both Power Platform and FlowForma Process Automation, and here are some examples where it makes good sense to do so:

Power Automate flows can be triggered by many events, for example, receiving an email. Power Automate can then create or update a FlowForma Process Automation form to execute the business process using our Power Automate Connector.

Simple Power Apps can be created easily, so if you need just a simple form for use within your team, with no business process, then Power Apps is all you need.

Power Apps gives you a significant level of control over the user interface, so if you need a super-slick user interface and have the time to build it, then Power Apps can act as the front-end user interface and can pass data into FlowForma Process Automation using the connector to handle the approval and fulfilment stages of the business process.

Often, IT teams will use Power Apps for their own needs as they have the necessary development skills, while process managers from the business, who need to build out processes quickly and scale fast, use FlowForma Process Automation. The process owners are then confident to create what’s required for the business and maintain it independently of IT.

The beauty is that skilling up in FlowForma Process Automation is not a steep learning curve for process managers and once one process is built subsequent processes are easy to replicate and tweak. This flexible approach facilitates the digitization of processes quickly across the organization. In fact, FlowForma has proven to digitalize 4x times faster than Power Apps and Power Automate.

What is FlowForma Process Automation

With FlowForma Process Automation,  process owners can build solutions quickly using one integrated tool that combines forms, workflow, analytics and document generation, in one interface. It’s 100% no code and a great alternative to using Power Apps and Power Automate for digital transformation. By combining everything into one no-code tool, FlowForma significantly reduces the learning time required to build solutions and automatically records performance metrics that demonstrate the value to the business user.

FlowForma Process Automation uses built-in features for workflow, data, and communications management that make the creation of solutions easy for businesspeople. It reduces technical complexity and risk when digitizing processes.

It provides a clear path that matches the way that business users think about processes and systems, with features that give users a helping hand when they need it (no need to search the internet!). Designers can test as they build and refine their solutions as soon as they get feedback from people in the field. FlowForma has a user-friendly interface that makes automating workflows a breeze for non-technical users.

So, to my earlier point, it’s easy to get distracted by the view. Slick interfaces look nice, and we’re naturally drawn to applications with exceptional user interfaces but the ability to create your workflows consistently, quickly, and with flexibility is key when pressure is on to digitize at pace.

Review feedback sourced from customers of Power Apps and FlowForma below: 

Statistics sourced from G2 Comparison Report 2022* 

Citizen Development

Even if business process owners create solutions themselves, IT will always play a part. Ultimately, IT are the owners of IT risks. They provide the tools to the users and have some responsibility to ensure that the tools are used well. FlowForma provides specific features that allow IT to manage this risk.

Governance

FlowForma Governance empowers IT to quickly create sandboxes for process managers, enabling the business to test within their sandbox without any risk to a production environment. Here they can build flows and test different processes, before applying to IT to have them promoted for day-to-day use by the business. It’s a ‘win-win’ easing the reliance on IT but ensuring that nothing goes awry and that they get the final say before anything goes ‘live’.

Watch this video to learn more about citizen development. 

Flowforma Case Study: A Process Automation Faster Than Power Apps

Find out what one customer, Boughyes Energies and Services found when automating workflows with FlowForma, compared with Power Apps and Power Automate. 

Check out the full case study featuring Bouygues Energies here.

Conclusion

I hope this has given you a good overview of Power Apps vs Power Automate and how FlowForma can be used as an alternative or to complement these platforms.

If you are looking to move manual processes online, we would be happy to help you. Building processes at scale and in a timely fashion can be a challenge for some at the moment, feel free to get in touch with us and we will do what we can to help.

Or start digitalizing today with a free 14-day free trial or schedule a demo.