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What are the top Microsoft Power Apps limitations?
Limitations include constrained licensing, limited support for different device sizes, lack of mature third-party integrations and complex app management.
Power Apps is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which falls under the Microsoft 365 and Azure ecosystems.
Power Apps can create rich electronic forms. Like most forms products, it offers visual interfaces that contain data entry fields and selection fields -- like drop-downs, checkboxes or date fields -- and supports responsive UI to scale and support realignment on mobile devices. Power Apps offers extensive integration through Microsoft's connector ecosystem to its other services and third-party platforms, such as Adobe, Amazon, Dropbox, Google, Salesforce and Zendesk. Power Apps has over 1,000 connectors available.
This platform is a natural InfoPath successor for organizations that use Microsoft technology. However, Microsoft didn't implement all of InfoPath's capabilities in Power Apps, nor has it made an explicit commitment to do so. Still, Power Apps can build forms, so it can replace Microsoft's InfoPath Forms tool, which has an end of life set for 2026. While Power Apps forms do not yet have all the capabilities of InfoPath forms, they likely will in time.
Example use cases for Power Apps include the following:
- Forms to capture metadata for document artifacts. Examples of metadata include the title, subject matter tags, reviews by date and document type -- including contract, purchase order, floor plan, budget or project plan.
- Forms to capture metadata for product catalogs. Examples include the product name, price, category, description, reviews and attributes such as color, weight or size.
- Forms to review and approve content management lifecycle changes. Examples include changing a document from draft to final or approving or rejecting a product catalog entry.
- Embellish existing forms or create new forms for business applications. Examples of business apps include ERP, CRM, warehouse management systems and content management apps, especially when the CMA is headless, so it does not include native UI forms.
- Build personalized websites. Examples include partner management, customer self-service, product support and FAQs.
Microsoft designed Power Pages -- part of Power Apps -- to support third-party secure and anonymous access to data stored in Microsoft Dataverse. Many users prefer the ease of use of Power Pages to the former Power Apps Portal, as Power Pages offers a no-code/low-code option to build personalized websites that access Microsoft Dataverse.
Despite the power and comprehensiveness of Power Apps, it has limitations organizations should consider when evaluating options for app development.
1. Constrained licensing
Power Apps forms can only operate within the licensed business domain. However, users can share content with their colleagues and guest users who have Active Directory accounts and Power Apps licenses. Power Pages also offers third-party and anonymous access.
The licensing model has multiple plans, which users may struggle to understand. Also, Microsoft 365 licensing restricts certain connectors, such as those integrating with third-party services, to higher tiers.
2. Cost
Power Apps has three pricing tiers: The Power Apps Developer Plan is free, Power Apps Premium is $20 per user monthly and Power Apps Premium with a 2,000-seat minimum is $12 per user monthly.
Organizations should consider how these costs scale with hundreds or thousands of users who require access to certain apps. For example, Microsoft licenses Power Pages differently. Pages costs $200 for 100 authenticated users monthly and $75 for 500 anonymous users monthly.
Cost also factors in when teams consider model-driven apps, where management, long-term maintenance and complex integration can lead to significant costs. Model-driven Power Apps can sit alongside Dynamics 365 apps, which could enhance or customize existing processes, but this involves additional licensing fees.
3. Low-code services
Power Apps enables users to build simple forms quickly with its low-code services. This is especially true of Canvas Apps, which focuses on ease-of-use in creation and control of the UI. Yet, forms that evolve or have complex business logic can cause problems due to a limited capability to manage the code base and track changes.
Microsoft has improved here with the release of Power Fx, an Excel-like formula language, and Power Automate. But despite these advances, Power Apps users still struggle to implement apps that support complex business logic.
Low-code services these days often take advantage of Microsoft Copilot, the vendor's generative AI service. While Copilot can handle basic tasks and repetitive processes, it can struggle with highly specialized or complex workflows, which often require deep customization or domain-specific human expertise and fully coded service implementations.
While users can build custom JavaScript into an overall suite, which would extend the functionality of model-driven apps and Dynamics 365 and enable richer client-side customizations, it comes with trade-offs related to security, performance and maintenance.
4. Power Apps integrated development environment
The Power Platform's integrated development environment (IDE) runs on the web. Users design all forms from a web browser -- not a desktop app -- so they can't develop forms while offline or disconnected from the internet. IDEs through web browsers generally lack the sophistication of desktop IDE environments. Core to the design of these IDEs was ease-of-use and simplicity for users. In that process, the IDE became less powerful for developers.
5. Limited support for multiple device sizes and screen orientations
Power Apps often requires users to develop multiple versions of apps. Responsive forms can scale to some extent, yet they may require a compromise.
For example, an app optimized for phones and tablets may require two versions -- one for each device. Power Apps supports responsive design better than it used to, especially when using containers and the modern app designer, but users still may need to develop multiple versions of their apps.
6. Item limit
Power Apps has a 2,000-item restriction from a connected data source like SharePoint, SQL or Oracle. Users can mitigate this challenge with delegation, in which they offload data sorting and filtering to the back end. However, not all data sources support full delegation.
7. Throughput limits of the connector ecosystem
Throughput varies by connection. However, trying to read or write hundreds of items from SharePoint lists, SQL databases or Excel workbooks can exceed allowed thresholds and cause failures.
For example, Power Apps permits 1,000 connector requests per 24-hour period in the per-app licensing plan. Each connector's throughput limits vary, as well as their complexity. Premium connectors can alleviate some limits but add cost and risk.
8. Limited attachment control
Microsoft limits Power Apps attachment control to SharePoint or Dataverse at the back end, so platforms like OneDrive or SQL cannot be the target document stores. Additionally, the maximum upload size is 50 MB.
9. No shared functions or shared code
Each app where users execute business logic -- such as field validation or field calculations -- requires the same logic built and maintained across Power Apps. Larger, more complex forms with many lines of embedded programming logic could lead to unpredictability when users add or change program lines to meet changing business requirements.
With Power Fx, developers can create reusable components to help maintain shared logic across multiple apps. However, large-scale apps can still face challenges in maintaining consistent business logic across several apps.
10. Limited integrations
Power Apps supports hundreds of connectors, including third-party apps, but connecting to those non-Microsoft integrations is still limited. Users may face cost implications, like requiring premium licenses from the other service provider or support custom development. Additionally, the other service provider could throttle the connectors.
11. Complex app management
Microsoft markets Power Apps as a low-code platform. Yet, as its apps grow in complexity, users might struggle to maintain them and would shift their work to more complex coded solutions, contradicting the ease-of-use premise.
Developers may need to rely on Power Fx, custom APIs or Azure Functions to bridge functionality gaps, increasing the technical complexity of app maintenance. This hurdle can present significant costs or risks, especially as products evolve or as usage increases.
12. Performance at scale
Microsoft designed Power Apps for quick prototyping, but performance issues often arise when the production environment involves larger data sets or higher concurrency than the prototyping exercised. SharePoint connectors or SQL server data retrieval can slow down when accessing thousands of records, even with delegation enabled.
Power Apps has limited performance tuning tools, which often require developers to code custom APIs to manage heavy lifting. Unknown architectural and re-coding expenses may hide behind Power Apps implementations if the workload is untested or grows beyond tested tolerances.
Editor's note: This article was originally written by Jonathan Bordoli and was expanded by Jordan Jones.
Jordan Jones is a writer versed in enterprise content management, component content management, web content management and video-on-demand technologies.
