If you’re looking for a rapid app development platform, you may have considered Alpha Software’s Alpha Anywhere and Alpha Transform and Microsoft’s PowerApps, and wondered which was best for you. The answer couldn’t be any clearer: Alpha Anywhere and TransForm beat Microsoft’s PowerApps by a wide margin. That’s according to analysts, users and a side-by-side comparison of their feature set.
Let’s start with what is likely the most comprehensive analysis of PowerApps — Gartner’s “Assessing Microsoft PowerApps as a Citizen Developer Platform.” At the top of the report — in fact, in the very first key finding — Gartner analyst Kyle Davis concludes: “PowerApps is a public-cloud-only service. Organizations seeking to deploy apps on-premises will need to consider an hpaPaaS, which offers an on-premises platform such as Alpha Software.”
As Alpha Software Richard Rabins notes in a blog post, “Successful digital transformation requires the involvement of the whole organization -- not just IT. Experienced IT developers or line of business users (citizen developers) can only succeed at transforming the business if the product they’re using is built to serve each group separately -- around how they work and their unique skills. This is where Alpha Software shines.”
It's not just analysts who point out PowerApps’ shortcomings. So do users who have tried out the software. Following are just a few quotes from users on the software review site G2.com who have tried out and reviewed PowerApps. One wrote: “PowerApps is not ready yet in my opinion…PowerApps is unable to handle large datasets… PowerApps also is very sluggish…not a complete tool set yet.”
Says another: “I hate how bad PowerApps is at syncing data with their respective back ends...I feel that presently, PowerApps is not ready to be used professionally.”
Customers have complained that PowerApps appears to be an inexpensive solution; however, once you try to do real world business use cases, the expense grows rapidly. As a result, they realized that they could not produce a cost effective solution for their business using PowerApps. They also realized that any kind of consumer facing (broad distribution) PowerApp application would be prohibitively expensive.
A comparison of the feature sets of Alpha Anywhere and PowerApps also shows why Alpha Anywhere beats it. PowerApps is solely a no-code product, which doesn’t let developers add code, while Alpha Anywhere serves both less-experienced users and professional developers. It allows experienced developers to add code where and when needed, and to handle functionality like security authentication, robust data integration, business logic and more.
PowerApps also can’t access devices for offline use, and doesn’t have custom synchronization rules, but Alpha Anywhere does both. Alpha Anywhere also has the ability to create sophisticated transactional apps with integration to enterprise data and workflows, while PowerApps has a very limited feature set and doesn’t include workflow capabilities.
Overall, as a development platform, Alpha Anywhere beats PowerApps. Alpha Anywhere — with new Alpha TransForm technology – utilizes both no-code and low-code modes to enable business users to work in parallel with IT to create and deploy mobile forms with power features like offline capability, rich media and signature capture, and GPS location. Alpha TransForm provides a path to business mobile development for BOTH developers and non-developers. Business users can design data capture business apps in a fraction of a time with the TransForm no-code capability.
View a detailed head-to-head comparison of Alpha Anywhere vs. Microsoft PowerApps.
Read these related blog posts about Gartner's take on Alpha Software vs. PowerApps:
- Alpha Anywhere's Value As An Easy-To-Use Citizen Development Tool Is Recognized In The Market
- Alpha Anywhere Is An Alternative To Microsoft PowerApps For Companies Needing On-Premise Hosting
Further reading: PowerApps Pricing: What You Need To Know
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