OutSystems vs. Power Apps

OutSystems excels with building web interfaces fast and lends itself to custom integrations written in .Net. Most anything can be brought in given this ability to be extended. One of the drawbacks to the speed of development is that most quality control teams become quickly overwhelmed and may be unable to keep up.

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

• Deployment management – OutSystems has a built in robust, multi-environment deployment system that helps ensures the clean and error free deployment of applications through the development, testing and production product lifecycle
• Rapid application development – Through the low code, graphical development environment you can develop applications far quicker than with more traditional development environments
• Cross platform mobile development – OutSystems handle the development and building of mobile application for both iOS and Android in a simple streamlined way that removes 90% of the problems normally associated with multi platform development

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

• The platform controls all the parts. While great for development and overall maintenance, it could lead to discussions with your DBA (who has to trust the platform). As a developer I love the platform, as a DBA I would like more control.
• By making software development model driven using flows, you are forced to rethink the way of programming. It makes it easier, but sometimes the way of working leads to code which could be optimized (standard problem in model based software development).
• Most of the code is generated, so the technical knowledge of the inner working of coding are not Essentials. This could lead to degration of this knowlegde. As part of this, most technologies will only be used when OutSystems supports it. They do a good job on implementing these things. But things like Node.js would be nice.

• More complicated to understand in comparison with Nintex Forms.
• Complicated to find errors.
• Using PowerApps for SharePoint Forms is a bit complicated by setting up the start and load scenario with a lot of JavaScript.
• Load values, change them by code, and save them back could be easier. Actually quite complicated to handle a lot of variables.

Incentivized

We are very happy with OutSystems and our developers deliver good work. OutSystems lets us build new software on a regulare (2 weekly) basis, which is highly flexible and adjustable. Even without very much experience, our developers manage to build usefull software, which is working a lot better than our previous (legacy) software.

OutSystems has a feature in which we can develop a functionality in a application and can use that functionality in another application without developing it again. That is main plus point for the development team so they can work with different functionalities rather focusing on the same thing again and again. if we want to make any change on the user side then we can make it live with just the deployment using the service center.

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

The tech support is very reachable. Usually by [email] from but also by phone if needed. We had some difficulties at the start with understanding "what our machine was doing" under high performance load. After some good sessions understanding our needs they delivered good solutions for our problems we had in the beginning.

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.

Excellent material full of hands on that improve the understanding of the platform.

The online training material is well designed and explanations are step by step, helping trainees to understand and follow each exercise and new concept.

In a large company, patiently and consistently work the behind the scenes politics with business and IT partners across the firm.
This is transformational - you will need a solid set of key business partners to lock arms together to move forward.

Incentivized

Totally different products of cource. Sitecore is best suited for full fledged websites with extensive support for analytics. OutSystems for modular business processes with a UI. Hence, there is no overlap. But even for small websites, or even landingpages, I would recommend OutSystems, with a custom made analytics part or a plugin.

Incentivized

Power Apps is great for rapid app development and internal business solutions. It helps build user-friendly applications quickly and is a great, cost-effective option for existing Microsoft customers like us. Even non-developers can get started on using Power Apps without much difficulty. Power Apps is ideal for scenarios with limited customization and works well for reusing simpler applications. Power Apps is the go-to choice for empowering business users.

Incentivized

• The ease of use of the OutSystems development process has been the biggest ROI for us. We have developed our Framework product and maintained/enhanced it with only 4 workers.
• OutSystems has enhanced their product very significantly over the last 4 years. They have gone from a simple to use tool to a very simple to use sophisticated tool that covers the standard mainframe-based computing apps and the apps used on handheld mobile devices all using the same basic set of development tools.

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