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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Power Apps

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/APowerApps is a low code / rapid application development product from Microsoft that allows users to quickly build apps.

    $20

    per month per user

    Xamarin

    Score6 out of 10
    N/AN/AN/A
    Pricing
    Power AppsXamarin
    Editions & Modules
    Power Apps Premium
    $20
    per month per user
    Xamarin
    Free
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Power AppsXamarin
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Power AppsXamarin
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    18 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    90%
    Happy with the feature set
    19 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    81%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    84%
    Implementation went as expected
    16 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Power AppsXamarin
    Low-Code Development
    Comparison of Low-Code Development features of Power Apps and Xamarin
    Feature
    Power Apps
    7.8
    24 Ratings
    7% below category average
    Xamarin
    -
    Ratings
    Visual Modeling7.722 Ratings00 Ratings
    Drag-and-drop Interfaces7.423 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform Security8.523 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform User Management7.923 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reusability7.423 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform Scalability7.622 Ratings00 Ratings
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    Power AppsXamarin
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    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Power AppsXamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.1
    (26 ratings)
    7.0
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    7.9
    (7 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.7
    (6 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Power AppsXamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    Power Apps is ideal for scenarios that are neither too complex nor too large. It is easy to begin development in Power Apps, as it is one of the best tools for low-code development. Power Apps can be implemented for complex scenarios as well, provided there is strong knowledge of the tool and ample time for planning. Our applications benefit from Power Apps' cross-platform support, making it easy to use on any device, including desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Microsoft
    • 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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
    • The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
    • Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • Sometimes the cost of solutions is greater than the benefit. Licensing is expensive relative to the scope of some business user-created personal or team-level solutions.
    • While there is a starter-kit for Governance, it is complicated to stand up and requires dedicated resources to provide on-going governance operations. Many organizations are not going to be able to dedicate resources to governance and this causes the sprawl, solution duplication, silos, unneeded and unplanned licensing expenses, and a general "wild wild west" environment.
    • There needs to be better direction and best practices given around Power Platform Environment utilization and optimization.
    • The accessibility to the platform and ease for business partners to independantly create solutions is both a benefit and a negative. When the business outcome needed is a good fit for PowerApps it is a quick win, but when not a good fit it becomes a frustration for the business partner attempting to make the platform do something it is not well-suited for. The business partner entangles tech teams in the effort which drains resources and provides a lack-luster solution. All of this to say, it would be beneficial to have some tools that business partners could leverage to determine\understand if the type of business outcome they need is well suited to PowerApps or not.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
    • iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
    • Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Microsoft
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    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.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • 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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Saves development time and deliver fast.
    • Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
    • Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots