Power Apps is a collection of apps, services, connectors, and a data platform that offers a quick development environment for creating unique apps for your company’s requirements.
You can easily create unique business apps with Power Apps that connect to your data housed in the Microsoft Dataverse underpinning data platform or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).
Power Apps-created applications offer robust business logic and workflow features to convert your manual business processes into digital, automated ones.
Furthermore, Power Apps-created applications have a responsive design and can operate on mobile devices and web browsers (phone or tablet) without a hitch. By enabling users to develop feature-rich, customized business apps without writing code, Power Apps “democratizes” the experience of producing business apps.
The versatile platform offered by Power Apps enables expert developers to interact with data and metadata programmatically, apply business logic, build unique connectors, and link with external data.
Power Apps consists of four main parts: canvas apps, model-driven apps, cards, and Dataverse.
Canvas apps
Canvas apps begin with your user experience, creating a highly customized interface with the power of a blank canvas and connecting it to your choice of more than 200 data sources. You can build canvas apps for web, mobile, and tablet applications.
Canvas apps provide you the freedom to customize the user interface and experience however you want. How you want your apps to appear, and function should be determined by your imagination and business acumen.
Model-driven apps
Model-driven apps begin with your data model, modeling forms, views, and other components based on the structure of your core business data and processes in the Dataverse. Apps that use models automatically create beautiful, responsive user interfaces.
When you develop a model-driven app, you can quickly set up your forms, business rules, and process flows by utilizing the full power of the Dataverse. A model-driven app is created via the Power Apps website.
The new page type based on canvas can be included in a brand-new or pre-existing model-driven app as part of the custom page public preview.
This gives the model-driven app the strength and adaptability of a canvas experience. Customized pages enable:
- Complete control over page design.
- Custom elements and out-of-the-box controls.
- Connectors for Power Apps.
- Authoring with low-code.
Cards (preview)
Cards (preview) are tiny applications that don’t require coding knowledge or IT prowess and may be utilized in various applications.
Through Power Platform connectors, you can quickly build and develop cards that can surface business data, or you may utilize your own business logic for further customization.
Microsoft Dataverse
You can store and model business data using the data platform called Dataverse, which is included with Power Apps. It is the foundation for developing Dynamics 365 apps for sales, customer service, field service, marketing, and project service automation. Your data is already present in Dataverse if you are a Dynamics 365 customer.
You can use Dataverse to safely store and manage data in a collection of pre-built and custom tables, and you may add columns as you need them.
Power Apps Pricing plans
General purpose, full Power Apps capabilities are licensed on a standalone basis. Also, limited Power Apps capabilities are included within select Dynamics 365 and Microsoft/Office 365 licenses.
A high-level overview of the licensing structure is provided below.
| Per user, per app | Per user | Per app, pay-as-you-go | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licensing scheme | Per user, per app | Per user | Per Active User |
| Description | Allows the individual user to run 1 application or access 1 Power Pages website | Equips users to run unlimited applications and access unlimited Power Pages websites | Allows users to access 1 application |
| Pricing | $5 | $20 | $10 |
| Features | Includes 250 AI Builder service credits per month. | Includes 500 AI Builder service credits per month. | Requires an Azure subscription. |
| Use Microsoft Dataverse | 50 MB database capacity and 400 MB file capacity | 250 MB database capacity and 2 GB file capacity | 1 GB database capacity and 1 GB file capacity |
| AI Builder | $500 per unit/month | $500 per unit/month | $500 per unit/month |
AI Builder with Power Apps
AI Builder is a Microsoft Power Platform capability that provides AI models designed to optimize your business processes.
With the aid of AI Builder, your company may apply intelligence to streamline procedures and extract knowledge from data using Power Apps and Power Automate. With AI Builder, you can leverage the power of AI without having any coding or data science skills.
You can either choose a prebuilt model prepared for many common business scenarios, or you can construct custom models according to your needs.
Depending on the model you’ll be utilizing, Microsoft Power Apps offers AI Builder in one of two ways. You can:
- Apply AI-based models in the formula bar.
- Include AI Builder elements.
Follow these steps to use Power Apps to provide your company with more intelligence:
- Select the AI solution from an expanding variety and use the model type that best fits your company’s needs.
- Choose your company’s particular data from the list of alternatives.
- Modify specific models to improve the functionality of your AI.
- Tweak custom models to optimize how your AI performs.
- Build up your AI model. Based on your business data and customizing, it teaches your AI model how to solve your business problem (for instance, how to recognize your products on a picture).
- Even if you don’t know how to code, you can use the outcomes of your AI model throughout the Power Platform to develop solutions that match your business needs.
Power Apps’ canvas and model-driven apps can use AI models generated with AI Builder to enhance intelligence.