Power Apps and Power Automate

Two Microsoft offerings, Power Apps and Power Automate, are available both as entitlements with most Microsoft 365 licenses and as stand-alone offerings. These services often supplant features previously found in other applications such as SharePoint Online.

Capabilities

Power Apps is a graphical application development environment that lets developers or users with little or no prior programming experience create Microsoft Azure-hosted applications that can present data for viewing and editing. Sample applications perform tasks such as budget tracking and cost estimation. Power Apps could make simple line-of-business applications easier to create and distribute to teams within an organization.

Power Automate is a graphical workflow automation engine that runs in Azure and is based on the Azure Logic Apps service. Power Automate could benefit power users who want to create lightweight workflows. Power Automate has received more advanced features over its lifespan, adding machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA) options that position it to compete with other established low-code automation offerings such as UiPath and Appian.