While Power Apps is a popular tool for creating custom SharePoint forms, it has some limitations. It doesn't support some essential SharePoint features, and users often report limited customization options, complexity for basic tasks, and the need for significant coding knowledge for advanced use cases.
Luckily, there are alternatives with more extended features and functionality for designing and managing custom SharePoint forms. From this post, you will learn what Power Apps alternatives are available, and why Plumsail Forms for SharePoint is the best form builder tool for SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises.
Install a free trial of the Plumsail forms designer and try all the features you will discover.
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Power Apps is one of the frameworks of the Microsoft Power Platform. It is used to create custom applications, as well as to customize SharePoint Online list forms. Power Apps is positioned as a replacement for InfoPath.
PowerApps is a robust form creation tool included in the Microsoft Office 365 subscription, but it has drawbacks that may prompt you to look for an alternative.
What are the advantages of using Power Apps to customize SharePoint forms?
What are the drawbacks of using Power Apps to customize SharePoint forms?
We have studied the MS Tech forum and community, built SharePoint Forms with Power Apps, and based on the information we gathered, compiled a list of Power Apps drawbacks:
All this can lead to an incredible increase in project cost and development time. If you have a small business or your company does not have a Power FX developer, you would probably want to consider an alternative application for developing forms in SharePoint.
Here are some of the leading Microsoft PowerApps alternatives for designing custom Sharepoint forms:
Further, we'll focus on and cover why Plumsail Forms appears to be the most comprehensive Power Apps alternative.
This is what Power apps should be. User friendly. Power features.
Plumsail Forms for SharePoint can be a great alternative to Power Apps for you. It has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and a wide range of advanced features. SharePoint forms created with Plumsail Forms are fully responsive and look great on any device.
You can extend the form functionality and develop a complex form with extensive logic by adding custom JavaScript code.
In addition, with Plumsail Forms for SharePoint, you can develop forms not only for SharePoint Online but also for SharePoint 2019 and Server Subscription Edition. Plumsail Forms is hosted on your SharePoint server, and you don’t have to use the On-Premises gateway to access your data.
Let's take a closer look at what you can get by using Plumsail Forms for SharePoint instead of Power Apps.
Both PowerApps and Plumsail Forms for SharePoint have a drag-and-drop interface.
Plumsail SharePoint forms designer has a minimalistic and intuitive interface that is pleasant to work with. You drag and drop fields, containers, and controls directly onto a form, and that's it:
Unlike Plumsail Forms for SharePoint, the Power Apps interface is rather cluttered. There are hundreds of features and settings, and what's more, adding fields to a form is a multi-step process:
With PowerApps for SharePoint list forms, you can't develop responsive forms that are optimized for different devices. It becomes a problem for mobile users as they struggle to view form content and complete it:
Unlike PowerApps forms, forms designed with Plumsail for SharePoint are responsive and adjust to any screen size. Moreover, you can design separate forms for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, which improves user experience on individual devices.
Working with vast forms containing many fields, it is convenient to open the form in full-screen mode. In Power Apps for SharePoint forms, there is no option to allow users to open a form in full-screen mode from the list view. In Plumsail SharePoint forms, you can specify how to open a form from the list view: in the panel or full-screen mode.
One of the major drawbacks of Microsoft PowerApps for customizing SharePoint forms is the limited form layout. You can define the number of columns for the screen, but you can’t enter a custom value. You can only select the number from a drop-down list.
Also, when you want to group several fields in a multiple columns layout and display the remaining fields in one column, you will have to be patient and spend some time on it:
In contrast, every SharePoint Plumsail form has a grid. It allows you to place fields and controls side by side and decide how many columns each row will have. Grid is used as a basis on every form and inside of other containers—Tabs, Accordion, Wizard.
Moreover, using the Stack container you can place fields and controls at a fixed distance from each other. It can be handy when you need to combine fields such as first and last names or for creating fill-in-the-blank forms:
Power Apps for Microsoft SharePoint forms has no controls for grouping form elements. You can create a tab-like experience by adding buttons and writing a formula for active, inactive, and hovered states. But that, again, requires too much effort. The same problem you’ll encounter when you want to create a paginated form.
In Plumsail SharePoint forms, you have several built-in containers to choose from.
You can add Tabs to organize the form content and make your form well-structured and give it a cleaner look.
With the Wizard container, you can create a multi-page form and customize its appearance and behavior. For example, you can add a brief description above each step or skip steps depending on users' answers.
Or create a SharePoint form in which the content is grouped into horizontally collapsible panels using the Accordion container.
For creating separate forms for viewing, creating, and editing data, in Power Apps, you must write a condition to route users between different form screens.
In Plumsail Forms for Modern SharePoint forms, it is much easier. Switch between form types to create unique forms for editing or viewing data. No formulas or additional actions are required. Users will be redirected to the corresponding form automatically.
Do you want to design one form for all form types? Easy as that, just click on the arrow symbol on the Save button and select which forms you want to replace with the current one:
For many SharePoint users, list folders are a great way to overcome the threshold limit of 5k entries and delimit user permissions.
The bad news is that Power Apps for Forms does not support folders. When you create a new item using SharePoint Power Apps forms, regardless of the folder you are in, the item is always created at the root level of the list.
The good news is that Plumsail Forms for SharePoint supports folders out-of-the-box the same way InfoPath did. When you create a new item using the form designed in Plumsail Forms, you create an item in the selected folder. It’s that simple.
SharePoint Content Types are one of the handy features for managing information category settings in a centralized, reusable way. That way, you can create a single list or library containing multiple item types and documents, and each can have unique metadata, policies, or behaviors.
Although Content Types is a part of SharePoint, forms designed with PowerApps do not support Content Types out-of-the-box. You should design a separate form for each Content Type and make sure you have added only those fields that are relevant to that Content Type. And even then, users won’t be able to open a specific Content Type from the list view. They can only select it on the form.
Pretty obvious that we need support for content types. Powerapps list forms are rather useless without it.
Plumsail Forms for SharePoint supports all Content Types, including Document Sets. In the Plumsail Forms designer, select the Content Type for which you want to create a form, and you will see only fields for that specific Content Type:
More importantly, a form created for a Content Type opens by default when you create a new list item or edit an existing one.
If your business process requires multiple steps and many people are involved, creating additional forms will simplify data handling. Create personalized SharePoint forms and configure routing based on Azure AD or SharePoint groups, display different forms depending on the item field value, create forms in multiple languages, and more with form sets. In Plumsail Forms for SharePoint, you can create as many form sets as you need and customize routing based on one or more conditions.
You can design SharePoint form with Power Apps with relational data, although it can be a bit tricky.
In Plumsail designer for SharePoint forms, it’s much easier. Two steps and you can work with related data from other lists or libraries within the same form. Simply add the List or Library control to the form and select a source. The source list can even be from another site collection.
What other features does the control give you?
Both SharePoint Plumsail Forms and Power Apps support the creation of cascading dropdowns. The fundamental difference lies in the customization possibilities and supported functionality.
In Plumsail for Modern SharePoint forms, dependent drop-down lists are created using Lookup fields. That allows users to see more detailed information about the selected option and is most helpful if your system has a branched structure:
With Plumsail Forms, you get even more by using the lookup fields:
Plumsail Forms has powerful and highly customizable controls.
Data Table control allows you to create dynamic tables for collecting repeating data, the same way as repeating tables in InfoPath. It is very flexible. You can populate column values for a new row, add custom validation to the table or particular column, perform column and table calculations.
Ink Sketch control is the alternative to PowerApps Pen Input control, but way more powerful. With the Ink Sketch control, you can not only collect e-signatures but also gather diagrams, schemes, and notes on an image.
With Likert Scale control, you can promptly and effectively gather valuable feedback from your customers or employees, measure the overall experience, or conduct competitive analysis.
These are just a part of the elements available in Plumsail Forms. Masked Input, Image control, and other major elements are available in Plumsail Forms for modern SharePoint forms.
PowerApps for Microsoft Forms is positioned as a low-code development platform. But if you want to extend the functionality of a form, create custom logic, or customize element behavior, you must be familiar with the Power Fx language.
Power Fx is not yet as widespread as JavaScript, and there is not much documentation on the Internet on it. That is why designing complex forms with PowerApps requires a fair amount of effort and skill in programming. Which increases the development time and as a consequence the cost of the project.
In Plumsail Forms for SharePoint, with a little knowledge of JavaScript, you can completely transform the appearance and functionality of a form.
The Plumsail documentation provides a wide range of ready-made code samples for various queries. For example, with a few lines of code, you can populate fields, or run a function when a field value changes, or limit the date range in the calendar.
If you have difficulties or questions about your code, you can post to Plumsail Community for help or contact the support team. We'll assist you within 24 hours.
In SharePoint custom forms designed with Power Apps, there is no way to hide the toolbar or customize the buttons’ default behavior.
Using Plumsail Forms for SharePoint, you can not only hide/show the toolbar dynamically but also change the functionality of the buttons, add new buttons, change the buttons’ icons, and more:
A descriptive word or phrase for the field gives users more clarity about what information and why they should enter it.
Unfortunately, the column description property is not supported by Power Apps forms. You must add labels to each field manually and enter text.
Plumsail Forms for SharePoint supports field descriptions, the text will be displayed below the field input:
You can instantly change the descriptive text, as well as the column defult value in the column settings, the changes will be automatically applied to the form.
Migrating designed forms from a deployment to a production environment is a typical task.
In PowerApps for SharePoint list forms, there is no out-of-the-box feature to streamline this process. This limitation results in numerous redesigns that cost many hours of development time.
Unlike PowerApps, Plumsail Forms for SharePoint offers two ways to migrate forms. If you only need to migrate a few forms, you can use the Export\Import capability. Using the export feature, you can also save backup copies of the forms so that you can quickly restore them if necessary.
If you have many forms, you can use Plumsail Forms Provisioning API for SharePoint to migrate forms programmatically. This way, the tedious task of migrating forms will take minutes.
Currently, only Canvas Apps can be embedded into SharePoint pages. There are no options to embed SharePoint forms created in PowerApps.
Plumsail for Modern SharePoint has a web part that allows you to publish a form to any modern page within a tenant. Web part supports both new and edit/display forms. You can also embed Plumsail forms into Microsoft Teams.
Power Apps users have been asking for the PDF export feature for a long time, but it hasn't been released yet.
SharePoint Plumsail Forms has built-in functionality allowing you to export any SharePoint form to PDF by clicking the button on the right side of the toolbar or programmatically. You can customize the appearance of the resulting PDF file, define the page size, and page breaks, add a custom header and footer, and more.
After comparing Power Apps and Plumsail Forms for designing SharePoint list forms, we can say that both form builders have their pros and cons. But there is something we must highlight.
Even though the Power Apps is partially included in the Microsoft Office 365 subscription, the price for the development and implementation of the project can be significant due to form builder limitations.
And if you need a tool that can save you time and money, take a closer look at Plumsail Forms for SharePoint. Considering the price and the set of features you get, we can conclude that SharePoint Plumsail Forms can be the best choice for any business.
For your convenience, we have created a chart for you to quickly compare Plumsail Forms for SharePoint and Power Apps Forms:
| Plumsail Forms | PowerApps Forms | |
|---|---|---|
| Supported SharePoint versions | Microsoft 365 / SharePoint 2019 / SE | Microsoft 365 |
| Supported SharePoint features | ||
| Content Types support |
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| Folders support |
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| Column description support |
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| Column default value support |
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| Appearance | ||
| Form layout | Bootstrap's grid system | Columns and rows |
| Responsive forms |
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| Separate forms for Create, Edit & View |
| Requires coding |
| Panel view |
|
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| Open form in full screen from list view |
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| Tabs |
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| Multi-page forms |
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| Fill-in-the-blanks forms |
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| Embedding forms into SharePoint pages, Microsoft Teams |
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| Advanced functionality | ||
| Personalized SharePoint forms |
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| Multilingual forms |
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| Export form to PDF |
|
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| Customizable form toolbar |
|
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| Advanced controls | ||
| Cascading drop-downs |
| Requires coding |
| Cross-Site lookup |
| Partial support |
| Related lists and libraries |
| Requires coding |
| Repeating tables |
| Requires coding |
| Signatures |
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| Likert Scale |
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| Rating |
|
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| Advanced customization | ||
| JavaScript support |
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| Power FX support |
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| CSS support |
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| HTML support |
| Partial support |
| Migration | ||
| Export/Import forms |
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| Provisioning API |
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| Versioning |
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You can try a free alternative to Power Apps for customizing SharePoint list forms. Start a free trial of Plumsail Forms for SharePoint, follow installation instructions, and design your first SharePoint form today.
KKiT from Australia helps their clients automate processes with Plumsail Forms, ranging from travel requests and office pre-visit questionnaires to more complex workflows.
New control to connect to any site on the tenant.
Change appearance or expand functionality of any column
