A robust alternative to Power Apps

Zoho Creator offers a comprehensive form builder for data management. It has 30+ different form fields, including AI and advanced fields. The platform can also integrate with over 1,000 third-party applications.

It provides a powerful dashboard builder, with intuitive auto-visualization capabilities. Offline data access is provided, and data and backups stored on the cloud are fully encrypted. The built-in integration with Zoho Analytics allows you to create insightful reports from raw data in minutes.

The platform has great capabilities for importing data from various sources, such as .xls, .csv, and .tsv, and provides data cleansing when importing. You can also create full-fledged applications from Creator's data import feature.

Power Apps' form builder offers drag-and-drop form creation, but customization often requires Power Fx expressions or Excel-like formulae. Offline data access is provided in canvas apps, but with several limitations; not all connectors are supported. Some features offered by Zoho Creator out-of-the-box, such as built-in geofencing and automatic IP address tracking, are only possible through Azure services, custom connectors, or third-party APIs.

Power Apps, by default, has only lightweight visualizations (basic forms, charts, and galleries). The platform relies on Power BI for powerful reporting and dashboard capabilities. Power BI adds licensing complexity and requires additional expertise. Compared to Creator, the native dashboard, chart, and report-building capabilities of Power Apps are limited.

Automation is a core objective of the Zoho Creator platform. It offers a drag-and-drop workflow builder and a drag-and-drop visual business process builder called Blueprint, with integrated business process management capabilities that empower users to build automation-driven applications.

The built-in integration with Zoho Flow empowers Zoho Creator users to integrate their applications with other Zoho products and hundreds of third-party applications easily.

Power Apps relies on Power Automate for workflow automation and RPA, and on Power Virtual Agents (Copilot Studio) for chatbot development.

The caveat is that, for automation on Power Apps, you have to procure tools such as Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents separately. Some Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 enterprise plans provide access to automation or chatbot capabilities without separate purchases.

Zoho Creator's app-building capabilities are aimed at empowering end users to deploy web and mobile applications seamlessly. Its Android SDK and iOS SDK are geared towards building native mobile-ready applications, and the platform offers automatic creation of progressive web applications (PWAs). The ability to generate completely rebranded applications is a game-changer for those looking to monetize their solutions built on the platform.

The portals offered by the platform are a great way to allow users to access data without creating a separate account, and the no-code schema builder allows stakeholders to have a bird's-eye view of the internal application architecture. Finally, the cloud-hosted Deluge (Zoho's scripting language) IDE, with syntax checking and automatic text completion, is a unique feature in its own right.

Power Apps' UI is pretty straightforward. No-code customizations are possible. Power Apps doesn’t provide out-of-the-box automatic localization, unlike Zoho Creator.

Power Apps also doesn't offer an iOS SDK or Android SDK. Unlike Creator's ability to provide over 80 gesture customizations, Power Apps' gesture customization capabilities are a bit limited. Rebranding applications is difficult, especially compared to Creator.

Zoho Creator comes with a powerful application development lifecycle management (ADLM) feature, which is useful for testing out applications before deploying them to end users. Creator's ADLM offers three stages—development, staging, and production. Development allows developers to edit solutions, staging allows testers to validate the changes made, and production pushes the changes live.

Zoho also has extremely high standards for user privacy, and, in line with this principle, Zoho Creator is one of the few low-code platforms that adheres to many international standards for data security. Some of these standards include HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR, and SOC 2 Type II. Zoho even owns all of Creator's data centers, which are highly secure, encrypted installations, making the platform a veritable security powerhouse.

Power Apps offers log, user, and change management. It also offers minor and major update tracking to applications, automatic scaling based on changing numbers of users, and built-in analytics. Power Apps offers testing features, and the platform delivers when it comes to governance and application lifecycle management (ALM) through the Pipelines feature.

Affordability for businesses of every size is central to Zoho's entire software suite, and Zoho Creator is no exception. The platform offers a 15-day free trial. Creator's paid plans start at $8/user/month (billed annually) for the Standard plan. The Professional plan is priced at $20/user/month, and the Enterprise plan is priced at $25/user/month (both billed annually).

To get a complete overview, including the pricing for monthly plans, please visit Creator's pricing page.

Zoho Creator's AI features are included in all of the plans. There’s no separate pricing for them. Ready to use and custom AI models have a quantity cap associated with them, depending on the plan chosen.

Power Apps has a free plan, the Power Apps Developer Plan. The paid Power Apps Premium plan begins at $20/user/month (billed annually). When bought with a minimum of 2,000 licenses, the Power Apps Premium plan is priced at $12/user/month (billed annually).

When it comes to AI features, the AI builder capacity add-on is $500/unit/month, and the Microsoft Copilot Studio starts at $200/month (both billed annually).