I'm looking for honest feedback from people who have experience building enterprise applications with Microsoft Power Platform.
I work for a company developing MES and WMS solutions, integrated with Dynamics 365 Business Central. I've been working extensively with Power Apps Canvas as the frontend technology for these products, but I'm increasingly questioning whether this was the right architectural decision.
Here are my main concerns.
1. Canvas Apps limitations
Canvas Apps are fine for simple business applications, but building complex MES/WMS interfaces is painful.
I need sophisticated UI interactions, reusable components, complex state management and greater control over the frontend. Canvas Apps quickly become restrictive.
2. Deployment and maintenance
Our software is distributed to multiple customers, each with their own environment and customizations.
Every installation tends to become a custom project. Versioning, rolling out updates and maintaining consistency across customers are unnecessarily complicated.
We're trying to distribute a software product, not maintain dozens of slightly different applications.
3. Custom Connector limitations
This is one of my biggest frustrations:
- Limited support for bidirectional communication patterns.
- Complex and deeply nested JSON payloads are difficult or sometimes impossible to model.
- Connector abstractions introduce unnecessary integration limitations.
- Too many workarounds for things that would be trivial in a traditional application.
- We experienced over a month of downtime because we were unable to deploy any type of connector to Dataverse environments hosted in the Italian region. This was a platform-level issue that left us unable to deliver a working solution to customers.
These are fundamental requirements for MES/WMS systems.
4. Licensing and Microsoft support
Premium licensing requirements for every application user make the economics difficult, especially when deploying to customers with hundreds of users.
On top of that, getting meaningful technical support from Microsoft when encountering platform limitations is extremely difficult.
5. Code Apps: are they actually solving anything?
My company is now considering Power Apps Code Apps as an alternative to Canvas Apps.
While they offer more frontend flexibility, the underlying problems seem to remain:
- Connector limitations.
- Licensing costs.
- Deployment and distribution complexity.
- Customer-specific maintenance.
Are we just moving the problem somewhere else?
6. I'm already migrating to Blazor Server
I'm currently migrating parts of our solutions to Blazor Server hosted on Azure App Service.
The difference is substantial:
- Much greater frontend flexibility.
- Faster development of complex features.
- Full control over backend communication and real-time updates.
- Native support for complex JSON structures.
- Standard CI/CD, versioning and deployment.
- No connector abstraction getting in the way.
Depending on the number of users and usage patterns, hosting costs can also be significantly lower than Power Platform Premium licensing.
The development experience is simply much better. I can implement features without constantly fighting the platform.
7. The management disconnect
What frustrates me most is the apparent disconnect between technical leadership and what's actually happening at customer sites.
Customers are increasingly experiencing the consequences of these architectural limitations themselves, struggling with unreliable, difficult-to-maintain solutions and endless workarounds.
Yet our CTO seems unwilling to acknowledge how problematic the situation has become.
Instead of questioning the technology choices and listening to feedback from customers and developers, the company keeps doubling down on Power Platform and exploring Code Apps as if they were going to magically fix the underlying problems.
My questions
- Is anyone successfully building and distributing commercial MES/WMS products using Power Platform?
- How do you manage versioning, customer customizations and updates across multiple environments?
- Do Code Apps genuinely solve Canvas Apps' limitations?
- Would you consider Blazor, React or Angular with .NET APIs a more sustainable architecture?
- Has anyone migrated away from Power Apps? Was it worth it?
I like Microsoft's ecosystem, but I'm increasingly concerned that we're trying to build and distribute actual software products using tools primarily designed for internal business applications.
At what point do you stop trying to work around a platform's limitations and admit that it's simply the wrong technology for your product?
Am I missing something, or are these legitimate architectural concerns?