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 650+ 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 data importing 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 is basic. Offline data access is provided, but some features offered by Zoho Creator out-of-the-box, such as built-in geofencing and automatic IP address tracking, aren't offered.

The platform relies on Power BI for reporting and dashboard capabilities. Compared to Creator, the inherent dashboard, chart, and report building capabilities of Power Apps is 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 easily integrate their applications with other Zoho products and hundreds of third-party applications.

Power Apps relies on Power Automate (formerly Flow) for workflow building and RPA and Power Virtual Agents for creating chat bots and smart bot building. While Power Apps does integrate tightly with the Power suite, these other tools are not available as part of any of Power Apps' pricing plans, and are required to be procured separately or as part of the Power Platform.

The caveat is that, for automation on Power Apps, you have to procure tools such as Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents separately, or you can opt in for Power Platform, an additional subscription on top of your existing Power Apps one.

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, however, Power Apps cannot create automatically localized applications, unlike Zoho Creator.

Power Apps also doesn't offer an iOS SDK or Android SDK. Unlike Creator's ability to provide 80+ gesture customizations, Power Apps' gesture customization capabilities are very limited. Further, rebranding applications is difficult, especially when 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. This is a massive upgrade over the previously offered sandbox feature. 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 very 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 are 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).