Power Pages is a web portal technology, but how is it different from other website-building approaches? How do you compare Power Pages vs WordPress? Or Power Pages vs a custom web app?
Luckily, it is not that complex, and a few criteria will help you identify the right approach. Look at the decision tree below, and it should be self-explanatory. Read more below for additional details.
This post doesn’t address the licensing implications, which are covered by another post, “Are PowerPages licenses too expensive?“
Power Pages vs WordPress
Power Pages is a self-service technology that helps your organisation extend its Dynamics 365 (Dataverse) data and include external users (customers, partners, vendors, citizens, etc) in the digital business processes. Users of the Power Pages portal usually need to log in (authenticate), view personalised data or enter new data.
WordPress is a content-rich website technology. It allows building blogs, company websites and other mostly unchanging (yet updating) content. Such website users are usually unauthenticated, view publicly available information, and don’t enter much data (except for simple forms like Contact Us).
Power Pages vs Custom Web App
Power Pages is a no-code / low-code technology that allows you to build a portal quickly, with pre-fabricated controls to display data in interactive grids, enter data into forms built from meta-data configuration and adjust the look and feel with themes. This technology allows deeper customisations of design with CSS and functionality with JavaScript, its views and forms model remains closed and based on Dataverse.
With a web portal developed as a custom web application, you have no constraints on look and feel, functionality, and interaction patterns. You can integrate with any database or non-Auth 2.0 authentication provider and fully control the HTML structures and scripts. All this flexibility comes with the cost of professional code development. You’ll need a team of user experience designers, front-end developers, back-end developers, and others. You must also ensure the custom code is secure via penetration testing or SecOps review. And last but not least, you will have to pay for hosting, deployments, operational aspects and updates.
Please comment below if you have other thoughts or contact me via the form to discuss your particular case.