OutSystems or PowerApps?
In 2014 I was looking for a tool that could give me more productivity when I found OutSystems(OS) and Mendix. I chose OS due my personal preference and its business model. The development was easier for me and every customer acquisition to OS was a continuous flux of money once the platform is rented. If OS was in the stock market at that time, I would invest on it.
OS is regarded as low code application platform or an application platform that supports rapid application development, one-step deployment, execution and management using declarative, high-level programming abstractions, such as model-driven and metadata-based programming languages. They support the development of user interfaces, business logic and data services, and improve productivity at the expense of portability across vendors, as compared with conventional application platforms. In practical terms you can, for example, rename your variables and every part of the code that uses it is updated automatically, in all modules. The control of code change also is automatic and the most actual version is downloaded every time you access it in the service studio, independently of the number of users using it concurrently in the project. In summary, I can tell that a lot of manual work in the traditional way of development was automatised with OS, even the part that publish the code and update the tables in the database. With one click publish (that is only available when there is no error in the code, but you can save it in your local machine until everything stay clear of errors) you upload all keeping the consistency of all changes.
An old problem that developers have with OS is its price. OS target to work with big companies. Even I tried to create my application to deliver in the market but the deadlock comes with the price. I need to pay one year subscription that at the moment of this article is US$ 75,000. In my case I was creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to check if the market would accept it. I could use the free platform (personal environment) to do that, once it accepts until 100 users I could receive some money to acquire OS. However, making a simple calculation, the use of personal environment determines the price of my product to US$ 62,50 to achieve US$ 6,250 by month. Once I get money for one month, I need to create 11 more personal environments to pay the anual subscription. Regarding that US$ 62,50 is expensive to use my product, this strategy is inviable.
I am not complaining that OS is doing something wrong. Its business model is working very well once they need less people to work with big companies that can bring money to OS as soon as possible. This is the business game. The money earned can be used to make researches and improve OS platform in a quick way. The result of this strategy can be verified in the Gartner Magic Quadrant below.
However, as you can see in the picture above, Microsoft (MS) is competing strongly with OS in the leader quadrant and regarding that PowerApps had been launched in 2016, MS has an impressive result. The strategy that MS is adopting to allow software developer accessibility is the opposite of OS. With US$ 7 per user per month is possible to acquire Powerapps, and regarding that Microsoft is working hardly to integrate all your products there is a good odd that new systems created in this platform can cross all organisation even in the personal level (in this case, more automation using Office).
As you can see, the goal of this article is not to tell you what is the best option between OutSystems or PowerApps but show some perspectives that can give you a perception that the things are changing in the actual market and you can choose one tool according your need. I didn't work deeply with PowerApps yet but what can be wrong in to keep in touch with tools that can help companies and workers to improve their productivity ?
