Power Apps — canvas vs model-driven
The two main Power Apps types — what each is good at, and how to pick.
Power Apps has two distinct app types: canvas apps and model-driven apps. They share licensing and tooling, but they're fundamentally different products with different best uses. Picking the right one up front saves a lot of rework.
Canvas apps
A canvas app is designed visually. You start with a blank screen, drop controls (labels, buttons, galleries, forms), connect them to data sources, and bind their behaviour with Power Fx — an Excel-like formula language.
Strengths:
- Total layout freedom — design any UI you can imagine.
- Phone-first or tablet-first orientations native.
- Heterogeneous data sources — SharePoint, Dataverse, SQL, Excel, custom connectors all work.
- Embedding — canvas apps can be embedded in Teams, Power BI, SharePoint, model-driven apps, web pages.
- Fast to start — a useful app in an afternoon.
Best for:
- Task-oriented apps: inspections, audits, approvals, expense capture, asset tagging.
- Mobile-first scenarios for frontline workers.
- Form replacements for paper or PDF processes.
- Custom views on top of existing data.
Weaknesses:
- Complex many-screen apps get hard to maintain as Power Fx logic spreads across controls.
- Performance can suffer with large datasets if not designed carefully.
- Per-screen design doesn't scale well to record-management apps with many entity types.
Model-driven apps
A model-driven app generates its UI from a Dataverse data model. You define tables, fields, relationships, business rules, forms, and views; the app surface follows. You build by configuring forms (the layout of a single record) and views (the layout of a list).
Strengths:
- Built-in CRUD experience — list, detail, edit, search, filter — without writing UI.
- Excellent for record management — customers, orders, cases, contracts.
- Business process flows guide users through multi-stage processes.
- Dataverse security — row-level, field-level, hierarchical.
- Same engine as Dynamics 365, with rich extensibility.
- Scalable to apps with hundreds of tables.
Best for:
- CRM-like scenarios — customers, leads, opportunities, cases.
- Workflow-heavy apps with structured processes.
- Apps with many entity types that need consistent navigation.
- Apps that may grow into Dynamics 365 territory.
Weaknesses:
- Less visual flexibility — the UI is largely prescribed.
- Requires Dataverse — adds cost and complexity.
- Steeper learning curve for first-time makers.
Power Pages
Power Pages is the third app type — externally facing websites with authenticated users and Dataverse-backed data. Used for portals, customer self-service, partner extranets, event registration. Behind the scenes it's a model-driven app extended with a Liquid-templating-based public site.
How to choose
| Need | App type | | --- | --- | | Custom UI, mobile-first, task focused | Canvas | | Record management, many tables | Model-driven | | External user portal | Power Pages | | Already using Dynamics 365 | Model-driven | | Small app, SharePoint data | Canvas | | Big app, Dataverse data | Model-driven |
When in doubt, prototype both. The exploration takes hours and saves weeks.