Sysgraft vs Power Apps for ERP Front Ends: An Honest Comparison

There is no shortage of people on the internet telling you that low-code is the only sensible way to build business applications — and just as many telling you that low-code is a dead end for anything serious.

The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in the middle.

Power Apps (part of Microsoft’s Power Platform) is a legitimate tool for certain classes of ERP front-end problems. Sysgraft — a custom React/Next.js interface layer built on the same principle — is better suited to others. Neither is “better” in the abstract. Both have their place.

This article compares them honestly: where each excels, where each falls short, what they cost over three years, and how to decide which path is right for your specific situation.

What Is Power Apps?

Power Apps is Microsoft’s low-code application platform. It lets you build web and mobile apps using drag-and-drop designers, pre-built connectors, and formula-like expressions (Power Fx). It integrates natively with Dynamics 365, Dataverse, SharePoint, and over 700 other connectors.

For ERP scenarios, Power Apps typically connects to your ERP data through one of three routes:

• Dataverse — synchronising data from Dynamics 365 Business Central or Finance & Operations into Microsoft’s common data service
• Direct connectors — pre-built connectors for Sage Intacct, NetSuite, and a handful of other systems
• Custom connectors — wrapping REST APIs for any ERP that exposes them, including OrderWise, SAP, or Epicor

Microsoft licenses Power Apps per user or per app. Premium licences cost approximately £32–£55 per user per month, depending on the plan.

What Is Sysgraft?

Sysgraft is not a platform or a product you licence. It is a delivery model: we build a custom web application layer (React, Next.js, TypeScript) that sits on top of your existing ERP via its REST API. You own the code. We handle the build, hosting, and ongoing maintenance.

The architecture is the same as any custom frontend project: an API adapter layer that talks to your ERP, an application layer that handles business logic and state, and one or more frontend portals for different user groups (staff, customers, management).

Pricing is a fixed-price build fee (typically £25k–£60k depending on scope) plus a monthly subscription for hosting, maintenance, and feature evolution.

What Power Apps Is Genuinely Good At

Let us start by giving credit where it is due. Power Apps solves real problems well, and dismissing it out of hand is a mistake.

Simple internal dashboards

If you need a dashboard for 5–15 internal users that pulls data from Business Central or Dataverse and displays KPIs, Power Apps can deliver that in days. The Canvas app designer is genuinely quick for read-only views of existing data. You do not need a developer. A capable business analyst can build it.

Approval workflows

Power Apps paired with Power Automate handles approval workflows elegantly. Purchase order approvals, leave requests, expense approvals — these are patterns Power Platform was built for. The out-of-the-box approval connectors reduce build time to hours rather than weeks.

Quick prototypes and MVPs

When you need to validate an idea before investing in a production build, Power Apps is hard to beat. A working prototype in a day or two. Show it to stakeholders. Iterate. Throw it away if the idea does not work. The cost of experimentation is near zero.

Data entry forms over Dataverse

For simple forms that create or update records in Dataverse (or directly in Dynamics 365), Power Apps provides a passable experience. Validation rules, conditional visibility, and lookups are all achievable with Power Fx formulas. It is not pretty, but it works.

Integration with the Microsoft ecosystem

If your organisation is already on Microsoft 365, Teams, and SharePoint, Power Apps slots in naturally. Embedding an app in Teams takes a few clicks. Authentication uses existing Entra ID credentials. Your users do not need yet another login.

Where Power Apps Hits Limits

The shortcomings of Power Apps emerge when your requirements go beyond simple forms and dashboards. These are not theoretical limitations — they are hard constraints that projects encounter regularly.

Complex business logic

Power Fx is a capable formula language for expressions, but it struggles with multi-step business logic. Consider a bill of materials explosion with multi-tier pricing, currency conversion, and discount matrices. In Power Apps, you end up wrestling with collections, context variables, and workarounds. In custom code, this is a straightforward set of functions with proper error handling, unit tests, and traceability.

Customer-facing portals

Power Apps can technically be exposed to external users, but the experience is underwhelming. Authentication for external users requires Azure AD B2C or a separate identity provider, which adds complexity and cost. The app loads noticeably slower than a well-optimised React SPA. Custom branding is limited. And if you need different experiences for different customer segments (distributors vs end-users vs suppliers), each permutation adds significant complexity.

High-volume transaction processing

Power Apps struggles when users need to process dozens or hundreds of records in a single session. The data source delegation model means that operations on large datasets either fail or perform poorly unless you carefully design around delegation limits. Warehouse picking, batch order entry, and bulk invoice processing all become painful at scale.

Performance at scale

Beyond 20–30 concurrent users, Power Apps performance degrades noticeably. The platform was designed for departmental applications, not enterprise-wide rollouts. Startup times increase, screen transitions lag, and data-heavy screens become unresponsive. Microsoft’s own documentation recommends optimising aggressively beyond 50 users.

Non-Microsoft ERPs

Power Apps connects natively to Dataverse and Dynamics 365. For everything else — SAP, OrderWise, Epicor, Sage 200, NetSuite, IFS — you rely on either a third-party connector or a custom connector you build yourself. Custom connectors work, but they add maintenance burden and do not benefit from Microsoft’s optimisation for the Power Platform. If you change ERPs, the connector may need rebuilding entirely.

Version control and testing

Power Apps does support solution export and import, but proper version control, automated testing, staging environments, and CI/CD pipelines are all significantly harder than in a standard code-based project. The result is that Power Apps projects tend to accumulate technical debt faster, especially when multiple developers are working on the same app.

Where Sysgraft (Custom React/Next.js) Excels

Full control over UX and branding

With React and Next.js, there is no platform limitation on what you can build. Any layout, animation, interaction pattern, or design system is achievable. Customer-facing portals look like a modern SaaS product, not a low-code tool. Branding is pixel-perfect rather than approximate.

Any ERP, any API

The Sysgraft adapter pattern means we can connect to any ERP that exposes a REST or SOAP API — Business Central, OrderWise, Sage 200, SAP, Epicor, IFS, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O, and many more. The adapter layer abstracts the ERP, so if you change systems later, only the adapter needs rewriting. The frontend applications remain unchanged.

Any complexity, any scale

Custom code has no ceiling on complexity. Multi-step wizards, real-time dashboards with WebSocket updates, complex data-entry grids, offline-capable mobile interfaces — all are achievable with standard web development patterns. Performance scales horizontally. There are no delegated query limits.

Production-grade customer-facing portals

This is the single biggest differentiator. If your users are customers (not just employees), the quality bar is higher. Customers expect fast load times, polished interactions, mobile responsiveness, and reliable session management. A Power Apps portal exposed to customers rarely meets these expectations. A well-built React application routinely does.

Code ownership and portability

With Sysgraft, you own the source code from day one. The application is built on standard, widely-used technologies (React, TypeScript, Next.js). Any competent web development team can take over the codebase. You are not locked into a platform or vendor.

Testable, maintainable architecture

Custom code supports standard software engineering practices: unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, linting, type checking, code review, CI/CD pipelines, staging environments, feature flags, and observability. These practices become increasingly important as the application grows in scope and user count.

Head-to-Head Comparison: 15 Factors

Ratings: Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor. These are generalisations based on our experience across dozens of ERP integration projects. Your specific mileage will vary.

Cost Comparison Over Three Years

Let us compare the total cost of ownership for two representative scenarios. These are illustrative ranges based on typical UK SME projects. Your actual costs will depend on scope, complexity, and specific requirements.

Scenario A: Simple internal dashboard (10 users, read-only, Dynamics 365 BC)

Verdict: For simple internal dashboards, Power Apps is significantly cheaper over three years. If this is all you need, Power Apps is the sensible choice.

Scenario B: Customer portal with write-back (200 users, Business Central)

Verdict: For customer-facing portals with write-back, Sysgraft is significantly cheaper over three years — despite the higher upfront build cost. The difference is Power Apps per-user licensing at scale. Power Apps Premium at £55/user/month for 200 users is £132,000 over three years before you write a line of code.

Note: Power Apps per-app plans may be cheaper in some scenarios. We have used per-user pricing because that is what most organisations end up buying once users need more than one app. Your Microsoft EA pricing may differ.

Speed Comparison: The Honest Trade-Off

One of the most persistent claims in the low-code world is that Power Apps is “10x faster” than custom development. That claim is true for some scenarios and false for others.

Where Power Apps is faster

For simple read-only dashboards, basic CRUD forms, and approval workflows — especially when the data source is Dataverse or SharePoint — Power Apps genuinely is faster by a factor of 3–5. A dashboard that takes 6–8 weeks in custom code can be built in 1–2 weeks with Power Apps. The drag-and-drop designer, pre-built components, and direct data binding eliminate the scaffolding work that consumes most of the early phase of custom projects.

Where the speed advantage evaporates

As complexity increases, the Power Apps speed advantage shrinks and eventually reverses. Complex business logic, multi-step workflows, conditional UI, and cross-data-source operations all require workarounds that take longer to build and debug than writing the equivalent in TypeScript. Once you factor in the time spent working around platform limitations, the total project timeline for a complex Power Apps application often matches or exceeds that of a well-scoped custom build.

The hidden tax: maintenance iterations

Simple changes in Power Apps are indeed faster. But as the application grows, each change becomes more fragile — the implicit dependencies in Power Apps mean that what looks like a one-line change can break something unexpected. Custom code with proper tests and type checking makes refactoring safer and faster over time. The maintenance curve slopes upward for Power Apps and stays flatter for custom code.

When to Choose Power Apps

Based on the above, here are the scenarios where Power Apps is the genuinely better choice:

• Simple internal dashboards — 5–20 users, read-only or simple CRUD, data in Dataverse or Dynamics 365
• Approval workflows — purchase order approvals, leave requests, expense approvals, paired with Power Automate
• Quick prototypes and MVPs — validating an idea before committing to a production-grade build
• Teams-integrated tools — internal utilities that live inside Microsoft Teams for convenience
• Limited budget for simple needs — when the build budget simply does not exist for custom development
• Small user counts — fewer than 20 users where the per-user licensing cost is manageable

If your requirements fit these scenarios, we will be the first to point you at Power Apps. It is the right tool for those jobs.

When to Choose Sysgraft

Sysgraft (custom React/Next.js) is the better choice when:

• Customer-facing portals — any scenario where external users need to interact with your ERP data. The quality bar is higher and Power Apps consistently underwhelms here.
• Complex business logic — multi-tier pricing, BOM explosions, configurators, anything that goes beyond simple CRUD
• High user counts — 50+ users where Power Apps per-user licensing becomes the dominant cost factor
• Non-Microsoft ERPs — OrderWise, Sage 200, SAP, Epicor, IFS, or any ERP that lacks a first-class Power Apps connector
• Multiple user personas — different experiences for staff, customers, suppliers, and management
• Long-term maintainability — you want proper version control, automated testing, staging environments, and CI/CD
• Vendor independence — you want full code ownership with no platform lock-in

Hybrid Approach: Using Both Where They Fit

The most sophisticated approach is not choosing one or the other. It is using both for what they are best at.

A growing number of organisations run a hybrid model:

• Power Apps for internal — staff dashboards, approval workflows, HR forms, internal reporting — all the simple internal tools where Power Apps is genuinely faster and cheaper
• Custom React/Next.js for external — customer portals, supplier portals, dealer portals — all the customer-facing applications where polish, performance, and scale matter
• Shared data layer — both layers connect to the same ERP API, ensuring data consistency across internal and external touchpoints

This hybrid model is, in our experience, the optimal architecture for mid-market manufacturers and distributors. It costs more in total than either approach alone, but it maximises value by deploying each technology where it is strongest.

If you are evaluating this path, we recommend starting the customer-facing portal first — that is where the highest business value typically sits. Internal tools can follow, built in whatever tooling makes sense at that point.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Power Apps replace a custom ERP frontend entirely?

For some organisations, yes. If your requirements are simple, your user count is low, and your ERP is Microsoft-aligned, Power Apps may be sufficient. For most mid-market manufacturers and distributors with complex workflows, customer portals, and mixed ERP environments, it cannot — the limitations around complexity, performance, and external user experience are genuine constraints.

Is Power Apps cheaper than custom development?

For small, simple projects: yes, significantly. For large, complex projects: no, the licensing costs at scale make custom development cheaper over a three-year horizon. The breakeven point is typically around 30–50 users for a customer-facing application.

Can Sysgraft connect to any ERP?

We connect to any ERP that exposes a REST or SOAP API. We have built adapters for Business Central, OrderWise, Sage 200, SAP, Epicor, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and IFS. If your ERP has an API, we can connect to it. If you change ERPs later, only the adapter needs updating.

What happens if I want to stop using Sysgraft?

You own the source code from day one. The application is built on standard React, Next.js, and TypeScript. Any web development team can take over hosting, maintenance, and further development. There are no proprietary frameworks or platform dependencies.

How long does a Sysgraft build take?

Four to twelve weeks depending on scope. Simple staff dashboards take 4–6 weeks. Customer portals with read-only access take 6–8 weeks. Full platforms with write-back and complex workflows take 8–12 weeks. We scope aggressively in a paid discovery sprint before committing to a timeline.

Can I use Power Apps and Sysgraft together?

Yes, and many of our clients do. Power Apps for internal tools. Sysgraft for customer-facing portals. Shared ERP data layer. This hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds.

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