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Differences between PowerApps Portals and Power Pages

Someleze_Diko's avatar
Someleze_Diko
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jul 12, 2022

A picture showing Portals and Pages

With the exciting announcement of Power Pages at Build as the 5th addition to the Power Platform Products how do we tell the difference between PowerApps Portals (which already exist within PowerApps for external facing websites) and Power Pages, are they the same or different?

Objectives

  • Understanding PowerApps Portals (brief overview)
  • Understanding Power Pages (brief overview)
  • PowerApps Portals vs Power Pages
  • PowerApps Portals and Power Pages similarities

 

Understanding PowerApps Portals

PowerApps Portals are an extension of PowerApps that enables both citizen developers and professional developers to build external facing-websites that allow users their organizations to sign in with a wide variety of identities, create and view data in Microsoft Dataverse, or even browse content anonymously.

 

Understanding Power Pages

Microsoft Power Pages is a secure, enterprise-grade, low-code software as a service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting, and administering modern external-facing business websites. Whether you're a low-code maker or a professional developer, Power Pages enables you to rapidly design, configure, and publish websites that seamlessly work across web browsers and devices.

PowerApps Portal vs Power Pages

  1. PowerApps Portals require you to have the portal creation option enabled for your tenant and have the Global Administrator, Dynamics 365 administrator, or Power Platform administrator role to create a portal (external-facing website) vs Power Pages just require an additional license or sig-up for a 30-day trial to get started with buidling with Power Pages.
    A picture showing PowerApps Portal creation error due to permissions
  2. PowerApps Portals require you to have some basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, or Liquid to customize your sites and build a better User Interface/User Experience vs Power Pages that allows you to create low-code/no-code sites that have the knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, CSS or Liquid as optional.
    A picture showing the Power Pages Design Studio
  3. With PowerApps Portals you must retype the link if you wanted to preview your site on a mobile device vs with Power Pages you must just scan a QR code using your mobile device.
    A picture showing how to preview a page/site in Power Pages
  4. PowerApps Portals Studio provides limited capabilities of configuring your website to meet your requirements and you must navigate away from the studio to add in other capabilities like identity providers vs Power Pages Design studio everything is centralized and organized in workspaces to enable makers to add capabilities as required without navigating away from the studio.
    A picture showing the four workspaces within the Design Studio
  5. Websites built with PowerApps Portals take longer to provision than websites built with Power Pages.

PowerApps Portals & Power Pages Similarities

  1. Power Pages is built on the foundation of PowerApps Portals providing the same robust capabilities and pro developer experiences with a new low-code maker experience and out-of-the box templates to design modern business sites.
  2. Both PowerApps Portals and Power Pages use Microsoft Dataverse as their underlying data structure for makers to manipulate and store data.
  3. Makers can build externally facing websites using both PowerApps Portals and Power Pages.
  4. Makers can take advantage of extending their websites through the addition of PowerBI, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate flows in both PowerApps Portals and Power Pages.
  5. Makers can configure security, table permissions and identity providers for their websites as per their specific requirements in both PowerApps Portals and Power Pages.
  6. Makers can edit their PowerApps Portals site or Power Pages site using pro-developer tools.

Use this step-by-step guide on how to edit Power Pages sites using pro-developer tools by Julia_Muiruri 

Note: Power Pages is still in Preview for users to play are in preview for users to try and provide feedback

Updated Jul 12, 2022
Version 1.0
  • amishpyakurel's avatar
    amishpyakurel
    Copper Contributor

    Was there any information available on how to migrate from Powerapps portals to Power Pages?

  • Jasonyang1295's avatar
    Jasonyang1295
    Copper Contributor

    So Power Pages is the way to go; Portals is deprecated.

     

    What happens to the existing Portals? Is there a tool to migrate Portals to Power Pages?

  • Sam_Lowe's avatar
    Sam_Lowe
    Copper Contributor

    Hi Someleze_Diko -is one of the differences that PowerApps Portals is (presumably) for environments that require a log in, like a subscriber site/member site, vs Power Pages being just like a general public company website? If not, what is the difference in purpose for portal v page? Thanks in advance 🙂

  • Matthieu_BEGHIN's avatar
    Matthieu_BEGHIN
    Copper Contributor

    Thanks Someleze_Diko for this comparison. As mentionned above, I do not see any advantage anymore for PowerApps Portal. Can we guess than PowerApps Portal will be deprecated, and replaced by Power Pages once the preview period will be over ?

  • kyatezz's avatar
    kyatezz
    Copper Contributor

    So why would anyone create a website using Power Portals anymore!? Power Pages seem to have a clear advantage in all the areas!?