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Microsoft PowerApps vs Parse
March 18, 2025 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
15★
Transform your business by creating custom business apps with Microsoft PowerApps. Connect data from the cloud and make your own app - no coding required.
2★
The complete mobile app platform. Focus on creating unique & engaging apps on any platform. We take care of everything else your app needs, from the core of your app to analytics and push notifications.
Microsoft PowerApps and Parse both claim to make app development easier, which is a bit like saying that automatic doors make walking obsolete. They both let you build things without writing much code, manage data without really knowing where it lives and integrate with various services in a way that suggests everything is connected, even if no one truly understands how. APIs exist, buttons get clicked and somewhere in the vast, humming cloud, things just work—until they don’t.
PowerApps, being a Microsoft creation, is very serious about business. It was launched in 2016, which means it’s old enough to know better but young enough to still get updated every other week. It likes Excel, loves Azure and will probably try to introduce you to Dynamics 365 at every opportunity. It’s perfect for people who want to build apps but only if those apps involve reports, workflows and some kind of SharePoint dependency they’ll never quite escape.
Parse, on the other hand, was born in 2011, got adopted by Facebook and then promptly abandoned like a pet that grew too large. It now exists in the wild as an open-source project, thriving in server rooms and on forgotten GitHub repositories. Originally, it was a mobile backend-as-a-service, which is just a fancy way of saying it did all the hard bits so developers could pretend they knew what they were doing. Unlike PowerApps, it doesn’t care about your spreadsheets, but it does enjoy handling databases, push notifications and the quiet existential dread of being self-hosted.
See also: Top 10 Mobile App Builders
PowerApps, being a Microsoft creation, is very serious about business. It was launched in 2016, which means it’s old enough to know better but young enough to still get updated every other week. It likes Excel, loves Azure and will probably try to introduce you to Dynamics 365 at every opportunity. It’s perfect for people who want to build apps but only if those apps involve reports, workflows and some kind of SharePoint dependency they’ll never quite escape.
Parse, on the other hand, was born in 2011, got adopted by Facebook and then promptly abandoned like a pet that grew too large. It now exists in the wild as an open-source project, thriving in server rooms and on forgotten GitHub repositories. Originally, it was a mobile backend-as-a-service, which is just a fancy way of saying it did all the hard bits so developers could pretend they knew what they were doing. Unlike PowerApps, it doesn’t care about your spreadsheets, but it does enjoy handling databases, push notifications and the quiet existential dread of being self-hosted.
See also: Top 10 Mobile App Builders
