Canvas Apps, Model-Driven Apps, and SPFx: Choosing the Right Approach in the Power Platform

The useful part

Teams building on Microsoft's Power Platform usually reach the same fork in the road. A business need arrives, and someone has to decide how to deliver it: as a canvas app, a model-driven app, or a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) solution. Canvas apps favor design freedom, model-driven apps favor structured data and process, and SPFx favors full developer control inside Microsoft 365.

How it works

• What follows breaks down the three options, along with the shared foundation they draw on, so you can match the tool to the job.
• Dataverse and Connectors Before comparing app types, it helps to understand what sits beneath them.
• Dataverse is Microsoft's cloud data platform: a managed relational database with built-in security, relationships, audit history, and a native API that every Power Platform product can use.
• Premium connectors need a Power Apps Premium license and reach further, to full Dataverse capabilities, SQL Server, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and the HTTP connector for any custom REST API.
• The moment an app touches a premium connector, including a single call to an external REST API through the HTTP connector, every user of that app needs a premium license.

What to take from it

One licensing detail deserves attention before development starts. Knowing where each is strong, and where it strains, turns the choice into a deliberate decision rather than a gamble. Connectors are the pre-built integrations to external services, and the platform ships with more than 900 of them across two tiers.

Example or evidence

• Discovering this after the build is well underway tends to be a...