Overview: I like Power Platform, but there are other options out there. Most products that are competitors cover a piece of what the Power Platform covers.
Mendix: A friend has used Mendix and they were not a fan. I have played around and I like the product. I certainly haven't found it's limitations but it feels straight forward and logical. Easy to learn.
Cons:
- The publishing is very slow
- Free version you have to use Mendix subdomain. Basic plan is $50/month, for my small demo, it a high price,
Outsystems:
Airtable: Has lots of templates and easily connects to various data sources. Easy to extend or build apps on the platform. Provides storage and low code apps. It's like having Dataverse and Power Apps. There are pre-built templates to get the team off to a start.
Nintex: Bought K2 and have a long history in workflows (workflows for SharePoint and O365), screen/form generation and form building. If your company uses Nintex then worthwhile but I wouldn't use it for new projects or if the team does not have significant experience.
UiPath: RPA tool. A strong tool for automation, from a desktop automation and recording piece I feel UiPath is ahead of Power Automate Desktop (PAD). Both UiPath and Power automate allow for attended and unattended runs. PAD is part of Power Automation Premium or Power Automate Process licences. Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism are other big players in the RPA space.
Postman Workflows: Bit of a dark horse but people love postman and i think this may become a interesting option for Rapid development.
Amazon: AWS has various services that allow for Low Code solutions. "Amazon Honeycode" is kind of like Model driven & Canvas apps, that can call Lambda's. Lamda's are the same service as Azure Functions on AWS. AWS Honeycode has predifined templates as staring points so I feel it is more like Salesforce's low code approach. This allows the developer to break out an write complex logic or persist the database in S3 storage. "Amazon QuickSight" works like Power BI for reporting on solution data.
Salesforce Lightening: Allows for building custom apps and utilising Salesforce CRM and it's data.
Retool: Good set of connectors to API's.
Appian:
OutSystems:
