Power Platform vs Zoho Creator vs OutSystems: Building Internal Apps in a UK Mid-Market Company

Every mid-market operations director in the UK eventually arrives at the same question: should we build our internal tools on Microsoft Power Platform because we already pay for 365, try Zoho Creator because it looks cheaper, or go straight to OutSystems because the CTO read about it in a Gartner report? The answer depends on what you are actually building, how large the user base will be, and whether your IT team can govern what gets created. This comparison strips away the vendor marketing and examines what each platform genuinely costs, where your data lives, and what happens when the person who built your critical app leaves the company.

What These Platforms Actually Are

Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of four tools: Power Apps for building applications, Power Automate for workflow automation, Power BI for reporting, and Power Pages for external-facing portals. It runs on Azure and integrates natively with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. For UK mid-market firms already on Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, some Power Platform capability is already included in the licence — but the useful bits cost extra.

Zoho Creator is a standalone low-code application builder that sits within the broader Zoho product family. It uses a proprietary scripting language called Deluge for custom logic. Data is stored in Zoho's own cloud infrastructure. For firms already using Zoho CRM or Zoho One, Creator plugs in without additional connection work. For everyone else, it is a self-contained platform that does one thing reasonably well.

OutSystems is a professional-grade low-code platform designed for building enterprise applications. It generates actual .NET or React Native code, which means applications can be deployed to your own infrastructure or to OutSystems Cloud. It targets a different market from Power Platform and Zoho Creator — firms that need to build complex, scalable applications and have professional developers available to do it.

UK Pricing in Pounds

Power Platform pricing in the UK works as follows. Power Apps Premium costs approximately £15.40 per user per month on pay-as-you-go, or roughly £16 per user per month on an annual commitment. Power Automate Premium is priced at around £12.30 per user per month. That said, if your firm is on Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, you already have access to Power Apps for Microsoft 365 — a limited version that can only use standard connectors and Dataverse for Teams. The moment you need a premium connector (SQL Server, Salesforce, SAP), you move to the paid tier. For a 250-person mid-market firm where 50 users need premium Power Apps access, budget roughly £9,600 per year before you add Power Automate licences.

Zoho Creator charges approximately £6 to £8 per user per month on the Standard plan (billed annually), rising to roughly £15 to £20 per user per month on Professional and Enterprise tiers. The pricing is simpler than Power Platform but comes with a catch: the Standard plan limits you to 1 application and 25,000 records. The Professional plan lifts that to 50 applications and 500,000 records. For a mid-market firm with 50 users on Professional, budget roughly £9,000 to £12,000 per year.

OutSystems does not publish a simple per-user price. It uses a consumption-based model tied to the number of end users, application objects, and hosting requirements. For a UK mid-market firm building 3 to 5 internal applications used by 250 staff, expect to pay between £40,000 and £120,000 per year depending on complexity. OutSystems does not charge per developer seat — you can have unlimited builders — but the platform cost is an order of magnitude higher than the other two options. This is not a criticism; it reflects a fundamentally different product aimed at a different use case.

Data Residency and UK Compliance

For any UK firm handling personal data, where that data physically lives matters under UK GDPR.

Power Platform stores data in Microsoft's UK South and UK West Azure regions by default for UK tenants. Dataverse, the underlying data store, keeps data in the tenant's home geography. This is straightforward and well-documented. Microsoft provides a Data Residency Commitment for Microsoft 365, and Power Platform data follows the same rules. For firms subject to FCA or SRA regulation, this is usually sufficient.

Zoho Creator stores data in Zoho's EU data centre in the Netherlands by default for European customers. Zoho does not currently offer a UK-specific data centre. For firms that require data to remain within UK borders (certain public sector contracts, some financial services requirements), this is a blocker. Zoho's privacy documentation states that customer data may be processed in the EU, which satisfies UK adequacy decisions post-Brexit, but does not satisfy policies that require UK-only residency.

OutSystems offers deployment to the customer's own Azure, AWS, or on-premises infrastructure, which means you can guarantee UK data residency by selecting UK-based hosting. OutSystems Cloud also offers EU-based hosting. For firms with strict data sovereignty requirements, the ability to self-host is a genuine advantage.

Developer Experience and Governance

This is where the three platforms diverge sharply, and where typical comparison articles fall short.

Power Platform is designed for citizen developers — business users who build apps without formal coding training. This is both its strength and its biggest risk. A competent Excel user can build a working Power App in a day. The problem is that without governance, you end up with hundreds of ungoverned apps scattered across the tenant, a good portion containing business-critical logic that nobody documented. Microsoft has invested in the Centre of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit to address this, but setting it up and maintaining it requires dedicated IT resource. For mid-market firms without a platform team, citizen development often creates more problems than it solves within 18 months.

Zoho Creator sits in the middle. Its Deluge scripting language is simpler than JavaScript or C# but more structured than Power Apps' Excel-like formulas. A technically minded business analyst can learn Deluge in a week, but building anything beyond basic CRUD applications requires genuine programming ability. Governance tooling is limited compared to Power Platform — there is no equivalent of the CoE Starter Kit, and managing who can build what relies on Zoho's basic role-based access controls.

OutSystems is designed for professional developers and treats low-code as an accelerator rather than a replacement for coding skills. The visual development environment generates clean, maintainable code that can be version-controlled in Git. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is built in, with staging environments, code review workflows, and automated deployment pipelines. This is the right tool for firms that have developers and want them to build faster. It is the wrong tool for firms hoping to avoid hiring developers entirely.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions

Power Platform: The per-user licensing model becomes expensive at scale. If you build an app that 250 people need to use, you are paying per-user fees for all 250 — even if the majority only open the app once a week. Power Apps per-app plans were available to reduce this cost, but Microsoft announced the end of sale for per-app plans, pushing firms toward the more expensive per-user model. Also budget for Dataverse storage — the included 10 GB fills quickly, and additional storage costs £30.50 per GB per month.

Zoho Creator: The record limits on lower tiers catch firms off guard. If your application tracks 30,000 customer interactions per year, you hit the Standard plan's 25,000-record ceiling within months. Migrating to Professional mid-contract means renegotiating your agreement. Also, Zoho's API rate limits on lower tiers can throttle integrations with external systems during peak periods.

OutSystems: The consumption-based pricing model makes budgeting difficult. Application complexity scores (measured in Application Objects) can increase as developers add features, pushing costs upward without a corresponding increase in users. Migration cost is the other hidden expense — if you decide to leave OutSystems, extracting applications and moving them to another platform is a serious engineering project, even though the platform generates standard code.

What Real Deployments Look Like in Practice

Theory is one thing. What actually happens when a UK mid-market firm deploys these platforms?

A 300-person financial services firm in Manchester deployed Power Platform to replace a set of Excel-based compliance tracking spreadsheets. The initial build took two weeks, which impressed everyone. Six months later, 47 unrelated Power Apps had appeared across the organisation — built by enthusiastic staff who discovered they could create apps through Teams. The IT director spent the next quarter implementing the CoE Starter Kit and retroactively documenting every application. Total cost including lost productivity: roughly double the original project budget.

A 200-person logistics company in Birmingham chose Zoho Creator because it was already using Zoho CRM. The operations team built a warehouse booking application in three weeks. It worked well until the company acquired a smaller competitor and needed to onboard 80 additional users. The Standard plan record limits forced an unplanned upgrade to Professional, and Zoho's API rate limits caused the connection to their third-party warehouse management system to throttle during the morning booking rush. The fix required rewriting the connection logic and upgrading the plan — an additional £8,000 per year they had not budgeted for.

A 400-person professional services firm in Edinburgh selected OutSystems to build a client engagement portal. The project took four months with two full-time developers and produced a polished, scalable application that handled 2,000 concurrent users during peak periods. The annual platform cost of £95,000 meant the project had to demonstrate clear ROI within 18 months. The firm achieved this by retiring three legacy applications and reducing manual data entry by an estimated 12,000 hours per year — but it required board-level sponsorship that smaller projects would not attract.

These examples illustrate a pattern: the platform choice matters less than the organisational readiness to govern and sustain what gets built.

Which Platform for Which Firm

Choose Power Platform if your firm is already on Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, your applications primarily need to work with Microsoft data (SharePoint, Teams, Dynamics), your user count per app is under 100, and you have IT resource to govern what gets built. It is the obvious choice for extending your existing Microsoft investment, but only if you treat governance seriously from day one.

Choose Zoho Creator if your firm is already using Zoho products, your applications are relatively straightforward (forms, workflows, approvals), your budget is tight, and UK-only data residency is not a requirement. It is the cheapest option for simple internal tools, but runs out of road quickly for anything complex.

Choose OutSystems if you are building applications that need to scale beyond departmental use, you have professional developers on staff or under contract, your applications will be used by hundreds of people concurrently, and you need guaranteed UK data residency through self-hosting. The price premium reflects a platform that genuinely produces enterprise-grade applications — but the investment only makes sense if your application portfolio justifies it.

The Governance Question That Decides Everything

Before choosing a platform, ask this: who is responsible for the applications after they are built? In firms where the answer is "whoever built it," Power Platform and Zoho Creator projects routinely collapse within two years. The builder moves roles, leaves the company, or simply loses interest, and nobody else understands the application logic. OutSystems mitigates this through professional development practices, but at a price point that assumes ongoing developer involvement.

For UK mid-market firms, the honest recommendation is rarely one platform for everything. Use Power Platform for departmental tools that integrate with your existing Microsoft 365 and Copilot environment. Use OutSystems if you need to build a client-facing portal or a complex operational system. And consider Zoho Creator only if you are already committed to the Zoho product family and your requirements are genuinely simple.

Before signing any contract, run a proof of concept with a real use case — not a demo scenario the vendor provides. Build one application that your staff will actually use, measure how long it takes, assess the quality of the result, and ask the builder how confident they are that someone else could maintain it. That proof of concept will tell you more than any Gartner quadrant or vendor webinar.

For firms subject to FCA, SRA, or other regulatory oversight, also verify that the platform's audit trail meets your compliance requirements. Power Platform's audit logging integrates with Microsoft Purview. Zoho Creator's audit capabilities are more limited and may require custom scripting. OutSystems provides configurable audit trails as a standard feature.

The worst decision is picking a platform because it looks cheap and then discovering 18 months later that you have built business-critical processes on technology that cannot grow with you. That is a conversation nobody wants to have with the board, and the cost of migrating between platforms is always higher than the vendor claims.