Three ways to build a business app in 2026. Which one is right for yours?
Power Platform, Lovable, or just prompting and deploying raw code — each route has different costs, governance requirements, and hard limits. This is an independent, opinionated guide to knowing the difference.
The AI app building market has splintered fast. Citizen developers have the low-code tools they already know, with Copilot added on top. Founders and side-project builders have products like Lovable. Techies with a DIY mindset have vibe coding with Claude Code and deploying to Vercel. One route will not serve all, and any bigger company will likely travel on multiple tracks at once.
I'm Jukka Niiranen. I've been working with Microsoft business applications for 20 years. I'm a citizen developer by heart who's always tested what the digital tools actually allow individuals and organizations to achieve. This is my take on things — not yet another AI-generated platform pitch.
The three routes
Power Platform
The established enterprise path. Governed, integrated with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics, built for citizen developers inside organizations that already run on Microsoft.
Lovable
Prompt-to-app in minutes. A full-stack builder that generates real deployable code, with built-in connectors to Microsoft services including SharePoint.
Claude Code + Vercel
Write nothing, deploy everything. Pure AI-assisted coding — no GUI, no managed platform — for builders comfortable owning the full stack and the deployment.
Most interesting decisions happen at the borders between these three. That's what this site is about.
See Lovable Microsoft 365 connectors in action
I took a SharePoint document library of 200+ event presentation decks and built a proper browsing app on top of it with Lovable. Here's the end result.
Making SharePoint More Lovable — a demo of Lovable building a front end on top of a SharePoint document library, with filtering, deck preview, notes, and write-back. Built in 15 minutes of prompting.
From my Perspectives newsletter.
"Between Power Platform and Lovable is a murky middle where the choice actually matters — for cost, governance, speed, and who ends up maintaining the result."
The full analysis of where Power Platform, Lovable, and AI-assisted app building are heading — and what Microsoft should be doing differently.
Read the full issue →Not sure which route fits your scenario?
A short interactive tool to help you choose — based on your org context, build profile, governance situation, and licensing. It's in progress.
No spam. Just the tool launch and occasional updates from Perspectives.