Power Apps: Classic vs Modern Controls

Key insights

• Classic controls: These are the original Power Apps controls that let you style each property directly.
  They give fine-grained control (for example, direct button fill and hover states) and work well for apps that need precise visuals or legacy behaviors.
• Modern controls: Built on the Fluent 2 design system, modern controls offer a cleaner, up-to-date look with rounded edges, built-in icons, and features like the Confirm function.
  They reduce manual formatting by inheriting styles from a central theme and improve accessibility and responsiveness.
• Themes & styling: Modern apps centralize colors and fonts in themes so you change style in one place rather than on each control.
  You enable them in the app settings under Settings → Updates and turn on Modern controls and themes; you can create and copy custom modern themes across apps.
• Control tradeoffs: Classic controls let you tweak many legacy visual properties that modern controls may not expose.
  Modern controls speed up design and ensure consistency, but they limit some manual styling choices—choose based on required flexibility versus time and consistency needs.
• Practical differences: Headers, labels, buttons, forms, and galleries behave and look different between the sets—modern buttons inherit theme colors, while classic buttons rely on explicit fill and font properties.
  Modern form inputs and built-in icons can save development time compared with recreating those elements in classic controls.
• Beginner recommendations: For new Canvas apps, prefer modern controls for consistent design, accessibility, and easier maintenance.
  Keep classic controls when you need specific legacy features or precise styling, and consider mixing both while you transition and test behavior across devices.

Video at a glance

The recent YouTube walkthrough from Pragmatic Works, presented by Helen Devlin, compares building the same time-off request app using classic controls and modern controls in Power Apps. The video demonstrates headers, labels, forms, buttons, icons, galleries, themes, and styling options so viewers can see side-by-side differences in real authoring scenarios. Consequently, beginners get a clear, practical view of how each approach affects design decisions and development time. Additionally, the presenter highlights where each control set still matters, which helps makers weigh tradeoffs when choosing an approach.

Design and theming differences

First, the video shows that modern controls adopt the Fluent 2-inspired look with rounded edges, cleaner form inputs, and prebuilt elements like a Header control, which together create a more consistent visual language. Therefore, themes play a larger role: modern themes centralize colors and styles so many controls inherit a unified appearance automatically, reducing repetitive manual work. In contrast, classic controls expose more granular visual properties, which means designers can fine-tune fills, borders, and hover states per control but also spend more time adjusting each element. As a result, modern controls speed up consistent styling while classic controls preserve precise visual control for custom needs.

Moreover, the video illustrates how modern controls include built-in iconography and functions like the Confirm dialog, which simplify common UX patterns without extra wiring. For that reason, teams focusing on fast prototyping and accessibility often prefer modern controls since they deliver consistent behaviors across devices. However, some visual options familiar from classic controls, such as direct button fill manipulation or specific legacy hover behavior, may be less accessible or different in the modern set. Thus, designers must balance the convenience of themes against the need for pixel-level customization.

Functionality and developer tradeoffs

Functionally, Helen explains that classic controls still offer property-level flexibility that some makers rely on, while modern controls reduce the number of exposed visual properties and push styling into the theme layer. Consequently, classic controls are often chosen for existing apps that depend on older behavior or for developers who need exact control over every visual attribute. On the other hand, modern controls emphasize accessibility, responsiveness, and consistency, which lowers maintenance and makes it easier to meet compliance guidelines out of the box.

That said, tradeoffs do exist: modern controls can hide legacy properties and small behavioral differences that require rethinking formulas or layout logic, and testing becomes essential when migrating UI elements. Meanwhile, mixing both control types is possible, but it introduces complexity because the two systems follow different styling rules and sometimes different runtime behavior. Therefore, teams should plan for extra validation, cross-device testing, and possibly refactoring when combining controls to avoid unexpected layout or accessibility gaps.

Enabling modern controls and practical workflow

Practically speaking, the video walks through enabling modern controls and themes in the app settings and demonstrates how to create and copy a custom modern theme between apps. As a result, authors can apply a theme once and then rely on it to keep colors and typographic choices consistent across screens and controls. Moreover, the presenter shows how to copy a theme from one app to another, which helps scale consistent branding across multiple canvas apps without repeating manual styling work.

However, the video also warns about limits: when modern controls and themes are enabled, classic themes are less visible in the command bar and some legacy styling options may be retired or hidden. Thus, switching an established app to modern controls can require careful planning, especially if the app relies on specific classic properties or customized behaviors. Ultimately, teams should evaluate migration effort, document control choices, and train makers on theme-based design to minimize surprises.

When to choose classic, modern, or a mix

In closing, Helen’s walkthrough helps makers choose an approach by weighing consistency and accessibility against flexibility and legacy compatibility. For new apps, the video suggests favoring modern controls to benefit from centralized theming, improved accessibility, and faster authoring, while legacy or highly customized apps may continue to rely on classic controls where fine-grained styling is essential. Meanwhile, mixing control types can be a pragmatic compromise, but teams should accept extra testing and ongoing maintenance as part of that tradeoff.

Therefore, the practical recommendation is to prototype key screens with modern controls first and then assess whether classic properties are needed for specific components; in this way, makers can capture efficiency gains while keeping the option to revert or blend approaches. Overall, the video offers a clear, hands-on comparison that helps beginners and intermediate makers understand both the benefits and the challenges of modernizing their Power Apps user interfaces.

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