What is Custom Connectors

If any of the over 1,000 connectors don’t provide you with what you need, you can build a custom connector. Custom connectors allow you to extend your app by calling a publicly available API, or a custom API you’re hosting in a cloud provider, such as Azure. API stands for Application Programming Interface and holds a series of functions available for developers. Connectors work by sending information back and forth across these APIs and gathering available functions into Power Apps or Power Automate. Because these connectors are function-based, they call specific functions in the underlying service of the API to return the corresponding data.

An advantage of building custom connectors is that they can be used in different platforms, such as Power Apps, Power Automate, and Azure Logic Apps.

You can create custom connectors using three different approaches:

• Using a blank custom connector
• Using an OpenAPI definition
• Using a Postman collection

While the requirements for each approach vary, they all require a Power Apps per app or per user plan. Each link above points to the instructions for each approach.