The Honest Way to Get a Kanban Board Into Dynamics 365

Why people go looking for a Dynamics 365 Kanban board in the first place

The request almost always starts the same way. A sales manager is staring at a view of opportunities as a flat grid, or a service lead is scrolling a list of cases sorted by status, and someone says out loud what everyone is thinking: why can't this look like a board, where I drag a card from one column to the next. It is a fair thing to want. A Kanban view is just a more honest picture of work that already moves through stages, and Dynamics 365 has all of that stage data sitting in Dataverse already. The pipeline stage, the case status, the custom picklist your team lives by - it is all there. The only thing missing is a control that draws it as columns and cards.

So the real question is not whether you can have a Kanban board in Dynamics 365. You can. The question is how you get one, and there are two genuinely different answers with different consequences. You can install a third-party Kanban app from Microsoft AppSource, or you can build a custom control using the PowerApps Component Framework, usually shortened to PCF. Neither is the right answer for everyone, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling one of them.

The AppSource route: fast, and fine for a standard board

AppSource is Microsoft's marketplace, and there are several vendors selling Kanban-style controls on it. The appeal is obvious. You install the app, point it at an existing view, and you have a working board the same afternoon. There is little or no build cost. The vendor handles maintenance and, in theory, keeps the thing working through Microsoft's twice-yearly release waves.

That is a real and reasonable path, and for a lot of teams it is the right one. If your board is a standard columns-and-cards view over opportunities, cases, or tasks, and dragging a record from one status to another is the whole requirement, an off-the-shelf app does the job without anyone writing code.

The trade-offs show up later, and they are worth knowing before you commit. Most of these apps are sold on a per-user or per-tenant subscription, so the cost grows with your team rather than stopping after launch. You fit your process to the app's model, not the other way round, so unusual entities, custom swimlanes, or drag rules tied to a business process flow may simply not be supported. Your access depends on the vendor staying in business and keeping the listing current. And on data, you have to check where records actually go: some of these apps run fully inside your tenant, and some route data through an external service you should review before anything sensitive touches it.

The custom PCF route: what it is and when it earns its keep

The other path is to build the board as a PCF control. This is not a hack or an iframe stuffed into a form. The PowerApps Component Framework is Microsoft's supported way of writing custom UI controls for model-driven and canvas apps. A PCF control is real code, written in TypeScript and React, that runs natively inside the Power Apps runtime. It honors your security roles, reads and writes through Dataverse like any first-party control, and keeps every record inside your tenant.

That native footing is what makes a custom board worth it when an off-the-shelf one leaves a gap. Because you own the code, the board can map to custom entities, use custom swimlanes and card fields, color cards by whatever logic you like, and validate a drag against your business process flow so a user cannot move a record into a stage it is not allowed to enter yet. There is a one-off build cost and then low running cost, with no per-user license on the control itself. And you own the source, so it cannot be sunset by a third party.

The honest downsides: it takes longer to get the first working board, and maintenance is on you or your partner rather than a vendor. In practice a focused PCF Kanban control is a matter of days to a few weeks depending on scope. A board over a single entity with standard drag-between-statuses behavior is quick; multiple entities, validation rules, and rich card layouts add time. Building this kind of custom control is a core part of our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform services, and because we already ship our own Solzet Kanban Board as a PCF control, we usually start from working code rather than a blank canvas.

How to actually decide

Strip away the sales framing and the choice comes down to a few questions. How specific is your workflow? If a standard board fits, buy one. If it does not, no amount of configuration will close the gap, and a custom control is the cleaner answer. How do you feel about a recurring per-user cost versus a larger one-off build? A subscription is cheaper to start and more expensive to keep. Who needs to own the thing? If data residency, security roles, or IP ownership rule out routing records through an external service, that decides it on its own.

For teams whose process is genuinely their own - the kind we see a lot in professional services, where the way work moves through stages is part of how the firm sells - the custom path tends to pay off, because the board is not a nice-to-have, it is the way people run their day. For a straightforward pipeline view, the marketplace is doing you a favor.

Whichever way it goes, a Kanban board is usually one piece of a wider sales or service workflow, not the whole thing. When we build a custom control we ship it as a managed solution with source and documentation, deployed through solution-based application lifecycle management so it moves cleanly from development to test to production. That same delivery approach shows up in our PCF subcontracting case study, where the control was one part of a larger build. If you want a straight read on which route fits your team, that is the conversation our services are built to start.