Comparing Microsoft Lists, Dataverse for Teams, and Dataverse

Whether you’re using Power Apps to build a small app for your team or a mission critical app for your business, there are many great options for data.

This article focuses on three of the most popular data technologies used in Microsoft Power Platform: Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Dataverse for Teams, and Microsoft Dataverse. With the answers to the questions below, you can quickly understand and apply the key considerations that will help you pick the correct one for your application.

The questions are broken out into four categories:

Category	Questions
Data	What types of data (and how much of it) will your application require? How do you want to search the data?
Application	How will the app be made available? For example, will it be a Teams app, custom code, or something else? Will guests be accessing your application? Who will build the app; low-code or pro developers? What special capabilities does your application need?
Integration	What do you want to integrate the system with? For example, databases, services, and so on?
Admin and governance	What are your organizations requirements related to security and compliance? Are there special requirements for backing up and restoring the data?

Key considerations and differences between Lists, Dataverse for Teams, and Dataverse

Using the answers to the questions above, use the table below to help identify the right technology for your application.

Considerations	Lists	Dataverse for Teams	Dataverse
Types of data	Lists, File, Image	Relational, File, or Image	Relational, File, Image, Lake, Log, Dataverse Search Virtual tables
Number of data types	15	23 (Currency is basic version)	24 (Currency is advanced version)
Common Data Model	N/A	User table only	Full support
Capacity	Up to 30M rows (considerations for lists > 100k)	Up to 1M rows Small number of files or images For limits on API requests per day, go to the entitlements available for Microsoft 365 apps with Power Platform access in the article: Request limits based on user licenses	No specified limit on rows. No specified limit of files or images. For limits on API requests per day, with option of capacity add-ons, go to this article: Request limits based on user licenses
Data movement	Create from/Export to Excel	Dataflows In	Dataflows In/Out Server-side sync Synapse Integration (Bring Your Own Data Lake, Data Factory)
Security	Owners, Members, Visitors, Designers, Approvers roles Customizable permissions	Owner, Member, Guest roles Share app with Azure AD group	Robust options to satisfy complex enterprise scenario requirements, such as roles, business units, auditing, CMK, hierarchical/field-Level security, and so on
Clients	Lists, Teams1, custom code	Teams	Teams, Power Apps, Power Pages, Dynamics 365, custom code
Guest limitations	Can't create or delete a list	Can't make, install, or edit apps	Must be in Azure AD using Azure B2B
Pro developer capability	REST API Graph API	N/A	REST API Software Development Kit (SDK) Plug-in Support Integration (Event Hub, Service Bus, Webhook, Export to Lake) SQL Server Management Studio Integration
Package and deploy	Package and deploy Lists	Single unmanaged solution per environment	Unlimited
Additional capabilities	Calculations and rollups	N/A	Business workflows Business rules Calculations and rollups Mobile offline

¹You can't create or pin lists on Power Apps mobile.

See also

Dataverse and Dataverse for Teams licensing
How are Dataverse for Teams and Dataverse different?
What is Dataverse?