The Power Platform CoE Starter Kit Is No Longer Maintained. It Is Still Worth Running.
The Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a free collection of apps, flows and Power BI reports that gives organisations visibility and control over what their people are building across the Power Platform.
In May 2026, Microsoft confirmed on its own documentation that the kit is no longer actively maintained, will receive no new capabilities, and that issues raised against it are no longer reviewed.
A lot of the reaction treated that as a death notice. It is not, and the reason matters. The kit was never an official Microsoft product in the first place. It was built by the Power CAT team and handed to the community as a starting point, which means it has never carried support, and losing something it never had is a smaller change than it appears.
The parts we get the most value from in client work are the audit and registration components, and those solve a problem the admin centre still does not.
Knowing what has been built is comparatively easy. Knowing why it was built, who asked for it and what it was meant to achieve is the part that makes governance decisions possible, and that context does not appear in an inventory list.
So the honest answer on whether to keep running it is that it depends on what you were using it for, and specifically on whether you were using it for visibility or for control. Those two answers point in opposite directions.
Quick summary
Microsoft’s announcement changes less than the headlines suggested:
The question worth asking is not whether the kit is finished. It is whether you were ever using the parts that the admin centre cannot replace.
What Microsoft actually announced
Microsoft’s CoE Starter Kit documentation now carries a clear statement: the kit is no longer actively maintained, its core capabilities have moved into the Power Platform admin centre, and issues are no longer reviewed or addressed. Security vulnerabilities remain reportable through the Microsoft Security Response Center, but nothing else does.
The signal came earlier than the statement. Monthly releases stopped in February 2026, several months before the documentation caught up, which is usually how these things go.
What Microsoft did not say is that the kit stops working or should be removed. The same documentation confirms it remains available for existing and new deployments. It simply will not be developed further.
Why this is less dramatic than it sounds
The detail that most of the commentary skipped is that the CoE Starter Kit was never an official Microsoft product. It was created by the Power CAT team and released to the community as an accelerator, following the same pattern as the Creator Kit, the Copilot Studio Kit and the ALM Accelerator.
That matters because it means the kit has never been supported. There was never an SLA, never a support route, never a guarantee. Organisations running it have always been running unsupported tooling, whether they realised it or not.
So the change is real, but narrower than it looks. You have lost future development. You have not lost support, because there was none to lose.
What the admin centre genuinely replaces
Microsoft’s position is that the kit’s core scenarios now live natively in the Power Platform admin centre, through the Inventory, Usage, Monitor and Actions experiences. On the reporting and visibility side, that is broadly fair.
If what you wanted from the CoE was dashboards, an inventory of apps and flows, usage figures and a view of who owns what, the admin centre now does that, natively, without a dedicated environment or a multi-hour setup. For organisations that only ever deployed the kit to answer “what have people built”, moving to the admin centre is the sensible call and there is little reason to keep maintaining a separate solution for it.
That is a genuine improvement, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than defending the kit out of habit.
Where we still get the most value from the kit
The components we use most in client work are audit and registration, and they solve a different problem to inventory.
An inventory tells you what exists. Registration tells you why it exists: who requested it, what business problem it was meant to solve, who owns it now, and what should happen to it when that person leaves. That context is what turns a list of 400 flows into a set of decisions about which ones matter. Without it, you have visibility without judgement, which tends to produce a spreadsheet nobody acts on.
This is also the part that survives a change of personnel. Most Power Platform governance problems we see are not really discovery problems. The organisation can find the apps. What it cannot do is work out whether a given app is load-bearing or abandoned, because nobody recorded the intent at the point of creation.
The admin centre does not currently capture that, and until it does, the kit continues to earn its place for organisations that use it properly.
Why we have not moved anyone off it yet
We currently maintain one client CoE deployment and have delivered several others previously, and we will continue to support anyone running it.
We have not moved a client wholesale onto the admin centre, and that is a deliberate position rather than inertia. Microsoft has taken a long time to bring even the basics of the kit’s functionality into the admin centre, and on that trajectory the gap between the two will take a while yet to close. Advising a client to dismantle working governance tooling in order to move to a platform that does not yet cover the same ground would not be doing them a service.
That position will change as the admin centre matures. It is not a permanent recommendation, and anyone telling you the kit is a long-term answer is overstating it just as much as the people declaring it dead.
Who should stop using it, and who should carry on
Being straight about this matters more than defending a tool.
Stop, or never start, if you only ever used the kit for dashboards and inventory, if setting it up and keeping it running has consumed more effort than the insight it produced, or if you deployed it once, never adapted it, and have not looked at it since. The admin centre does that job now and does it with far less overhead.
Carry on if you use the audit and registration components meaningfully, if the context they hold is feeding real decisions about ownership and lifecycle, or if you have adapted the kit to reflect how your organisation actually works. In that case, you are using the part that has no native replacement, and switching now would cost you something the admin centre cannot give back.
The deciding question is simple: are you using it for visibility, or for control? Visibility has been replaced. Control has not.
What to do now
If you are running the kit, the sensible next step is not migration, it is an honest audit of which components you actually use. Most organisations find they deployed considerably more than they touch.
From there, the decision is straightforward. Retire the parts the admin centre now covers, keep the parts it does not, and stop treating the kit as an all-or-nothing proposition. It was always a starter kit, assembled from components, and there is no requirement to run all of it or none of it.
It is also worth accepting that you are running unsupported tooling, and writing that down somewhere. That was true before the announcement, but announcements have a way of surfacing risks that were already there, and it is better to have made the decision consciously than to discover it during an audit.
Not sure whether to keep your CoE running?
We will look at which components you actually use, tell you what the Power Platform admin centre now covers properly, and give you a straight answer on what to retire and what to keep. If the admin centre does everything you need, we will tell you that rather than sell you a governance project.
The bottom line on the CoE Starter Kit
Microsoft has stopped developing the CoE Starter Kit, and that is worth knowing. It is not the same as the kit being finished, and it is a long way from being a reason to tear out working governance tooling.
The reporting side has been genuinely superseded. The registration and audit side has not, and until the admin centre captures why something was built rather than simply that it exists, the kit continues to do a job nothing else does for free. Use the parts that still earn their keep, retire the parts that do not, and revisit the decision as the admin centre catches up.
Our Power Platform Governance Consultancy team works with organisations on exactly this decision, and our post on why Power Platform governance fails in growing organisations covers the wider problem the tooling is meant to solve.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Frequently asked questions
The questions clients have actually put to us since Microsoft’s announcement, answered without pretending the kit is either dead or permanent.
Has Microsoft discontinued the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit?
Not exactly. Microsoft confirmed in May 2026 that the kit is no longer actively maintained and will not receive new capabilities, and that issues raised against it are no longer reviewed. Its documentation is explicit that the kit remains available for both existing and new deployments. It has stopped being developed rather than being withdrawn.
Was the CoE Starter Kit ever officially supported?
No, and this is the part most coverage misses. The kit was built by Microsoft’s Power CAT team and released to the community as an accelerator rather than shipped as a product. It has never carried support or an SLA, which is why the announcement changes less in practice than it appears to.
Can I still deploy the CoE Starter Kit in 2026?
Yes. Microsoft’s own documentation confirms the kit remains available for new deployments. Whether you should is a separate question, and depends on whether you need the registration and audit capability that the Power Platform admin centre does not yet provide, or only the inventory and reporting that it now does.
Does the Power Platform admin centre replace the CoE Starter Kit?
Partly. The Inventory, Usage, Monitor and Actions experiences cover the kit’s reporting and visibility scenarios well, and for organisations that only used it for dashboards, the admin centre is the better option. What it does not replace is the registration and audit side, the record of why an app or flow was built and who owns it, which is the context governance decisions actually depend on.
Should we migrate from the CoE Starter Kit to the admin centre now?
For most organisations, not wholesale. We have not moved a client entirely onto the admin centre yet, because it has taken Microsoft a considerable time to bring even the core of the kit’s functionality across, and the gap has not closed. The practical approach is to retire the components the admin centre now covers and keep the ones it does not.
What is the alternative to the CoE Starter Kit?
For visibility and inventory, the Power Platform admin centre. For registration, audit and ownership context, there is currently no free equivalent, which is the main reason the kit remains in use. Paid third-party governance products exist and cover some of this ground, but they are a different proposition to a free accelerator and should be assessed on their own merits.
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