In today's SaaS business landscape, to remain competitive, a product must have seamless integration capabilities with the rest of the tech stack of the customer.
In fact, limited integration capabilities is known as one of the leading causes of customer churn.
However, building integrations from scratch is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process for a SaaS business. It often takes focus away from the core product.
As a result, SaaS leaders are always on the lookout for the most effective integration approach. With the emergence of off-the-shelf tools and solutions, businesses can now automate integrations and scale their integration strategy with minimum effort.
In this article, we will discuss the pros and cons of two most popular integration approaches: Unified APIs and Workflow Automation tools and provide you with clear instructions to choose the approach that suits your specific product integration strategy. (We also have a checklist for you to quickly assess your need for the perfect integration approach in this article. Keep reading)
We will get to the comparison in a bit, but first let’s assess your integration needs.
Types of product integrations
In order to effectively address customer-facing integration needs, it is crucial to consider the various types of product integrations available. These types can vary in terms of scope and maintenance required, depending on specific integration requirements.
To gain a comprehensive understanding of product integrations, it is important to focus on two key aspects.
- Firstly, identifying the applications that need to be integrated to determine the scope of the integration.
- Secondly, considering the number of integrations that will need to be regularly managed as time progresses.
Based on these considerations, you can gauge whether or not you will be able to take care of your integration needs in-house.
Read: To Build or To Buy: The practical answer to your product integration questions
1) Internal integrations
When working on any product, it is often beneficial to connect it with an internal system or third-party software to simplify your work processes. This requires integrating two platforms exclusively for internal use.
For example, you may want to integrate a project management tool with your product to accelerate the development lifecycle and ensure automatic updates in the PM tool to reflect changes and progress.
In this scenario, the use case is highly specific and limited to internal execution within your team. Typically, your in-house engineering team will focus on building this integration, which can be further enhanced by other teams who reap its benefits. Overall, internal integrations are highly distinct and customizable to cater to individual organizational needs.
2) Occasional customer-facing integrations
Another type of integrations that organizations encounter are occasional customer-facing integrations, which are not implemented at scale. Occasional customer-facing integrations are typically infrequent and arise as specific requests from customers.
In these cases, customers may have specific software applications that they regularly use and require integration with your platform for a seamless flow of data and automated syncing. For example, a particular customer may request integration of Jira with your product, with highly specific requirements and needs.
In these situations, the integration can be facilitated by the customer's engineering team, third-party vendors, or other external platforms. The resulting integration output is highly tailored and may vary for each organization, even if the demand for the same integration exists. This customization ensures that the integration reflects the structures and workflows unique to each customer's organizational needs.
3) Scalable customer-facing integrations
Finally, there will be certain integrations that all your customers will need. These are essential functionalities required to power their organizational operation.
Instead of being use case or platform specific, scalable or standardized customer facing integrations are more generic in nature. For instance, you want all your customers to be able to connect the HRMS platform of their choice to your product for seamless HR management.
These integrations need to be built and maintained by your team, i.e. essentially, fall under your purview. You can either offer these integrations as a part of the subscription cost that your customers pay for your software or as add-ons at an extra cost. Offering such integrations is important to gain a competitive edge and even explore a new monetization model for your platform.
Standardizing the most common integrations is extremely helpful to provide your customers with a seamless experience.
Different approach to integrations
While companies can always build integrations in-house, it’s not always the most efficient way. That’s where plug-and-play platforms like unified APIs can help. Let’s look at the top approaches to leveraging integrations.
1) In-house integration development and maintenance
Undoubtedly, the most obvious way of integrating products with your software is to build integrations in-house. Put simply, here your engineering team builds, manages and maintains the integrations.
Building integrations in-house comes with a lot of control and power to customize how the integration should operate, feel and overall create a seamless experience. However, this do-it-yourself approach is extremely resource intensive, both in terms of budgets and engineering bandwidth.
Building just integration can take a couple of months of tech bandwidth and $10-15k worth of resources. Integration building from scratch offers high customization, but at a great cost, putting scalability into question.
2) Workflow automation
Workflow automation tools, as the name suggests, facilitate product integration by automating workflow with specific triggers. These are mostly low code tools which can be connected with specific products by engineering teams for integration with third party software or platforms.
A classic example is connecting a particular CRM with your product to be used by the end user. Here, the CRM of their choice can be integrated with your product following an event driven workflow architecture.
Data transfer, marketing automation, HR, sales and operations, etc. are some of the top use cases where workflow automation tools can help companies with product integrations, without having to build these integrations from scratch.
3) Unified API / API Aggregators
Finally, the third approach to building and maintaining product integrations is to leverage a Unified API. Any product that you wish to integrate with comes with an API which facilitates connection and data sync.
A unified API normalizes data from different applications within a software category and transfers it to your application in real time. Here, data from all applications from a specific category like CRM, HRMS, Payroll, ATS, etc. is normalized into a common data model which your product understands and can offer to your end customers. To learn more about how unified APIs work, read this
By allowing companies to integrate with hundreds of integrations overnight (instead of months), a unified API enables them to scale integration offerings within a category faster and in a seamless manner.
Now that you have an understanding of the different types of integrations and approaches, let’s understand which approach is best for you, depending on your scope and needs.
When to use Unified API
If you want scalable and standardized integrations, choosing a unified API is a sensible option. Here are the top reasons why unified API is ideal for standardized customer-facing integrations:
- They cover almost all integrations within a particular category or type. This suggests that you can integrate with all CRM platforms, including Salesforce, Zoho, etc using just one unified CRM API for example. (Check out Knit’s integration catalog across ATS, HRIS, Payroll. CRM and Accounting software)
- Integration code is universal. You just need to integrate the unified API code into your application for a particular category once. Even when new apps are added within the unified API category, you automatically get access to and start syncing data with the new app without writing any additional line of code. This means that you build once and scale perpetually.
- It is extremely developer friendly and doesn’t require a lot of technical expertise or engineering bandwidth to understand and execute.
- You can retain a great degree of control. The integration backend can be managed by your engineering team, keeping control of transfer logic and also facilitating high levels of security.
- The data you receive into your product is normalized and can be directly synched without the need for any processing or transformation. (Moreover, unified APIs like Knit also allow you to map any custom data field from a specific integration that’s not included in the standardized model. Learn more)
- Most unified APIs completely take care of integration maintenance once it is built. It means, your tech team need not worry about addressing ongoing customer issues at all.
However, if you want only one-off integrations, with a very high level of customization, using a unified API might not be the ideal choice.
Therefore, choose a unified API if you want:
- To create standardized customer-facing integrations
- High levels of data normalization and standardization
- Scalable integrations that can be replicated across customers
- Ability to add more integrations with minimal resource requirements
- To control the backend code and drive customizations to a certain extent
- A native integration experience and feel and adherence to your brand guidelines
When to use Workflow Automation
Depending on the nature of your organization and product offerings, you might need integrations which are simple, external and needed to enable specific workflows triggered by some predetermined events.
In such a case, workflow automation tools are quite useful as an integration approach. Some of the top benefits of using workflow automation to power your integration journey are as follows.
- Negligible engineering expertise needed. Workflow automation tools are created in a drag and drop manner, facilitating low-code or no- code functionalities. Event triggers are all you need to facilitate data sync from integrations.
- They come with pre-built connectors. This means that you can easily get started with pre-established workflows and integration patterns between different applications.
- You can easily outsource integration or hand it over to teams beyond your core engineering team as integration using workflow automation doesn't require knowledge about your core product, etc.
However, the low-code functionality comes with a disadvantage of lack of developer friendliness and incidence of errors. At the same time, data normalization is a big challenge for applications even within the same category.
The presence of different APIs across applications necessitates the need to develop customized workflows. Invariably, this custom workflow need adds to the cost of using workflow automation when scaling integration. As API requests increase, workflow automation integration turns out to be extremely expensive.
Therefore, choose workflow automation if you want:
- A low code integration solution
- One-off customer facing integration or integrations for internal use
- Limited functionalities for data normalization
- Off-the rack workflows and integration syncs
How to choose the right tool for your integration strategy?
In the previous section, we explored different scenarios for building product integrations and discussed the recommended approaches for each. However, selecting the appropriate approach requires careful consideration of various factors.
In this section, we will provide you with a list of key factors to consider and essential questions to ask in order to make an informed choice between workflow automation tools and unified APIs.
1) Integration complexity
You need to gauge how complex the integration will be. Generally, standardized integrations which are customer facing and need to be scaled, will be more complex. Whereas, internal or one-off customer facing integrations will be less complex.
Try to answer the following questions:
- How complex is your integration need?
- Do you want to connect with multiple applications within a category or only one?
- How much tech bandwidth do you need to spend on complex data transformation or normalization?
Depending on the nature and scope of complexity, you can choose your integration approach. More complex integrations, which need scale and volume, should be achieved through a unified API approach.
2) Customization requirements
Next, you must gauge the level of customizations you need. Depending on the expectations of your customers, your integrations might be standardized, or require a high amount of customizations.
If you need an internal integration, chances are high that you will need a great degree of customization. You may want to check on:
- What is the level of customization you need for your integrations?
- Do your customers need unique workflows in integrations?
If you need to customize your integrations for specific workflows tailored to your individual customers, workflow automation tools will be a better choice.
Note: At Knit, we are working on customized cases with our unified API partners every day. If you have a niche use case or special integration need, feel free to contact us. Get in touch
3) Scalability and growth
It is extremely important to understand your current and expected integration needs.
Internally, you might need a limited number of integrations, or if you have a very limited number of customers, you will only need one-off customer facing integrations.
However, if you wish to scale the use of your product and stay ahead of competition, you will need to offer more integrations as you grow. Even within a category, you will have to offer multiple integrations.
For instance, some of your customers might use Salesforce as CRM, but others might be using Zoho CRM. Invariably, you need to integrate both the CRM with your product. Thus, you must gauge:
- How many integrations do you need currently and what is the scale of growth expected?
- Do you need more than a few integrations or applications within the same category?
- How integral is integration scalability to your business or product growth?
If scaling integrations faster is your priority, unified APIs are the best choice for you.
4)Technical expertise available
Your choice of the right integration approach will also depend on the technical expertise available.
You need to make sure that all of your engineering bandwidth is not spent only on building and maintaining integrations. At the same time, the integrations should be developer friendly and resilient to errors.
Try to check:
- How much bandwidth does your engineering team have to dedicate to integrations, without diverting focus from core product?
- Has your team worked with a particular integration approach in the past?
- Will your team need additional training to align well with the chosen integration approach?
It is important that not all your technical expertise is spent on integrations. An ideal integration approach will ensure that other team members beyond core engineering are also able to take care of a few action items.
5) Turnaround time and budgets
You need to gauge how much budget you have to ensure that you don’t overshoot and stay cost effective. At the same time, you might want to explore different integration approaches depending on the time criticality.
Time and budget critical integrations can be accomplished via unified API or workflow automation. It is important to take a stock of:
- What is the available budget you have for integration building and maintenance?
- How many integrations do you seek to accomplish with those budgets?
- What are the expected timelines for the integrations to be implemented?
It is important to undertake a cost benefit analysis based on the cost and number of integrations.
For instance, a unified API might not be an ideal choice if you only need one integration. However, if you plan to scale the number of integrations, especially in the same category, then this approach will turn out to be most cost effective. The same is also true from a time investment perspective.
6) Ecosystem support
When you go for an external integration approach like workflow automation or unified APIs, beyond in-house development or DIY, it is important to understand the ecosystem support available.
If you only get initial set up support from your integration provider/ vendor, you will find your engineering team extremely stretched for maintenance and management.
At the same time, lack of adequate resources and documentation will prevent your teams from learning about the integration to provide the right support. Therefore, it is ideal to get an understanding of:
- What is the support being offered by your integration partner?
- What are the capabilities available within your team to facilitate the integration process?
- Will the integration partner provide comprehensive documentation and resources for knowledge sharing?
- What is the quality of pre-built connectors/ API that are being provided?
7) Future outlook and considerations
Finally, integrations are generally an ongoing relationship and not a one-off engagement. The bigger your business grows, the higher will be your integration needs both to close more deals as well as to reduce customer churn.
Therefore, you need to focus on the future considerations and outlook. The future considerations need to take into account your scale up plan, potential lock-in, changing needs, etc. Overall, some of the questions you can consider are:
- How well will your integration approach support your scale up plan?
- Will the integration approach seamlessly adapt to the changing integration landscape?
- Are there lock-ins or commitments that come along with any particular approach?
Understanding these nuances will help you create a long-term plan for your integrations.
Wrapping up: TL:DR
When building integrations, it is best to understand your use case or type of integrations that you seek to implement before choosing the ideal product integration approach. While there are numerous considerations you must keep in mind, here are a few quick hacks.
- Choose workflow automation for one-off customer facing integrations where you need a low-code editor with pre-built connectors.
- On the other hand, go for a unified API approach if you want to create standardized customer-facing integrations which you can scale.
Knit unified API helps you connect with multiple applications within the CRM, HRIS, ATS, Accounting, category in one go with just one API. Talk to one of our experts to explore your use case options or try our API for free
