SaaS customers increasingly expect fast and seamless integrations with their existing tools. Whether your business offers a marketing automation platform, a sales solution, or an all-in-one system, your customers want to continue using their preferred software without disruption.
There are three primary ways to address this need: building integrations in-house, leveraging a unified API provider, or adopting an embedded iPaaS platform. But which approach is the best fit for your business?
In this article, we’ll break down the key differences between these options, explore their benefits, and highlight the best use cases for each.
In-house development: Pros and cons
In-house means that you develop all integrations yourself. You either need to hire a team of skilled developers, or delegate the task to your existing team. Adding a new integration can take a few months. Updates, maintenance, and technical support are also your responsibility.
Pros of the in-house approach
1. Full control over the integration UI/UX. When a company develops integrations in-house, it has complete control over functionality, customization, and performance. This is essential for businesses with unique workflows or industry-specific needs such as healthcare.
2. No dependence on third-party vendors. Using an external integration platform means relying on its uptime, API support, and business decisions. In-house development eliminates this dependency, ensuring the company is not affected by a vendor’s limitations, pricing changes, or service disruptions.
3. No ongoing third-party costs. Although in-house development requires an upfront investment, it eliminates ongoing subscription fees associated with integration platforms.
Cons of the in-house approach
1. High dev costs. Building integrations from scratch requires skilled developers, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance. This can be a significant investment, particularly for companies that need to support numerous integrations.
2. Long time to market. Developing an integration in-house can take months, delaying product launches and core feature updates. In contrast, third-party solutions often provide hundreds of prebuilt integrations that can be enabled in days.
3. Ongoing maintenance. APIs frequently change or are deprecated. Failure to keep up with API updates can lead to broken connections and frustrated customers. Every time an integration breaks down, your developers will get pulled away from their core work and lose momentum. The more integrations you have, the greater the snowball effect of these issues.
4. Complex scaling. As a company grows and needs to support more integrations, in-house development becomes more complicated and resource-intensive. Juggling dozens of integrations across various software types can quickly overwhelm even the most capable engineering teams.
Who should choose in-house integration development?
Companies that:
- Require deep customization and unique, complex use cases.
- Operate in highly regulated industries.
- Only need a few basic integrations without plans for further scaling.
- Have enough bandwidth to put a dedicated dev team on integrations.
What is a Unified API?
A Unified API is a developer-first solution that provides a single API to interact with multiple third-party applications within a specific category, for example, CRMs. Instead of integrating with each service individually, developers connect to the Unified API, which handles the complexity of interacting with different APIs behind the scenes.
Pros of a Unified API approach
1. Developer-friendly. Reduces integration complexity with a single, standardized interface.
2. High customizability. This feature enables dev teams to use stand-alone API components (e.g., auth, mapping schema, endpoints) to tailor integrations to their needs.
3. Faster development. Eliminates the need to build and maintain multiple direct integrations. Devs can leverage a library of prebuilt integrations and API components with comprehensive documentation.
Cons of a Unified API approach
1. Requires experienced engineers. Proper implementation and troubleshooting often require skilled developers familiar with API integrations.
2. Limited coverage. Unified APIs focus on specific software categories and standardize various APIs to their lowest common denominator. Therefore, they may not cover all the endpoints and use cases your business needs. As a result, your product may miss out on many advanced features from individual APIs and will be limited to building only basic use cases within each category.
3. Longer time to market. Implementing a Unified API requires initial setup, testing, and customization, often taking 6 months or more.
4. API latency. Most Unified APIs rely solely on CRON-based updates and don’t support webhooks. Data will sync on a fixed schedule (e.g., every hour) rather than firing instantly when a change happens in one of the apps. This can be a deal-breaker for SaaS businesses that need real-time or near-instant data updates.
Who should choose a unified API?
Companies that:
- Require deep engineering flexibility while avoiding the overhead of building direct integrations.
- Have experienced API developers who can make the most of Unified APIs.
- Need to build a custom UI on top of an integration backend.
- Want to maintain full control over authentication, mapping, and API schemas.
What is an embedded iPaaS?
An embedded iPaaS is a white-label integration platform that allows SaaS companies to offer pre-built integrations directly within their products. Unlike a Unified API, which provides fragmented API components and requires significant development effort, an embedded iPaaS is a plug-and-play solution with built-in authentication, an API backend, and a user-friendly UI.
Pros of an embedded iPaaS
1. Faster time to market. While building and maintaining integrations in-house can take months, an embedded iPaaS can go live in less than two months. For example, a CRM platform that wants to integrate with various marketing automation tools can use an embedded iPaaS to launch these integrations in weeks instead of months.
2. Minimal dev effort. Keeping multiple integrations running means constant updates, bug fixes, and troubleshooting. With an embedded iPaaS, most of that heavy lifting is handled for you, so your engineers can focus on your core product.
Rather than burdening developers with building multiple CRM integrations from scratch, a SaaS can leverage an embedded iPaaS to enable dozens of popular CRMs in one go.
3. Smooth UX. An embedded iPaaS lets customers quickly set up integrations right inside your SaaS product—no need for third-party tools or complicated setup.
4. Scalability. As a company grows, so do its integration needs. An embedded iPaaS scales fast with the business, and instantly supports new integrations and enhancements whenever needed.
5. Two-way, real-time data sync. An embedded iPaaS supports API and webhook-based workflows, ensuring instant data flow between apps. This means changes made in one system are reflected in the other without delays, enabling seamless automation—and keeping customers happy.
Cons of an embedded iPaaS
1. Usage-based pricing. While an embedded iPaaS saves engineering time, it comes with a subscription cost that typically scales with usage (though not always). That said, in-house integrations or unified APIs also come with growing infrastructure costs. Hence, the decision depends on the specific business case and requires a thorough evaluation of long-term expenses.
2. Dependency on a third party. Relying on an embedded iPaaS means depending on a third-party vendor’s infrastructure, API uptime, and roadmap. If the provider experiences downtime, it can impact the company’s service. This applies to unified APIs and any other third-party vendors as well.
3. Limited customization in some cases. Businesses with highly specific integration requirements may run into some limitations.
Who should choose an embedded iPaaS?
Companies that:
- Need to quickly enable dozens of third-party integrations.
- Plan to scale integrations over time.
- Want to minimize engineering workload.
- Ensure smooth customer experience.
- Want to have full visibility into integration usage.
In-house vs. Unified API vs. embedded iPaaS: Key differences
Handle integrations with Albato Embedded
Albato Embedded provides a white-label integration solution, allowing SaaS companies to quickly embed workflows and automation into their platforms. Instead of spending months building integrations from scratch, businesses can deploy Albato's embedded solution in weeks.
Albato handles all integration maintenance, including API updates, error handling, and troubleshooting. This means that internal engineering teams don’t have to manually manage each integration or worry about keeping up with API changes.
Albato offers a no-code/low-code interface that allows users to set up and manage integrations directly within the SaaS product. Customers can easily configure workflows without needing technical expertise or relying on third-party tools.
Explore our case studies:
Summing up
If you want maximum customization and full ownership of all integrations, in-house development may be the right choice. A Unified API might be a good fit if you need a developer-first API solution within a specific category. And if you want to offer user-friendly, customizable integrations within your SaaS product that are fast and easy to scale, an embedded iPaaS is the way to go.
Looking for an embedded iPaaS solution to power your SaaS integrations? Partner with Albato Embedded on your integration journey.
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