A guide to embedded integration platforms

As you look to build product integrations, you’ll have a few different options for implementing them.

There’s native integrations, which involves leveraging your in-house engineers to build and maintain them; universal APIs, which allow you to offer a whole category of integrations (e.g. HRIS) by building to a single API; and an embedded integration solution, otherwise known as an embedded iPaaS, that lets you build one product integration at a time.

To help you suss out whether an embedded integration solution is right for your business, we’ll break down how the platform generally works, common tools in the market, their advantages and disadvantages, and more.

What is an embedded integration?

It’s an integration that sits between your product and a client’s 3rd-party application. Through these integrations, your clients can easily keep data in sync as well as automate workflows within your product—all but ensuring clients get more value from your solution.

What is an embedded integration platform?

It’s a 3rd-party tool that lets you build integrations between your product and clients’ 3rd-party applications. You may be able to white label these integrations to make it seem as if they’re built natively; and you can let your clients’ users build and maintain the integrations or limit this responsibility to clients.

Related: How API connectors work

Embedded integration platform vs integration platform

An embedded integration platform is often used synonymously with an integration platform, but the two aren’t one and the same. 

An embedded integration platform falls under the category of integration platforms, but it differs from most of the other integration solutions in that it only offers customer-facing integrations; integration platforms largely focus on internal integrations (i.e. integrations between the applications your teams use).

How embedded integration platforms work

To better understand embedded integration solutions, let’s break down a few of their key features and functionality.

Enable different deployments

You can choose how clients access the embedded integration platform’s integrations and automations. More specifically, you can either provide the integrations and automations on clients’ behaves and bake them into your product or you can allow clients to build them themselves.

Assuming you pick the latter, you can choose to use the embedded platform’s workflow builder in its current design or, through additional investment, white label the workflow builder such that it matches your product’s look and feel. 

Offer pre-built connectors and automation templates

To help you connect to a given application faster, an embedded integration vendor might offer a pre-built connector for that app. Once authenticated, these connectors can access a predetermined set of objects and fields from the client’s instance of an application. 

In addition, the embedded integration platform may offer automation templates that you and/or your clients can access. These automation templates can be shared as is or modified to meet the client’s automation requirements.

You can also build your own automation templates and application connectors through the embedded iPaaS and allow clients to access them within your product, allowing you to offer a personalized integration marketplace.

Share observability tooling

Most embedded integration solutions provide out-of-the-box monitoring and observability tooling. 

This tooling can help you see the history of a client’s syncs, whether they were successful, the applications that were involved, among other insights.

Embedded integration use cases

Let’s break down just a few ways to use embedded integration solutions:

Enrich sales appointment recordings with relevant customer insights

Say you offer a product that records field reps’ onsite meetings with clients and prospects.

To help the field reps and their managers access and review the appointment recordings in your product more effectively, you can integrate with their CRM systems and build the following sync: Once a recording gets added to your product, the relevant customer records from the client’s CRM get added to your product and associated with that recording. 

Your users can then more easily search for and find recordings in your product and get high level context before watching any recording (what was being sold, to whom, whether the sale was successful, etc.).

Automate user provisioning

To help your clients add and remove users on time, as well as modify user permissions successfully, you can use an embedded integration solution to connect to clients’ HRIS solutions and build the following sync: Any time an employee is added, modified, or removed from a client’s HRIS, the corresponding actions take place in their instance of your product. 

Create offer letters quickly and accurately

Imagine you offer a recruiting product that—among other things—allow clients to build and send offer letters to candidates.

To help clients’ recruiters populate offer letters quickly and without risking human errors, you can integrate with clients’ ATS solutions and implement a sync where once a user clicks a button like “Create offer letter” for a given candidate in your product, your platform automatically populates and shares an offer letter based on the information in that candidate’s ATS profile.

Why your organization might need an embedded integration platform

It comes down to being able to close more sales, retain more clients, and expand to new markets. 

Let’s break down each of these factors.

Increase your close rate

According to Gartner, more than 4 in 5 buyers look for vendors that offer “seamless integrations” with 3rd-party tools. 

Since an embedded integration solution can help you build these integrations faster than you could in-house, you’ll likely be able to not only offer the integrations your prospects want but also provide more integrations than your rivals. This, in turn, can help your product stand out and lead you to close more deals. 

Retain more clients

Embedded integrations, and any product integrations for that matter, allow your clients to realize more value from your solution. 

While it depends on the integrations you offer, your clients can potentially auto-provision users in your product, upload files automatically, analyze specific types of data (e.g. employee compensation) more effectively, and so on. Each of these items translates to improved customer experiences that increases clients’ likelihood of renewing and even spending more with you.

Expand to new markets

As you look to break into specific markets, you’ll likely notice that many of the organizations that operate within it use a certain set of applications. 

For instance, a small and midsize business (SMB) may use a tool like Gusto as their HRIS, Insightly as their CRM, and Quickbooks Online as their accounting tool; all the while, a larger company might use ADP as their HRIS, Salesforce as their CRM, and NetSuite as their accounting system.

If you can build embedded integrations with the applications your target market uses, you’re effectively eliminating a hurdle to earning their business.

Embedded integration benefits

So, why are embedded integration solutions worth investing in?

• Have a stable and solid reputation: Several vendors have been in business for 10+ years and have positive customer reviews on 3rd-party sites like G2. Both of these facts should provide at least some reassurance that these providers won’t go out of business (at least in the short-term) and will provide a decent customer experience.

• Offer strong security and governance controls: Many embedded integration solutions comply with stringent data protection regulations, like GDPR, and regularly undergo and pass audits, like SOC 2 Type 2. In addition, they often provide features like role-based access control and two-factor authentication to ensure data is only visible to the right stakeholders.

• May address your clients’ integration requirements: If you only need to build and maintain a handful of integrations over time, embedded integration solutions can prove to be a suitable solution. Especially if the embedded integration vendors you're considering offer pre-built connectors for these applications.‍

• Enable you to build integrations across a wide range of categories. These categories span everything from project management systems to ecommerce platforms to machine learning solutions.

• Provide some respite for your engineers: As we’ll cover in the following section, embedded integration solutions aren't easy for anyone to use—your developers included. That said, their pre-built connectors can help you develop integrations faster.‍

• Accelerate the onboarding process for builders familiar with the internal version. Since a vendor’s embedded iPaaS’ features and functionality largely overlap with their iPaaS, any users who are familiar with the latter can get up to speed on the former relatively quickly.‍

• Offer additional integration features and capabilities your business might need. Many of these vendors also provide internal integrations, API management solutions to help you build and manage APIs, and many other features.

Embedded integration drawbacks

Unfortunately, embedded integration solutions aren’t without their flaws. 

• Require technical expertise to use: While these platforms brand themselves as low-code/no-code solutions, they often do require coding. In addition, the platforms themselves aren’t necessarily intuitive. As a result, your technical personnel are not only forced to build and maintain the integrations but also become comfortable with using the platform—which can take them several weeks.

• Force you to build integrations in an incremental fashion: If and when you need to build several integrations within a short period of time, the embedded integration approach of individual builds can become a true liability. 

Scott Walker, an Engineering Manager at Bonusly, explains this point concisely: "Embedded iPaaS solutions require extensive customizations and force you to build one integration at a time, which isn’t scalable.”

• Provide underwhelming maintenance and management support: Your product integrations will inevitably break for a wide range of reasons. And while many embedded integration tools may detect these failures, few, if any, can diagnose why they failed and how these failures can be addressed. This puts the onus on your engineers, which can become unsustainable for them as you scale your integrations. 

Will Decker, the Head of Engineering at BrightHire, went so far as to say that this drawback was actually the reason why they avoided investing in this type of solution: "One of our reasons for avoiding embedded iPaaS solutions is that they simply don’t provide the tooling we need to manage our integrations effectively."

• Lack innovation and constant improvement: Many embedded integration solutions are provided by large companies that offer additional integration and automation products. These large companies often allocate a relatively small share of their engineering and product teams’ resources toward embedded integration tools, leading these products to stagnate and even degrade over time.

• Integrations don't go through your software development lifecycle (SDLC): Since embedded integrations are built natively in the platform—and not in your code base—they won’t be evaluated thoroughly from a performance and security perspective. This can lead to security, compliance, and syncing issues.

Related: The top benefits of using an embedded integration platform

Examples of embedded integration tools

As you navigate the embedded integration market, you’ll likely come across two sets of vendors. There’s the larger iPaaS solutions that also offer “direct” (i.e. internal) integrations, along with other features and capabilities, like API management or UI-based integrations. These vendors include Workato, Boomi, and Tray.io. 

You also have smaller vendors that solely provide embedded iPaaS solutions. In a few cases, these vendors even specialize in specific industries (e.g. Alloy Automation was, until recently, focused on the e-commerce space). Some of the vendors that fit into this category today include Cyclr, Prismatic, and Paragon.

While there can be some differences between these vendors, such as the applications they provide pre-built connectors with or the maintenance and management tooling they offer out-of-the-box, they're, by and large, the same.

Related: What you need to know about embedded workflow solutions

How you’d work with an embedded integration platform

Understanding what you’d do and what the embedded integration platform would provide can be confusing, but it’s critical to grasp as you decide whether to invest in this type of integration tool. 

Here’s a brief look at each group’s areas of responsibility.

Your responsibilities

• You’d embed the vendor’s iframes and maintain this implementation
• You’d pick and choose the pre-built application connectors you want to use and go on to build the integrations
• You’d provision users (i.e. your employees) and assign them with certain permissions
• You’d manage and maintain the integrations over time (which can involve using the embedded integration solution, along with other tools that collect the API logs)

The embedded integration platform’s responsibilities 

• They’d provide the pre-built connectors (which they maintain and enhance over time)
• They’d offer an out-of-the-box dashboard to help you monitor your clients’ integration health
• They’d deliver security features to keep your clients’ data secure and private, such as encrypting data at rest and in transit

An alternative approach to product integrations: unified APIs

Building to a unified API lets you access a whole category of integrations, whether that’s HRIS, ATS, CRM, marketing automation, etc. This naturally makes the approach of building integrations more scalable. 

In addition, using Merge, the leading product integration platform, you get:

• Maintenance support and management tooling to offer clients reliable and high-performing integrations 
• Robust Common Models that let you retrieve and sync all the data your clients care about
• Access to sandbox accounts for enterprise tools like UKG

To learn more about Merge, you can schedule a demo with one of our integration experts.

Embedded integration FAQ

In case you have more questions on embedded integrations, we’ve addressed several more below.

What is an embedded integration marketplace?

It’s a section on your website and/or application that allows prospects and customers to view, learn about, and activate specific integrations with your product. In addition, these integrations are built and maintained via your embedded integration solution.

What is a key feature of an embedded integration platform?

While there are many you can point to, a key feature includes their pre-built application connectors. These connectors likely require additional customization, but they allow developers to fast-track integration development with a 3rd-party application.

What are the best embedded integration solutions?

The best solution for your organization largely depends on your specific integration requirements. However, based on the reviews on G2—along with the G2 Grid® for Embedded Integration Platforms—they are Prismatic, Workato, Boomi, and Paragon.