How to find the best integrations partner
Need a framework to help find the right integrations partner for you and your team? Read this article for a handy checklist and more!
Introduction
If building product integrations in-house isn't the right solution for you, you're probably looking at tools to make the process easier. With so many platforms promising "fast integration building," choosing the right one can be challenging. Without a clear evaluation framework, the decision can feel overwhelming.
This post outlines the most important factors to consider when choosing an integrations partner, including:
- API and use case support
- Built-in developer tooling
- Flexibility and control
- Enterprise API support and professional services
- Open platform vs black box
- And as a bonus: data security & self-hosting
Let’s dive in.
💡 Need to prepare an RFP or present a vendor comparison? You can copy this google sheet with all the criteria from this post.
Does Your Integrations Partner Have the Pre-Built Templates and Use Cases You Need?
The first and most obvious step in evaluating a third-party integrations partner is checking whether they support the APIs and use cases you need today. After all, one of the key benefits of using a third-party tool is speeding up the process of building integrations. You don’t want to pay for and work with multiple vendors, or even worse, work around an expensive platform because it turns out to only be a point solution.
But don’t just think about your current needs—consider the future as well. Will the partner support new APIs and use cases as your product evolves? Again, you don’t want to find yourself juggling multiple vendors just because your initial choice couldn’t keep up with your growing requirements.
Objectively speaking, it’s likely that no vendor covers all your API needs today or into the future. However, this doesn’t mean that you will be left with an impossible choice.
The solution is to check how much control you have to add support for new APIs:
- Are you dependent on the vendor and their internal prioritization?
- Can you add support for new APIs yourself, without waiting on them?
If you want to be sure that you can ship all the integrations your customers need, it might not be a good idea to tie your fortunes to the roadmap prioritization of a vendor.
Will Your Engineering Team Love Working with Your Integrations Partner?
Building and maintaining integrations often involves dealing with external systems beyond your control. That’s why observability and maintenance tools are critical. Your integrations partner should empower your engineering team with robust tools to debug, monitor, and manage integrations effectively.
Now, almost every integrations tool out there says that they have great developer tooling, so it can be tricky to assess who is the best fit for your needs. You will need a much more specific list of questions to ask in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Here are some key questions to ask when assessing built-in developer tools:
- Type safety: Does the tool offer end-to-end type safety to minimize runtime errors?
- Data validation: Are there built-in mechanisms for runtime data validation, so you can catch and resolve issues early?
- User communication: Can the tool communicate integration statuses and potential issues directly to users, reducing the load on your support and engineering teams?
- Unification: Does it support data unification, ensuring data from different APIs is returned in the same format?
- Testing support: Does the platform help you create and maintain tests for your integrations?
Integrations shouldn’t just work—they should work reliably at scale. Choosing a partner with built-in developer tools that your engineering team loves will save countless hours of frustration down the road.
Does Your Integrations Partner Offer Flexibility and Control?
Your integrations should align with your product’s unique value proposition and address the specific needs of your customer base. Rigid, off-the-shelf solutions might make you indistinguishable from competitors using the same tools.
This is why, while pre-built integrations are great for getting started quickly, we see most teams outgrow them over time. At this point, you will want to customize and extend them. Having the right integrations partner to support these requirements is crucial.
Ask these questions about flexibility and control when assessing integrations partners:
- Can you customize pre-built templates to fit your customers’ unique requirements?
- Does the platform allow for extensions into new product areas, industry-specific APIs, or novel use cases?
- How easy is it to adapt the solution as your product and customer needs evolve?
Bottom line: the right integrations partner should empower your product to stand out, not force you to conform to generic use cases.
Does Your Integrations Partner Provide Enterprise API Experts and Professional Services
An ideal integrations partner goes beyond providing tooling—they commit to your success. Look for partners who offer high-quality support to address the inevitable challenges that come with building and maintaining integrations.
Key aspects of service-level support include:
- Assistance with platform changes to support new APIs.
- Tips, tricks, and documentation for working with complex APIs.
- Access to experts for enterprise-grade APIs (e.g., Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, SAP).
- Sandbox accounts and help navigating approval flows.
- Direct access to API and platform experts when needed.
This level of support ensures that you have a true partner in tackling even the most complex integration challenges.
Is Your Integrations Partner an Open Platform or a Black Box?
Many third-party tools operate as closed platforms, which can lead to vendor lock-in. Once you commit to a closed platform, switching away becomes costly and complex.
Furthermore, closed platforms often act as black boxes. Not having full control and visibility over the end-to-end integrations journey can unnecessarily keep you up at night and lead to end user frustration and precarity when something goes awry.
Some important questions to consider related to the above include:
- Does your end user authorize your own application vs an integrations partner when connecting with a third party tool?
- Can you access your owner users’ API keys and access & refresh tokens?
To fully insulate yourself from risks outlined above, consider choosing an open-source platform for your integrations. They allow for seamless platform migration when needed, and give you full control over the user and integration process. Furthermore, open-source solutions undergo extensive scrutiny from the developer community, making them more resilient and transparent.
Vendor lock-in, lack of visibility and user level control, and security vulnerabilities aren’t risks you want to overlook, especially as your business scales. Make sure you choose the right platform for you and your team that is as future-proof as building in-house.
Bonus: Does Your Integrations Partner Offer Self-Hosting?
For B2B SaaS companies handling sensitive customer data, privacy and security are paramount. While many integrations tools boast enterprise-grade certifications like SOC2 or HIPAA compliance, this might not suffice for all use cases. In such scenarios, the ability to self-host becomes critical.
If self-hosting is a priority for your business, ensure your integrations partner offers it as a first-class feature, not an afterthought. A self-hostable solution gives you full control over your data, helping meet the strictest compliance requirements while reducing reliance on external vendors.
How Nango Stacks Up Against These Criteria
As a product integrations infrastructure provider, how does Nango compare to the factors we’ve outlined? Here’s how we measure up:
- Pre-built templates and quick start: Check. Nango supports 250+ APIs and use cases, helping you get up and running fast.
- Will developers love working with Nango: Check. From type safety to data validation, we offer comprehensive tools to streamline debugging and maintenance, making developers’ lives easier.
- Customizability and extensibility: Check. Nango gives you control over your integrations as if you were building them in-house.
- Service-level support: Check. We provide expert guidance, sandbox accounts, and API insights to ensure your success.
- Open platform: Check. Our open-source approach eliminates common platform risks and enhances transparency.
- Self-hostable: Check. We prioritize data security and control by offering a fully self-hostable solution.
Conclusion
Building integrations is hard—but finding the right partner doesn’t have to be. By focusing on your product’s needs, your customers’ workflows, and the criteria outlined in this post, you can choose a partner that helps you deliver seamless integrations your customers will love.
Don’t forget to reference our handy checklist as you evaluate your options and make a strong case for your preferred vendor in front of other stakeholders. With a thoughtful approach, you’ll find the perfect partner to support your integration goals and drive long-term success.
Useful resources
How is Nango different from embedded iPaaS or other unified APIs?
