Top Tray Embedded Alternatives [2024]

Native product integrations are gaining importance in the B2B SaaS space. Many engineering and product teams are focused on delivering them quickly while minimizing engineering effort.

Tray Embedded is one option that several companies use. However, other alternatives may better suit your organization's needs.

This article outlines some common alternatives to Tray Embedded:

1. Nango

Nango (that’s us 👋) is an open-source, comprehensive integrations platform.

It provides everything you need to quickly deliver integrations: A seamless, white-label user experience, hundreds of pre-built integrations for 200+ APIs, support for both unified and direct integrations, and a modern developer platform to extend and customize integrations without adding engineering complexity.

Nango is the most popular open-source integrations platform, with over 4,800 GitHub stars. More than 100 B2B SaaS companies, from large public corporations to early-stage startups, use it in production.

Key Nango Features

Compared with Tray Embedded, Nango has a more advanced feature set. Nango’s key features include:

• Largest open-source integrations catalog: Nango has the largest and fastest-growing open-source catalog of integrations. New integrations are added every week.
• Turnkey solution: UI components, pre-built integrations, full observability suite, and fanatical support from API experts
• Unified APIs and direct integrations: Simplify your integrations code with unified APIs or get the full power of direct integrations. Nango supports both on a single platform.
• Developer-first: Nango is the only platform with end-to-end type safety, runtime data validation, native 2-way syncs, and a code-first approach to integrations.

How does Nango compare to Tray Embedded?

Nango is a more modern and robust integrations platform compared to Tray Embedded. It offers more built-in connectors and advanced features that save engineering time and reduce maintenance. In contrast, Tray Embedded provides a low-code flow editor, which Nango doesn’t include because of its developers-first approach.

Why do companies choose Nango?

There are several key reasons:

• Extensive API & integration coverage: Nango imposes no limits on your integrations. You can deliver any integration with any API your customers require, all within a single platform.
• Focus on developer experience: Engineering teams prefer to focus on product features rather than data pipelines. With end-to-end type safety and a modern, code-first architecture, Nango saves engineering teams time and reduces maintenance challenges.
• Exceptional support: Nango’s support goes beyond technical assistance, helping with developer access, sandbox accounts, marketplace listings, and even building templates for new APIs on certain plans.
• Flexible & scalable pricing: Every product has different integration needs. Nango’s adaptable pricing plans can accommodate various setups, including B2B, B2B2B, B2C, per-user versus per-company integrations, and enterprise requirements.
• Self-hosting option: Nango meets the demands of security-conscious enterprises by offering both self-hosted and managed cloud-hosted solutions.

2. Merge.dev

Merge offers a unified API for product integrations, simplifying the process by abstracting various source APIs, like CRMs or accounting systems, into a single data model and API interface. This allows you to connect with a single API to access data from multiple underlying source APIs. This approach lets you quickly add new APIs since they are entirely abstracted away from you.

How does Merge.dev compare to Tray Embedded?

Merge’s approach to integrations differs significantly from Tray Embedded's: Tray prioritizes the configurability and extensibility of integrations, allowing for more customization. In contrast, Merge emphasizes pre-building as much as possible, which speeds up the initial setup but limits extensibility and customization options.

Why do companies choose Merge.dev?

There are several key aspects that Merge users appreciate:

• Unified data models: A single data model simplifies integration with multiple APIs by exposing only a limited number of fields, which can be sufficient for some use cases.
• Managed access & sandboxes: With Merge, users authorize Merge.dev rather than your app, eliminating the need to apply for developer access with each API. Additionally, some plans offer sandbox access for testing integrations.
• Well-designed APIs & SDKs: Merge adopts a developer-first approach, providing well-crafted API interfaces and SDKs that enhance the integration experience.

3. Apideck

Apideck is another unified API provider that offers a unified CRM API, unified Accounting API and unified HRIS API. All integrations are entirely pre-built, which makes them fast to activate, but limits the customizations users can apply. Besides their unified API, Apideck also offers a marketplace product that let’s companies build marketing pages for their integrations.

How does Apideck compare to Tray Embedded?

Apideck provides more pre-built integrations, compared to Tray, but its integrations are less flexible. While Tray doesn’t offer any unified APIs, Apideck only offers unified ones and doesn’t have low-code/no-code editor.

Why do companies choose Apideck?

There are few key reasons companies choose Apideck:

• Pre-built integrations: The unified APIs of Apideck are entirely pre-built and therefore fast to deploy.
• Unified data model: A single data model simplifies integration with multiple APIs by merging common fields into one schema. This limits the fields available, but can be enough for some use-cases.
• White-label: The connection flow is largely white-label and doesn’t show any Apideck branding. There are limited styling options and there is no fallback to create your own UI.

4. Building Integrations In-House

Despite the availability of many market solutions, some teams still opt to build integrations in-house. Integrations are crucial for B2B SaaS products, and relying on third-party solutions can feel risky and limiting.

Building in-house offers complete control and flexibility over your integrations, but it also requires a significant time investment and long-term maintenance commitment.

Pros of Building Integrations In-House

1. No Constraints: You have the freedom to develop any integration with any API, fully controlling the end-user experience. This allows you to customize the solution to fit your infrastructure, product, and customer needs.
2. Future-Proofing: With no intermediary between you and the API, you can adapt to new APIs, changing requirements, or new product lines as they arise.

Cons of Building Integrations In-House

1. Slow Development: Many teams report that building new integrations in-house can take many weeks or months, even with prior experience. Handling different types of authentication, API designs, webhooks, and data synchronization is often cumbersome, time-consuming, and difficult to estimate.
2. Underestimated Infrastructure Needs: Many companies create their own frameworks and infrastructure to support integrations, including authentication, retries, rate-limit handling, caching, change detection, observability, user-facing reporting, and error detection. Developing and maintaining these components is time-consuming, and new APIs often require significant changes at the framework level.
3. High Maintenance Demand: It’s common for teams to dedicate full-time resources, or even multiple positions, to debugging and maintaining integrations. Maintenance efforts increase as APIs change, new features are added, or when a lack of observability makes debugging transient issues challenging.
4. Missing Integrations Block Deals: Integrations are often key requirements for prospects, and missing integrations can block deals. Many teams struggle to balance the prioritization of product features against the need for integrations that are critical for securing enterprise clients.
5. Scalability Concerns: Scaling integrations can be challenging in various ways. Large accounts may take hours or days for initial syncs, small customers’ jobs can be delayed by larger ones, new integrations might require architectural changes, and high volumes of API requests necessitate more sophisticated observability. Most teams end up spending significantly more time on this than they initially expected.
6. Lack of External Support: Unlike commercial solutions that offer vendor support, an in-house system requires internal resolution of any issues or challenges, which can be a major disadvantage when dealing with complex problems.
7. Knowledge Silos & Training New Employees: As with other complex infrastructure, training new employees on in-house integrations takes time, leading to knowledge silos within the company, where only a few engineers are capable of creating and debugging integrations.

Is Nango Right for You?

Here’s our (brief) sales pitch.

We’re admittedly biased, but we believe Nango is an ideal replacement for Tray Embedded if:

• You’re looking for a comprehensive catalog of pre-built integrations that you can customize and extend as needed.
• You prioritize a productive developer experience over low-code flow configurators.
• You want a unified platform to manage all your integrations.
• Security and compliance are top priorities for you.

Explore our product page and dive into our documentation to learn more.

If you have any questions or would like to schedule a product demo, feel free to talk to one of our experts.

Useful resources

How to build integrations you and your customers love

Should you build or buy product integrations?

The hidden costs of building product integrations in-house

How to find the best integrations partner