Why Unthread moved from Merge to Nango
The limits of pre-built unified APIs & Merge.dev
“Initially we were excited by the prospect of a single data model for all our integrations” Jake McCloskey, co-founder and CTO of Unthread, says. “We were using the CRM integrations of Merge.dev and could ship a first version pretty fast. But this was when we started to see that a rigid, unified data model might not be the right choice for us.” Unthread helps companies run customer support on Slack connect channels.
They integrate with CRMs to link conversations in these Slack channels with CRM data, which enables all sorts of helpful automations and enhancements for their customers.
Why use a pre-built unified API if you need to work around it?
“The unified data model Merge provided us was missing key information our customers needed in Unthread”, Jake elaborates. They managed to get the data with passthrough requests, but doing so meant re-building a lot of the integrations infrastructure in Unthread. It also lead to a lot of API-specific code in Unthread’s application.
“In addition, we discovered that even with a unified data model, there were still differences in behavior between the CRMs our customers were using. We may get the data in the same model, but our code was still sprinkled with Ifs for different CRMs and handling different cases for each. It got to the point where we working as much around the platform as we were leveraging it, which felt wrong to us.”
Pricing made scaling difficult
“On top of the technical challenges, we were facing a dilemma with Merge’s pricing”, Tom Bachant, co-founder and CEO of Unthread explains. “Our customers were asking for more, and deeper, integrations with more systems. Unlocking these was key for our success, but the high per-connection price we were quoted by Merge just made this unfeasible with our business model.” Armed with these insights the team started looking for solutions that fit better with their needs.
Why Unthread decided to go with Nango
Unthread first got in touch with Nango in May 2023 and started using it for their product shortly thereafter. “There were a few things Nango did different that got us interested”, Jake remembers.
Full control to build exactly what their customers need
“The fact that we could leverage the pre-built platform and integration templates, but keep full control over the integration’s logic and data model resonated with us. It allowed us to deliver exactly the experiences our customers care about, such as real-time updates of status changes, whilst making it fast and easy for us to build these integrations.” With full access to the external API, the team could also build very deep integrations for key systems such as Salesforce and HubSpot. And long tail systems could still be covered efficiently with unified data models & integrations.
Pricing that enables scale & more integrations
Tom explains that Nango’s pricing is also different: “Because Nango is a single platform for all your integrations, their incentives are really well aligned with ours. We both benefit if Unthread has a lot of paying customers using a lot of different integrations. And with their usage based pricing we only pay Nango for connections when we we have paying customers using them.”
Simpler code, 7 new integrations and a slick developer experience with Nango
“We launched 7 integrations with Nango shortly after onboarding, which was faster than we had expected.”, Jake recalls.
“Today Nango powers our integrations across CRMs, project management systems, and communication platforms.” Shipping integrations fast was a key goal for them with Nango, but they were surprised about the deeper impact it had on their application.
Less code, less complexity, fewer bugs
“We found ourselves deleting code when we adopted Nango. A lot of code.”, Jake tells us.
“You would think that coming from a single, unified data model, Nango’s integrations might require more work on our side. But the opposite was true. We could offload a lot more API-specific work to Nango and have much cleaner, simpler code on our end. This has reduced the maintenance and bugs in our integrations logic by a good margin!”
A thoughtful DX that puts engineers at the center
All of Unthread’s integrations are version controlled in their repository and deployed together with their main application. “The Nango CLI and developer tooling has been really nice to work with. It made debugging issues fast and easy. The dashboard shows you everything that is happening with your integrations in real time and the detailed logs make pinpointing issues easy. You can feel that the team cares a lot about the developer experience and pays attention to details.”
