API integrations can mean different things to different people. 

Many product managers, for example, may associate them with customer-facing integrations (also known as product integrations); while business technology teams may associate them with internal integrations.

We’ll clarify each type of API integration by outlining them below. This includes a breakdown of how they work, their common use cases, and the approaches for building each. 

Internal API integrations

It’s any API integration that’s built between internal systems.

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Related: How to test API integrations

Examples of internal API integrations

To help bring this definition to life, let’s cover some common use cases:

Keep employee data consistent and up-to-date across HR systems

Let’s assume that you use various HR systems to perform specific functions. 

For instance, you might treat an HRIS, like Workday, as a single source of truth for employee data. And you might use a payroll system, like ADP, to manage employee compensation.

To ensure your payroll system has up-to-date employee data, such as annual salaries, and is able to add and remove employees automatically, you can integrate it with your HRIS and sync employees and specific fields they’re associated with.

Related: Examples of impactful API integrations

Add warms leads to your CRM automatically

As marketing nurtures leads, many will eventually reach a point where they’re ready for sales. To help route these leads to the appropriate sales reps quickly and automatically, you can connect your marketing automation platform, like HubSpot, with your CRM, like Salesforce, and build a flow where once a lead reaches a predefined score, they’re automatically created in the CRM. 

Approaches to building internal API integrations 

Here are three common methods:

Native integrations

Native integrations, also known as point-to-point integrations, are when your in-house developers  build, maintain, and manage the integrations. 

This approach works well when you have a limited number of integrations you need to build and/or you have enough engineering capacity to manage integrations. 

That said, integration-related work can be extremely time consuming for your engineers, so it may not ultimately be the best use of their time. Maintaining the integrations in-house can also be extremely frustrating and stressful—as our co-founder experienced first-hand.

Robotic process automation (RPA)

RPA software uses software scripts, or “bots”, to integrate data at the UI-level and automate tasks. These are typically simple tasks, like copying and pasting data between applications, or downloading an email attachment and uploading it to a specific location within one of your applications. 

RPA can work great when one or both of the applications you want to integrate don’t offer APIs or provide endpoints with the data you need. However, since the integrations work at the UI-level, they’re prone to breaking—and troubleshooting these breaks over time may not be scalable.  

Integration platform as a service (iPaaS)

An iPaaS is a cloud-based, SaaS solution that lets you integrate cloud applications and on-prem systems (typically through their APIs) and build data flows across them.

The software’s integrations tend to be more reliable than RPA’s (since they’re built on APIs), and these solutions let you build integrations and automations somewhat quickly through pre-built connectors and automation templates. 

Unfortunately, the platform also comes with drawbacks: It only lets you build one integration at a time, which can make it difficult to scale your integration builds. It also lacks robust monitoring to help your team identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot integration issues. 

Related: A guide to API integration solutions

Customer-facing API integrations

It’s any API integration that’s built between your product and your clients’ 3rd-party applications. 

Examples of customer-facing API integrations

Here are just a few impactful external integrations:

Automate user provisioning in your product

To help your clients provision and deprovision users in your product, you can integrate with clients’ HRIS solutions, like SAP, BambooHR, and UKG and sync employees between these systems and your product. 

In other words, if an employee is removed from a client's HRIS, they’re automatically removed from your product; if an employee is added to the client's HRIS, they’re automatically added in your product; and if an employee's role changes, the change is reflected in your product, which can adjust their level of permissions.

Related: A guide to automating user provisioning

Create tickets in your clients’ ticketing tool when your product identifies issues

Say you offer a product that helps organizations identify issues and vulnerabilities in their code base. 

To help your clients’ engineers become aware of these issues and work on resolving them quickly, you can integrate your product with their ticketing solutions and build a workflow where once an issue gets identified in your product, an associated ticket in the client’s ticketing system gets added.

Approaches to building customer-facing integrations 

Here are a few ways to build, manage, and maintain product integrations:

Native integrations

As mentioned previously, this approach simply involves your engineers performing all of the work. 

While the native integration approach may work out in the short-term, it’s even less ideal than internal integrations when it comes to scaling. Reason being, you likely need to build more product integrations than internal integrations over time (many customers and prospects have a unique set of integration demands).

Embedded iPaaS

An embedded iPaaS is simply an iPaaS that can be added to your product. 

The platform offers a high volume of pre-built connectors to accelerate integration development, and it often provides enterprise-grade security and governance measures. However, the platform requires a high degree of technical expertise to use and forces you to build one integration at a time, which prevents you from scaling your integrations with ease.

Related: How embedded integrations work

Unified API solution

Also known as a universal API solution, it offers a single, aggregated API that lets you access a whole category of integrations, whether that’s HRIS, CRM, ATS, ticketing, etc.

Since you can access dozens of integrations from a single integration build, this platform naturally addresses the drawbacks of the previous two approaches. In addition, by using Merge, you’ll also access integration management features that enable your customer-facing team to handle integrations independently and receive integration maintenance support from our team of partner engineers.

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.