Deciding whether to “build or buy” integrations is a question that countless engineers and product managers have to navigate carefully.

After all, the decision can significantly influence the team’s bandwidth, the integrations they're able to build, and their organization’s security posture over time. 

We’ll help you navigate this decision by outlining when it does and doesn’t make sense to outsource integrations and how you can go about evaluating your options. But let’s start by clarifying what we mean by outsourcing integrations.

What is integration outsourcing?

It’s when you rely on a 3rd-party to provide and/or maintain an integration(s). This 3rd-party is typically an integration platform, but it can also take the form of a business (otherwise known as “system integrators”), a freelancer, or a contractor. 

Related: What are integration partners?

Criteria for deciding whether to outsource integrations

Every organization should weigh this decision independently, as their situation likely differs from other organizations'. 

Here’s a look at some of the top factors and how they can guide your team’s thought process.

Engineering capacity

Implementing and maintaining integrations is naturally time consuming for your developers. 

It requires becoming familiar and staying up to date with API providers’ documentation; testing the integrations in various ways before pushing them to production; diagnosing, troubleshooting, and resolving integration issues whenever they crop up—and much more.

If your organization not only has enough engineering capacity to build and maintain integrations today but also for the foreseeable future, it may be worth keeping the integrations in-house. Otherwise, it’s worth outsourcing them.

Employee morale

Integration-related projects can be intensely frustrating for engineering. 

Every time an integration breaks, your engineers have to move away from their core projects and deal with the issue as quickly as possible. 

Your internal and external stakeholders (i.e., prospects and clients in the case of customer-facing integrations) are also highly sensitive to integration issues or shortcomings. If anything falls short of their expectations, your engineers are likely to bear the brunt of their complaints; attempting to address these complaints over time can become exhausting and when the issues are out of engineering’s control (e.g., an API outage), they can feel hopeless.

With this in mind, it’s worth measuring your engineering team’s current levels of satisfaction and retention. If your engineers appear very happy and the team’s retention rate is high, engineering may be able to take on integration projects and still feel happy overall. Otherwise, it’s likely not worth investing in integrations in-house, as doing so could tip the scales and lead a greater number of engineers to become disengaged and leave. 

Time to market 

In many cases, you’ll find that you need to have a specific integration built to support a critical business need as soon as possible, whether that’s to win a sale, improve a core business process, or keep certain clients happy. 

Your ability to implement these integrations internally at the speed that’s necessary is likely difficult, if not impossible. So, if your organization currently faces or foresees time-sensitive scenarios for building integrations, it’s likely worth outsourcing them.

Related: The costs of building and maintaining API integrations

How to evaluate your options when outsourcing integrations

Now, let’s assume that you’ve decided to outsource many, if not all, of your integrations. Your next question is how you should go about reviewing your options so that you can pick the one that’s right for your business from the get-go.

We’ll help you do just that by covering several key criteria.

Note: Since most organizations outsource their integrations via a platform, we’ll focus on tactics that can help you compare integration platforms and pinpoint the best one. That said, many of these tips are applicable when outsourcing integrations to an individual or a company. For instance, a system integrator may offer a POC or a discounted rate on their first integration project to give you a chance to assess them properly.

Look at reviews on 3rd-party sites

Fortunately, countless integration platforms receive a high volume of thoughtful reviews from sites like G2. 

The reviews come from validated users, making them credible and trustworthy. And they touch on various aspects, from the platforms' features and capabilities to the quality of their support. 

Beyond reviewing aggregate ratings across vendors on a given software review site, you can filter reviews by reviewers who hold a certain role or who work at companies of a certain size, region, or industry—ensuring that you’re able to find the most relevant and helpful feedback.

You can even find specific grids or quadrants from 3rd-party review sites that directly compare integration software in a given category—such as this one for unified APIs; these can help simplify and supplement your team's your evaluation efforts.

Go on free plans and proof of concepts before making an investment

Any marketer or sales rep can make certain claims about their platform; instead of taking them at their word and making your purchasing decision by what they say or show in a pre-built demo, you can test drive the products through proof of concepts (POCs) and/or by using their free plans.

Given the stakes of making a poor choice, coupled with the fact that many integration platforms offer both POCs and free plans, there’s no reason to commit to a solution financially right away.

Review the integration platforms’ security features and credentials

Your integrations likely store sensitive data, whether that’s on your employees, clients, or business (e.g., company financials). Falling short of protecting this data adequately leaves you at risk of failing to comply with data protection and privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR), not passing security audits like SOC 2 Type 2, and losing employees’, clients’, and prospects’ trust. 

The platforms should also provide certain security controls to help you keep data safe. This can take the form of role-based access control (RBAC), scopes, multi-factor authentication (MFA) for users, and so on.

Related: How Merge keeps your clients’ data secure

Scale your customer-facing integrations by outsourcing them to Merge

Merge lets you build hundreds of integrations to your product across key software categories through a single API. This ensures that you’re not only able to provide the core integrations your clients and prospects want but also the long-tail integrations they might need.

Merge also offers Integration Observability to help your customer-facing team diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve clients’ integration issues. And, through its partner engineers, the company maintains your integrations, ensuring they’re reliable and performant.

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