3 Workday API connectors worth evaluating in 2025

Workday is the most—if not one of the most—popular integrations among HR software providers.

Case in point: We recently surveyed hundreds of HR leaders through Centiment to understand which applications they want integrated into their tech stack, and Workday was the clear winner—at 41%.

Assuming you need to integrate Workday with other apps your teams use or your product, you’ll likely need to implement the integration through a 3rd-party. That way, you can avoid the costly and time-intensive partnership process and save your engineers countless hours in building and maintaining the integration.

We'll help you evaluate 3rd-parties’ Workday connectors, or pre-built integrations with Workday, by breaking down your best options and highlighting their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Merge

Merge offers the leading unified API platform, which lets you not only add a Workday integration but also dozens of other HRIS integrations to your product.

Some of the benefits of Merge’s Workday integration include:

• Broad data coverage: Merge offers 19 Common Models, or normalized data models, that span nearly every type of data that users can create and use in Workday. This includes data related to the company, employees, time off, locations, employer benefits, and more

• Customizability: Workday instances can be heavily customized—so you’ll often run into unique syncing scenarios. To address any edge cases, Merge offers advanced features to access and sync custom fields (e.g., “Union_membership_status”), like Field Mapping and Authenticated Passthrough Request

• Constant enhancements: Merge is constantly adding support for additional endpoints, addressing edge cases for certain ones, making it easier to sync specific fields from an endpoint, and more

• Enterprise-grade security: Merge lets you follow the principle of data minimization by offering Common Model Scopes, which lets you toggle off any Common Models you don’t need in Workday. You can even apply scopes at the individual account level when certain customers have more significant security concerns

• Flexible syncing methods: Merge lets you sync data in real-time via webhooks, in frequent intervals (e.g., hourly) via API requests, and even through the secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) when Workday doesn’t support the necessary endpoints and/or when users don’t want to expose their API endpoints directly

• Strong partnership: Merge is an official Workday partner, which means Merge gets access to additional documentation, Workday development tenants for testing integrations, and more comprehensive support from Workday’s Partner Integration Architects. Taken together, Merge can support a deeper and more reliable Workday integration

https://www.merge.dev/blog/workday-partnership?blog-related=image

Workato

Workato offers a Workday connector that supports both customer-facing and internal integration scenarios.

Here are some of the pros and cons of using it:

Pros

• Automation templates: Workato offers pre-built “recipes”, or automation templates, with the Workday connector to help you brainstorm and implement specific integrations and automations quickly

• Flexible syncing methods: Workato lets you use Workday’s SOAP APIs, REST APIs, and their Report-as-a-Service (RaaS) to help support a diverse set of use cases

• Strong business partnership: Like Merge, Workato has a partnership with Workday that allows their team to build a deep integration and continually improve it

Cons

• Slow updates: Workato has a policy of only updating its connector for every even-numbered major version release. This policy can prevent you from accessing Workday’s latest endpoints, avoiding bugs, and more for several months

• Unclear endpoint support: If you look through the supported triggers and actions on their integrations page, you’ll find that most of them are vague. This can force you to speak with a member of their team to confirm whether the connector can, in fact, support your use case out of the box

• Learning curve: The process of leveraging the Workday connector in Workato’s recipe-builder UI can take some initial onboarding and trial and error for your team. For example, your team will need to learn how to map fields between the systems and build transformation logic on the data that’s integrated 

https://www.merge.dev/blog/workato-alternatives?blog-related=image

Mulesoft

Mulesoft offers a Workday connector that lets companies develop and implement integrations and workflow automations between their instance of Workday and another one of their internal applications.

Pros

• Comprehensive endpoint support: You can access dozens of endpoints via the connector, whether it’s related to absence management, payroll, recruiting, or workforce planning

• Fast sync frequencies: While Mulesoft lets you decide how frequently you poll a given API endpoint, they offer faster polling frequencies than most Workday connectors. For example, you can poll endpoints as frequently as every 15 seconds (while Workato, for instance, only lets you poll Workday endpoints up to once per minute)

• Workday-approved use cases: Mulesoft has worked with Workday directly to get guidance and approval on certain workflow integration implementations, such as a bidirectional sync between Workday and Active Directory. This ensures that key use cases with the Workday connector are impactful and resilient

Cons

• Difficult to adopt templates: Mulesoft’s templates aren't actually templates—they are documents that offer helpful content, like key considerations and visual workflows. This puts the entire onus of developing integrations on your team

• Slow improvement timelines: Mulesoft’s release notes on the connector vary dramatically in frequency. They can come out every month, but they can also come out every several months. Since API connectors frequently break or need to be enhanced on a consistent cadence, this inconsistency can point to potential reliability and performance issues

• Limited use case support: Since Mulesoft is an internal integration platform, the connector doesn’t help companies use Mulesoft to integrate Workday with their platforms

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Workday connector FAQ

In case you have any more questions on Workday connectors, we’ve addressed several more below.

What is a Workday connector?

It’s a pre-built, API-based connection that's provided by a 3rd-party. 

A typical Workday connector uses a specific version of Workday’s REST and SOAP APIs, includes support for specific endpoints (often presented in the form of triggers and actions), and handles authentication (e.g., OAuth) on your behalf.

Workday connectors aren’t fully ready to use out of the box; users still need to customize them to meet their business' or customers' specific syncing needs. That said, they remove most of the burden associated with developing the integrations, and they make the process of managing integrations relatively easy (it can just require modifying the triggers and actions).

What are the benefits of using a Workday connector?

There are several benefits to keep in mind:

• Time to market: Building a Workday integration in-house can take weeks, if not months. A connector can dramatically shorten this timeline and lead you to build the integration in a matter of days

• Engineering hours saved: Your engineers can save hundreds of hours on both developing the Workday integration and maintaining it. They can reallocate their time savings toward more high-impact, strategic initiatives that they’re uniquely equipped to tackle

• Reliable syncs: Since the integration provider maintains the connector on your behalf (e.g., keeping up with Workday’s API version changes), the integration is likely to be resilient and performant over time

• Avoiding a partnership: Without a connector, your team may need to engage in a formal partnership with Workday to access advanced support or develop more custom integrations. This process can take months to formalize and cost thousands of dollars per year

What are the drawbacks of using a Workday connector?

All of this said, Workday connectors include notable drawbacks:

• Poor at handling edge cases: Workday connectors are typically built for the most common integration use cases. If yours are more niche, it may not be helpful (e.g., it doesn’t support the endpoint you need)

• Quality varies widely: A Workday connector from one vendor can differ dramatically from another, whether it’s the vendor’s approach to maintaining the connector or it’s the use cases (triggers and actions) the connector supports. Evaluating individual connectors across vendors and determining the best one can prove time consuming and tedious for your team

• Suboptimal time to value: While a Workday connector accelerates integration development, you and your team may still need to learn how the platform’s UX works, which can prove tedious and time intensive

• Unscalable pricing model: Some integration providers charge by API call volume. Since you or your customers will likely need to make many calls to Workday’s endpoints, this can translate to significant costs over time

What are other examples of Workday connectors?

Other frequently-used Workday connectors are provided by embedded iPaaS, traditional iPaaS, and robotic process automation (RPA) vendors, like Informatica, Cyclr, Boomi, and UiPath.