When Prismatic launched in 2019, the list of embedded iPaaS vendors could be counted on a single hand. Today, you're choosing from 30 to 40 vendors. This explosion of options makes your decision both easier and harder: easier because you have choices, harder because making the wrong choice can create unneeded burdens and costs for your team and product.
Integrations are now a top-three buying criterion for your customers. When prospects evaluate your product, they often ask about integrations during the first sales call. When customers consider renewal, the quality and breadth of your integrations factor into those decisions.
But not all embedded iPaaS solutions are created equal. Some are traditional (enterprise) iPaaS platforms that retrofitted embedded features. Others lock you into rigid paths that might not fit your team and development processes.
The right choice helps your product reach escape velocity or further differentiate itself from the competition. The wrong choice means you and your team keep struggling with integrations.
What is an embedded iPaaS solution?
An embedded iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is a purpose-built platform that enables you to deliver native product integrations between your product and the other apps your customers use. The embedded part is critical – this includes an integration marketplace, configuration wizards, and a workflow builder that you white-label and embed directly into your product.
Unlike traditional iPaaS platforms (Workato or Boomi, for example) that your customers buy separately, or unified APIs that handle straightforward data syncing, an embedded iPaaS gives you the tools to build integrations once and deploy them to multiple customers, each with their own credentials and configurations.
Embedded iPaaS architecture
When considering an embedded iPaaS, make sure you understand the platform layers:
- The build layer provides pre-built connectors, a low-code integration designer, code-native development, and APIs and SDKs for extending the platform.
- The deploy layer handles multi-tenant infrastructure for customer-specific instances, with the necessary configuration wizards and credential management.
- The manage layer offers monitoring, logging, and debugging for your team and your customers.
In addition, you have embedded functionality (the marketplace, dashboards, and workflow builder) that spans all of these layers and ensures that your integrations function as product features.
Some embedded integration platforms are enterprise iPaaS tools that have been retrofitted for embedded use cases. You'll spot them by their gaps: powerful low-code builders but weak multi-tenant deployment, or robust APIs but no embedded user interface.
However, purpose-built embedded integration platforms have everything necessary to build, deploy, and manage integrations at scale.
Who will build, deploy, and manage your integrations?
Your answer will vary based on resources, requirements, and other constraints, but here's a common scenario: Senior devs build complex integrations. Solutions engineers configure customer instances. Customer success teams deploy instances to new customers and handle support issues.
You need a platform that supports both code-native development and low-code tools – not as separate products, but as an integrated experience. Your devs should work in their IDEs with version control and CI/CD processes. Your non-devs should assemble sophisticated workflows without hitting arbitrary limits.
Be wary of platforms that claim to be "dev-friendly" but are clearly designed for low-code tools, with code-native features bolted on later. During demos, ask to see how devs use the platform.
Your team structure evolves as you scale. This year, you might have three devs building, deploying, and managing all your integrations. Next year, solutions engineers will handle configurations while engineers focus on writing code to meet complex integration requirements. The year after that, customers will build their own workflows. Your platform needs to remain flexible as your team and customers' needs evolve.
How will customers activate and configure integrations without involving engineering every time?
Many platforms help you build integrations, but require engineering involvement for each deployment. That won't scale. With 50 customers, engineering-led deployment may be doable. At 500, it's unsustainable. At 5,000, it's a joke.
Look for an embedded marketplace where customers browse, activate, and configure integrations within your application – not a link to an external tool. Self-service configuration should let customers answer business questions ("Which Salesforce fields should we sync?") rather than technical ones ("What's your OAuth client secret?"). The platform should handle OAuth flows, credential storage, and connection testing behind the scenes.
Customer success or solutions engineers should deploy integration instances without writing code. They select the integration, configure customer-specific requirements (like data mapping and credentials), and activate it for the customer.
Ask integration platform vendors about this scenario: A customer wants your Salesforce integration but needs custom field mappings. Can customer success handle deployment? How long does it take? What's the ongoing maintenance load? The answers will reveal whether the platform supports scaled deployment in the real world.
What breaks at scale, and who handles maintenance?
When evaluating platforms, it's tempting to focus on how quickly you can build your first integration. But what matters just as much is what happens at 3 AM when a customer's integration chokes, or when you hit 10,000 integration executions per hour.
Look for purpose-built infrastructure designed for B2B SaaS integration challenges: multi-tenant isolation, customer-specific scaling, and complex auth flows. The platform should handle OAuth token refresh, retry logic, rate limit management, and security without you having to build any of it.
Monitoring and alerting must be accessible to non-technical teams. Your customer success and support teams should investigate integration health and resolve issues without escalating to engineering every time. If they need to open a terminal or write SQL queries during investigations, the support tooling isn't ready to support integrations at scale.
If you build this infrastructure yourself, you're not just building it once – you're maintaining OAuth flows as APIs change, monitoring for rate limit adjustments, handling security patches, and ensuring compliance. How many engineering hours per month will this consume? What's the opportunity cost in core product features your team can't build because they are busy with integration maintenance?
Platforms that started as enterprise iPaaS typically have elegant workflow builders but poor multi-tenant deployment. They talk vaguely about "customer isolation" or require you to manage separate instances per customer. That's not true multi-tenancy. Instead, that's you wasting time building infrastructure on top of what's already there.
What happens when you need to integrate with systems your vendor has never heard of?
Every vendor showcases its connector library: Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, etc. These pre-built connectors increase the velocity for building common integrations. But breadth isn't enough. You also need depth (more than basic data retrieval) and the ability to create custom connectors for proprietary APIs, legacy systems, and niche apps.
If you're in a SaaS vertical, this becomes even more critical. Healthcare companies integrate with EMR systems that vary by hospital. Manufacturing companies sync with legacy ERPs that haven't had major releases in years. Your embedded iPaaS must support both the generic Salesforce integration and your customer's proprietary warehouse management system.
The ideal platform gives you pre-built connectors for common applications and custom connector flexibility for everything else. You build your Salesforce integration in days and your customer's legacy system integration in weeks, using the same platform.
The cost of switching integration platforms
Switching platforms after you've built 20 integrations and deployed them to 150 customers is doable, but it's messy and expensive.
You'll spend months rebuilding those integrations. You'll migrate customer configurations and credentials. You'll risk breaking live integrations that customers depend on. You'll confuse customers with UI and UX changes. You'll spend engineering and PM time on the migration rather than on new features. The total cost for this scenario easily reaches six figures in internal resources alone.
To avoid this, weigh the long-term fit of the integration platform more heavily than minor differences in today's pricing or feature set. You're not choosing for your next quarter's roadmap; instead, you're choosing a platform that will support hundreds of integrations, serve thousands of customers, and become deeply embedded in your customers' tech stacks for years to come.
Ask the integration platform vendors this question: "Tell me about a customer who outgrew your platform and had to leave. What were they trying to do that you couldn't support?" If they claim no customer has ever left due to capability issues, they're either very new or not being completely honest.
Choosing the right embedded iPaaS
Create an evaluation matrix to score vendors on the aspects that matter most to your team: dev and non-dev experience, deployment model, infrastructure maturity, connector flexibility, and long-term viability. For each aspect, write specific notes about why you gave that rating.
Map your current pain points to platform capabilities. If your devs currently spend 50% of their time on integration work, which platforms will make things more efficient, or move work to non-devs? If customer-specific deployment for a new integration currently takes weeks, which vendors can reduce that to days?
Design your trial or POC to answer your most critical questions. Don't build "hello world" integrations; tackle real challenges. If you're concerned about DevX, have devs build a real integration using their standard processes. If you're worried about scaling deployments, deploy one integration to multiple test customers with different configurations.
Calculate real ROI: platform subscription costs plus implementation time versus engineering time saved on integration builds, faster time-to-market on deals, improved customer retention, and reduced support burden. Most teams find that an embedded iPaaS delivers ROI within 6-12 months, even with conservative assumptions.
The strategic value of using the right integration platform
Integrations are no longer background technical features; they're product differentiators that directly impact revenue. The right embedded iPaaS creates integration leverage as you build an integration once and deploy it to every customer. You empower non-devs to handle deployment, freeing devs to build out everything on your product roadmap. You provide self-service tools that improve customer experience while reducing support burden.
The wrong choice creates more work and takes you in the opposite direction you want to go. You spend engineering hours working around platform limitations. You maintain custom code because the platform doesn't support your needs. Your integration roadmap slips quarter after quarter because requests come in faster than you can handle.
Your integration strategy is too important to take lightly. Assess vendors against your specific requirements. Run meaningful trials. Check references. Calculate real ROI. Your embedded iPaaS choice will shape your integration capabilities for years to come.
Check out our 3-minute demo video to see how Prismatic handles building, deploying, and managing integrations.
