What is a Unified API?

Unified APIs

With a Unified API, your product has to connect to each category, with limited support for custom integrations, coverage, and extensibility.

Unified APIs amalgamate numerous integrations into specific classes, providing an abstraction layer capable of communicating with multiple APIs simultaneously. For instance, if your customers require your product to be compatible with CRMs (such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and others), a Unified API allows you to bypass individual integrations in favor of one CRM-Unified API with a standardized data model. Their key benefits are:

• They offer a broad range of integrations, requiring only one connection to each Unified API class.
• They come with a dashboard for managing integration access and tracking your customers' integrations.
• They ensure robust security measures and standards, including data encryption at rest and in transit.

Despite the seemingly convenient approach to handling integrations offered by Unified APIs, the reality is more complex. The underlying structure of Unified APIs makes them susceptible to numerous issues:

• Limited coverage: Unified APIs cover only a single app category, such as CRM, accounting, or task management. Therefore, if you wish to integrate with multiple categories, you must connect to multiple APIs. If the integration you need doesn't fall under any existing Unified API classes, you must create the integration yourself.
• Limited flexibility: Unified APIs essentially offer a shared abstraction for multiple applications. Consequently, as the number of supported integrations in a category increases, the depth of integration the Unified API can provide decreases, especially in terms of custom fields, required data types, rate limits, and more. Hence, custom integration is often necessary to cover all the fields a customer may require.
• User experience: Unified APIs typically offer limited support for your user experience. They do not facilitate the entire flow (i.e., the front-end) that enables your customers to select an integration, authenticate, map fields, and view the status of their data transfers.

Overview

Unified APIs enable companies to integrate with specific categories but are limited in their coverage, flexibility, and user experience.

Endgrate: one connection, 100+ integrations, instantly.

With Endgrate, your product only needs to connect with us once.

Endgrate provides a unique strategy to help businesses with their integration roadmap. Rather than relying on the sub-optimal Unified API, Endgrate allows businesses to instantly access 100+ integrations.

Endgrate overcomes the limitations associated with using Unified APIs. A single Endgrate connection grants access to integrations across a wide range of categories, such as CRM, marketing, accounting, ATS, and more. Endgrate efficiently manages integration nuances like custom fields, required data types, and rate limiting. Moreover, Endgrate includes full front-end support to enhance your customers' user experience.

Furthermore, setting up an integration on Endgrate requires no configuration or workflow setup. Endgrate comes with support for 100+ integrations right off the bat, and new integrations can be created quickly. Custom integration requests do not entail any additional costs or setup.

To find out more about how Endgrate can assist in turning your product's integrations into a competitive advantage, book a demo.