There’s a silent stigma in the market against embedded iPaaS providers. Whether the provider offers code-first integrations, unified APIs, no-code workflows, or some combination of them all, when developers initially hear the term “embedded iPaaS”, there’s a gut reaction to reject it. Reason being, too many third-party integration tools underperform, causing teams to think they’re better off building in-house.

At hotglue, we fully empathize with the market’s skepticism. As a code-first embedded iPaaS platform, we’ve heard the fears and challenges that come with building your integrations through a third-party provider. They often sound like this...

This comment nails the general concerns across product leaders. From first-hand experience, we know how noisy the market is, how difficult it is to determine which platforms do what, and how tough it is to decide which solution will actually help you scale. And if you’re not 100% sure what questions to ask or how to think about the future state of your company’s integrations - it’s easy to get locked-in or screwed over by an embedded iPaaS provider.

The last thing hotglue wants for any organization is for you to be burned by your integrations partner. This is actually why comments like the one above give hotglue a clear direction for working with customers. Instead of over-promising and under-delivering on:

• Which connectors are and aren’t supported
• Customization and flexibility
• Being a no-code tool that needed a lot more code
• Data processing and rate limits
• Real-time syncs that aren’t real-time

hotglue simply focuses on customer communication and product clarity. That way prospects and customers know exactly what they’re getting. As a result, customers don’t have to deal with “sub-par” performance or “too generic” features.

What’s the future of embedded iPaaS?

hotglue’s approach to embedded iPaaS and building native integrations is radically different from other vendors in the marketplace. It starts with how we think about the problem product teams are trying to solve for their customers.

Product teams need 3 things:

1. Integrations they can trust to work
2. Integrations built quickly and maintained regularly
3. Integration customization and flexibility

Point three is what makes hotglue unique to the embedded iPaaS marketplace. Nearly every integration tool offers the first two points, but point three is where everyone who evaluates hotglue sees a distinct difference. The difference is in how product teams can integrate any application without being limited by hotglue's infrastructure.

Unfortunately, workflow builders limit you by not being a developer-first tool. Their drag-and-drop capabilities lack the functionality to offer deep customizations or handle complex logic (large data syncs, custom transformations, etc). Ultimately, this brings teams to say “we can build a better integration in-house.”

Unified APIs are fantastic for integrating with apps that are restricted to rigid schemas and standard fields (HRIS systems) - but that’s not the case for most platforms. CRMs (Salesforce/Hubspot), E-commerce (Shopify, WooCommerce), and ERPs (Netsuite, Dynamics), are examples of highly custom apps that require custom integrations. So it makes sense why a unified API wouldn’t work in these scenarios.

Knowing this, it’s easy to understand why teams think it’s best to build in-house. They’ve tried embedded iPaaS before, they wanted it to be the answer, but it just didn’t work.

The embedded integration platform that’s built for scale

Due to these challenges, hotglue built a code-first embedded integration tool specifically for developers. Referring to the points above, it’s not that product leaders and developers want to build integrations in-house, it’s that they believe they can build “better” integrations in-house. “ “Better” meaning - “control + flexible”.

hotglue solves this with its code-first approach. You’re not limited by a single API, nor are you blocked by what workflow builders can or can’t support. With hotglue, devs maintain control and flexibility by writing custom transformations, filtering out irrelevant data, processing large volumes of data, syncing at whatever schedule is needed, or using one of our 250+ open-source connectors.

The control and flexibility of hotglue is what gives developers and product leaders confidence in using an embedded iPaaS tool again. Allowing them to:

• Reprioritize efforts to their core product, while still launching new integrations quickly.
• Not worry about maintaining any connectors since they’re all open-source.
• Customize any integration as complexities grow.

For most companies, integrations are their weakness. For companies using hotglue, integrations become their strength. Due to the negative stigma, we understand why customers may not want to publicly share they’re using an embedded iPaaS provider - but fortunately, companies who choose hotglue can build integrations with confidence, trusting that their integrations will always work and their integrations are built for scale.