7 Best Apideck Alternatives and Competitors in 2024

Searching for the best Apideck alternatives to scale your SaaS product’s integration roadmap?

We’re here to help you narrow your search and find the best platform for your use case.

In this detailed review, we’ll explore 7 best Apideck alternatives, deep-diving into their core functionalities, primary use cases, pricing structures, and strengths & drawbacks.

To make sure everyone finds the right solution, we:

1. Had our engineers test the platforms that had free trials and rated their capabilities from the perspective of seasoned application developers.

2. Talked to users of each solution (both customers and those who have evaluated them), who provided insights into the overall user experience, limitations, and benefits.

3. Sifted through tons of customer reviews on rating platforms so you wouldn’t have to.

We also evaluated solutions in different integration platform categories—from unified APIs to embedded iPaaS—for optimal coverage.

But first, let’s dig a little deeper into why users switch from Apideck - or choose not to use it altogether - in the first place.

TL;DR

• Apideck is a solid solution for users looking to launch highly standardized integrations in one of the categories covered by Apideck’s unified APIs, assuming all the integrations you need are covered.

• Paragon is the best Apideck alternative in the Embedded iPaaS category. It’s the most extensible solution on the list, providing real-time webhook triggers and an enterprise-ready workflow engine for running concurrent and high-volume background jobs. It also offers both a Typescript framework and a visual workflow editor for implementing integration logic, providing optimal flexibility. 

• If you want to stick to Unified API platforms, Merge, Unified, and Nango are valid options. Nango is a newcomer with an open-source component, while Merge and Unified provide a more traditional unified API model.

• Alloy is an internal e-commerce automation platform that is now trying to tackle both integration approaches. It provides both a unified API system and an Embedded iPaaS solution, which can be a good fit if you’re building an e-commerce SaaS.

• Tray Embedded and Workato are solid options in the Embedded iPaaS space for users who can get by with a non-white-label experience and limited functionality (e.g., no version control), especially compared to Paragon’s offering.

Why Look for Apideck Alternatives?

Unified API like Apideck certainly have utility for a portion of the developer market, as they allow for the “build once, ship multiple integrations” approach to building native integrations.

While this can be a viable option for users who can do with generic integrations and don’t need much customization, customers looking for more flexibility and scalability will quickly hit Apideck’s limits.

Here are some of the factors that put users off Apideck:

1. Limited integration coverage

Although Apideck offers a solid range of unified APIs, many integrations are omitted.

Most of their integrations are auth-only, meaning you won’t really get any of the benefits of a unified API when using its platform.

Source

Moreover, if you have a niche integration that you need them to support, Apideck’s team will take quite some time to develop it, resulting in potential production delays.

Source

2. Lack of flexibility and customization options

This is a common issue with all unified API platforms.

While they’re excellent for creating standardized integrations that can easily be deployed across similar apps, they are far from optimal if you need more flexible and unique solutions.

Namely, unified API solutions can only support a limited number of API endpoints that are the same in all supported apps.

Additionally, their supported integrations are also riddled with limitations, such as the lack of field mapping support, which is critical, especially in categories such as CRMs.

3. No real-time syncing

Apideck doesn’t offer webhook support for most integrations, meaning real-time data syncing is impossible.

You can only build sync jobs that run on a 24-hour interval. This can get the job done in certain use cases, such as syncing HR records, but is unacceptable for any use case where it’s critical to have updated data. 

Additionally, their sync jobs are abstracted, which limits your ability to figure out what’s happening behind the scenes. This can make it difficult to debug customer issues in production and identify data consistency issues.

4. Pricing model

Each of Apideck’s pricing tiers includes a limited number of API calls.

This can quickly drive up the costs unexpectedly, especially when dealing with complex integrations that require more API requests to work properly.

Moreover, it is almost impossible to anticipate how many tasks you’ll need before you implement your use case. For example, if one of your customers suddenly decides to import a few thousand records, you may blow up your request allocations for the month before you know it.

Source

Top 7 Apideck Alternatives and Competitors

1. Paragon - Embedded iPaaS for building flexible and scalable integrations.

2. Merge - Unified API with strong coverage in HR and ATS app integrations.

3. Unified - Unified API with a wide range of API endpoints and comprehensive documentation.

4. Tray Embedded - iPaaS turned Embedded iPaaS with a low-code interface and options for creating custom connectors.

5. Cyclr - Embedded iPaaS with a solid number of pre-built connectors.

6. Alloy - iPaaS turned Embedded iPaaS with a unified API repository.

7. Nango - New Unified API solution with an open-source approach.

1. Paragon

Paragon is the leading embedded iPaaS platform, enabling engineering teams to quickly and seamlessly build SaaS integrations for their products.

Unlike Unified API platforms like Apideck, Paragon offers much more extensibility and tooling, allowing you to easily build any integration use case, from large-scale ingestion jobs to real-time bidirectional syncs.

Full disclosure: While Paragon is our own product, we aim to provide an unbiased perspective on why Paragon is truly the top Prismatic alternative on the market.

Developers find that Paragon offers the perfect balance between a powerful and extensible toolkit for building integrations and a seamless end-user (your customers) experience.

Let’s look into the most popular features for teams considering Paragon over Apideck ⤵️

Feature #1: Workflows

Workflows are at the core of Paragon’s integration capabilities. They enable you to define the business logic for any integration with 1:1 parity with the underlying 3rd party API.

Unlike other iPaaS platforms that offer only no-code interfaces, Paragon also provides a Typescript framework called Paragraph, enabling developers to author code integrations and sync it with their git repository.

This dual approach incorporates the best of both worlds in a single platform, as you:

• Gain all the customization and benefits that code enables, such as version control, collaboration, and code re-use. 

• Keep all the benefits of an embedded iPaaS solution, such as managed authentication, pre-built integration connectors, and a serverless workflow engine.

This also showcases the extensibility of the Workflow Builder.  It’s fully compatible with everything that can be authored through Paragraph, including custom functions, importing JS libraries and even npm.

This workflow construct, coupled with an enterprise-ready workflow engine enables Paragon to support any integration use cases you’ll need to build, including:

• Real-time bidirectional sync, which allows for data changes happening in your app to be immediately reflected in the integrated apps, and vice versa.

• Data ingestion, which lets you pull in a lot of data from your users’ 3rd party apps, such as all the pages in your users’ Notion account (popular for AI companies).

• Automation, which lets you automate tasks across your users’ apps. For example, you can send users Slack notifications when a specific action is taken in your app, or upload files to Google Drive whenever a user signs a document in your app. 

Let's walk through an example where you want to update or create a HubSpot record when a new contact is created by a user in your platform: 

Feature #2: Custom integration builder

Paragon’s custom integration builder allows you to create a custom integration with any app, even if Paragon’s integration catalog does not natively support it. 

This provides an extra layer of flexibility to deliver niche integration features to your end users and centralize all of your integrations in a single platform

The best part?

Custom integrations come with all the integration-agnostic benefits of the platform, such as:

• Embedded Connect Portal for your customers.

• Visual workflow editor/Typescript framework for specifying custom integration logic.

• Fully managed authentication with OAuth 2.0 or API Keys.

• Access to any API methods provided by the application's API.

• Robust monitoring & observability tools

• Serverless workflow engine for executing up to 1600 TPS

Feature #3: Webhook, CRON, and app event triggers

As mentioned earlier, all workflows start with a trigger—an event that sets off an entire chain of actions for a given integration.

Paragon lets you set up various actions as initial workflow triggers, giving you more control over how you want the jobs to kick off.

For instance, you might sync data in real-time or on a scheduler, trigger workflows via third-party webhooks or events in your application, or send an external API request that triggers a response.

There’s also an Integration Enabled trigger that sets off workflows when a user activates your integration for the first time (for example, you can automatically sync all leads from your customer’s CRM to your app once the integration is initially enabled).

All unified API platforms, including Apideck, do not allow this level of configuration - you simply have to accept the implementation approaches they’ve taken, regardless of the implications it may have on your users’ experience.

Pricing

Paragon has a 14-day free trial that lets you try out its capabilities.

Once the trial expires, you can choose between two plans - Pro and Enterprise.

While both plans include unlimited integrations and enable connecting a custom number of users, they differ in certain aspects.

The Pro plan has everything you need to build the integration use cases you need, perhaps without some bells and whistles.

Enterprise, on the other hand, offers enterprise-specific and/or additional functionality, such as on-premise deployment, dynamic field mapping, SSO, RBAC, and more.

Note: Paragon offers discounts for eligible startups.

How does Paragon compare to Apideck?

Apideck is a Unified API, while Paragon is an Embedded iPaaS, meaning they function in entirely different ways.

Apideck provides a library of unified APIs, allowing users to deploy an integration across various apps in a particular category. 

However, this means that you forego customization and flexibility, as:

• Apideck limits you to the integrations and app categories included in their unified APIs.

• You won’t have access to many of the app-specific endpoints, resulting in generic integrations.

• You can’t build any real-time functionality due to their lack of support for webhooks.

• Many of their integrations are auth-only.

Paragon, on the other hand, has inherently more customization options, making it a more future-proof and comprehensive solution for engineering teams who want control and ‘escape hatches’.

Additionally, while Paragon enables real-time data syncing—which is extremely important in sales, marketing, chatbots, collaboration, and other use cases—Apideck only enables sync frequencies of 24 hours.

Self-hosting is another critical differentiator between Apideck and Paragon. Only Paragon includes the option for in-house hosting, which is if you want your customer data to stay in your own infrastructure for security reasons, or if you need to deploy your own product on-prem to your customers.

However, it’s worth noting that Apideck supports SMS API integrations, which Paragon doesn’t. They also provide an embeddable marketplace feature called the Apideck Ecosystem, which would enable you to showcase your integrations on your website.

Apideck is an excellent solution if you:

• Need to build a lot of generic and standardized integrations, especially with File Storage, HR and accounting platforms.

• Don’t need real-time behavior for your integrations.

Paragon has a significant edge over Apideck if you:

• Don’t want to run into any use case limitations.

• Need the flexibility to build custom integrations.

• Require real-time behavior for your integrations via webhook triggers or other event-driven triggers.

• Want the ability for technical product managers, solutions engineers, and support teams to have visibility into integration activity via the visual workflow builder and task history.

Pros & Cons

✅ Options for creating workflows through a no-code visual builder and its unique scripting language, Paragraph.

✅ Real-time syncs and task execution.

✅ Optimal flexibility in terms of creating and deploying integrations.

✅ Monitoring and observability tools providing a centralized view of your users.

❌ Doesn’t have unified APIs that enable defining integration logic once and applying it across various apps.

❌ Doesn’t support as many integrations as Apideck in certain categories, such as HR or SMS APIs.

What Are Our Customers Saying?

Let’s see what some of our customers have to say about Paragon.

A significant number of them pointed out how Paragon helped reduce overall time-to-market and save development resources: 

"Without Paragon, we would have had to hire a dedicated team of engineers just to help us manage the integrations. Not only managing the setup, but also the maintenance of them long term. Building this out internally would have taken at least half a year if not more... with Paragon, it allowed us to put one engineer on it and he was able to knock out multiple integrations within a few weeks."

Chris Lu, Copy.ai CTO and co-founder

Others highlighted its ease of use and the benefits of using Paragraph for building customized integrations via code ⤵️

“Paragon's product hits all the marks in terms of functionality that we need to get authentication and workflows to market fast. Was easy to setup and to implement. And the support along the way has been fantastic. Their new Paragraph product is also differentiated and useful to us as we go about programmatic creation of workflows.” - G2 Review

Finally, users praise Paragon for letting them build simple and complex integrations with equal ease without using workarounds, third-party tools, or messy APIs: 

2. Merge

Merge is a Unified API integration platform with unified APIs across 7 app categories and over 200 integrations, making it the leader in the unified API category.

Similarly to Apideck, it enables you to quickly ship integrations with multiple apps in the same vertical with a single API, speeding up the process at the cost of any vendor-specific API endpoints or features.

Features

• Strong integration coverage in HRIS (50+) and ATS (40+) verticals.

• The unified data model for each app category allows you to connect with many apps in a specific vertical without dealing with data transformations.

• Dashboard overview of your customers’ integrations, allowing for monitoring and timely issue detection.

Pricing

Merge has three pricing plans:

1. Launch: Includes 10 linked accounts (i.e., accounts created by your end users for connecting their apps with yours). The first 3 are free, while the rest are charged $650 per month. While this plan offers a relatively low barrier to entry, note that it doesn’t scale that well.

2. Professional: Custom plan, built for companies looking to launch deep application integrations seamlessly. Includes:

• Custom number of linked accounts

• Data syncs at custom intervals

• 60-day sandbox access

• Dedicated Slack support, etc.

3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, designed for enterprise-scale users that want enhanced security, support, and infrastructure. Provides:

• Custom number of linked accounts

• Unlimited sandbox access

• Priority support

• White-label support for your end users, etc.

Pros & Cons

✅ Good customer support.

✅ Enables quick launch of standardized integrations, reducing your product’s time to market and saving valuable development resources. 

✅ Responsive to requests for adding new integrations their unified APIs are lacking.

❌ Limited use cases, you can only deploy integrations supported by its unified model.

❌ Steep learning curve.

❌ Expensive, especially for smaller businesses.

3. Unified.to

Unified.to is another Apideck competitor in the Unified API space that provides coverage for a several integration categories, such as Knowledge Management Systems, Commerce, Marketing, CRMs, Enrichment, GenAI, Accounting platforms, etc., amounting to 180+ app integrations in total.

It’s a good alternative for teams who want a slightly cheaper unified API platform at low volumes. 

Features

• Enables easy setup of OAuth 2 authentication for various integrations.

• Allows embedding integration directories into your product by adding just one line of code using Javascript, React, Vue, or Angular.

• Good coverage of enrichment tools makes it a potentially better option for SaaS companies in sales or marketing tech.

Pricing

Unified.to has a free plan that provides 30 days of unlimited access to test their unified APIs in non-production applications.

After that, you can upgrade to one of its 4 paid plans:

1. Startup: For launching unified APIs in production applications. $250+/month

2. Growth: For production applications with growing customer usage. $1,000+/month

3. Scale: For large-scale applications with high customer usage. $5,000+/month

4. Enterprise: Contact them for custom limits, pricing, and configurations.

Unified.to provides a pricing calculator that helps you estimate which plan would be the best match and how much the final cost would be.

It considers factors such as the number of end users, the average number of connections per user, and the average number of API requests per user.

Pros & Cons

✅ Free for non-production environments.

✅ Comprehensive documentation.

✅ User-friendly interface.

❌ Limited number of native API integrations.

❌ More expensive than Apideck at scale.

❌ Not all its integrations are seamless, especially since some new ones haven’t been tested extensively.

4. Tray Embedded

Tray.io, a popular AI-powered iPaaS, recently launched Tray Embedded, which aims to provide white-labeled native integrations for its customers.

As such, Tray Embedded is available only as an optional add-on for Tray.io’s Enterprise package users.

It’s an interesting option if you’re part of a large organization with teams already leveraging Tray for internal workflows in other business apps, but they’ve actually divested from this Tray Embedded strategy in recent years.

Features

• The Configuration Wizard is an end-user portal for activating and configuring the integrations intuitively, with minimal Tray branding

• Tray Integration Manager, for creating, editing, and maintaining integrations at scale. It includes a low-code builder for building more complex integrations.

Pricing

Tray Embedded is available as an add-on for Enterprise customers only. 

This means businesses need to subscribe to Tray.io's Enterprise plan to access the Embedded Bundle, which comes at a custom price.

Since the Embedded Bundle is a separate add-on, though, expect that to raise the total costs.

Pros & Cons

✅ Allows you to create nearly white-labeled integrations.

✅ Solid range of pre-built connectors that reduce development time.

✅ Scalable infrastructure, given that it’s designed for enterprise-level users.

❌ Doesn’t include custom, headless UI, meaning developers won’t have as much control over integration options.

❌ No self-hosting options

❌ No ability for developers to extend in code

5. Alloy 

Alloy’s key standout feature, which sets it apart from other iPaaS solutions, is its ability to function as both an Embedded iPaaS and a Unified API solution.

It’s a great alternative to Apideck, but lacks white-labeling and low-code capabilities. In most cases, it requires painful workarounds. 

Features

• 220+ pre-built connectors covering categories from E-commerce and CRM to SMS, Developer Apps, etc.

• Low-code workflow builder and a simple SDK for a low-code integration building experience.

• Headless APIs that let you leave authentication processes to Alloy while maintaining complete control over your app’s interface.

Given their backbone in helping e-commerce businesses automate internal workflows, they’re heavily focused on the e-commerce and fintech segments.

Pricing

Alloy has a single pricing plan custom-tailored to each customer’s integration requirements.

On it, you get:

• Easy SDK Setup

• Access to over 220+ integrations

• SOC2 Type 2 Compliance

• GDPR/CCPA Compliance

• Unlimited number of custom workflows per integration

• Custom Events

• Retry and rerun workflow logic

• All data encrypted at rest

While Alloy doesn’t have a free trial, you can always book a demo to see it in action.

Pros & Cons

✅ Enables both a Unified API and Embedded iPaaS approach to integrations.

✅ User-friendly interface backed by extensive documentation.

✅ Wide range of customization options.

❌ It’s one of the newer platforms, meaning it still has unresolved issues, bugs, and glitches occurring every now and then.

❌ Difficulties with debugging and error handling result in wasting your engineering resources.

7. Nango.dev

Nango is one of the newer unified APIs that has been on the market for just over a year.

Its differentiator? It takes an open-source approach to building API connectors. 

This means users can add their own connectors to its integration catalog, contributing to its rapid growth.

Features

• 190+ pre-configured APIs, with users frequently adding new ones.

• Automatic two-way data sync for keeping data between your and integrated apps fresh and updated.

• Self-hosting options for users who want full control over their infrastructure.

Pricing

Nango offers a free forever plan that provides 3 synced connections and access to a decent range of features, such as automatic token refreshes, a monitoring dashboard, etc.

If you need more, you can choose between two plans:

1. Starter:$250/mo, includes 20 connections and options for building custom integrations, 2-way syncs, 7-day log retention, etc.

2. Scale: Custom pricing. Provides a custom number of connections, real-time data syncs, SOC 2 compliance, etc.

Pros & Cons

✅ Competitive pricing.

✅ Strong community that contributes to its API quality.

❌ New platform means little information on the actual stability and user appreciation.

❌ Suffers from the same constraints as other platforms in the Unified API space, as it offers limited customization options.

Deploy Any SaaS Integration Your Customers Need Faster & Easier with Paragon

One thing’s certain - you won’t go wrong with opting for any of the Apideck alternatives we reviewed, as they’re all powerful solutions in their own right.

In the end, it all comes down to your preferences and requirements.

If you need a “set it and forget it” approach that lets you integrate hundreds of similar apps with a single API model, then one of the Unified API platforms (Nango, Merge, Unified) is the way to go.

However, if you’re looking for high customizability and the ability to provide your users with a seamless and tailored experience, Embedded iPaaS solutions—such as Paragon—are the perfect choice.

With Paragon, you can ship all the integrations you need faster without sacrificing their flexibility and customization.

Why take our word for it?

Try Paragon’s free trial or book a live demo with our team to see what it can do.

Related reading:

Top 5 Merge.dev Alternatives for Native Integrations

Top 4 Cyclr Alternatives

Top 4 Tray Embedded Alternatives

Top Prismatic Alternatives - Embedded iPaaS Comparison