“An Unified API is an abstraction layer that connects multiple platforms and delivers standardized data through a single endpoint. It is quick and eliminates the need to build custom integration for each platform.”

Many software companies turn to Unified APIs as a quick solution for scalable product integrations. For some, this means reducing the resource drain caused by in-house or custom integrations. For others, it addresses security concerns with manual data transfers or provides a robust system that can handle operational growth.

While Unified APIs certainly solve these pain-points, their benefits go well beyond just simplifying integrations. They extend all the way down to improving employee experience, customer retention, and even better brand advocacy.

This article will guide you through the features and functionalities of Unified APIs, explain how they work, compare them to other integration methodologies, and explore the real-world benefits they bring to your product integrations.

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Unified API At a Glance - Key Features & Functionalities

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How Unified APIs work - Detailed Breakdown

Unified APIs are designed to offer a single, consistent interface for integrate and access data from various third-party platforms.

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Let’s break down how this is achieved, focusing on the core aspects of their functionality:

API Aggregation

Unified APIs turn objects and fields from various APIs in a given category into a common model for quick and easier integration.

Say for instance, your product needs to retrieve employee data from BambooHR for one customer and ADP for another.

Each of these platforms operates differently when it comes to authentication, rate limiting, and pagination frameworks.

Unified APIs streamline these differences, providing a consistent point of access across platforms like HRIS. This reduces complexity and offers a standardized way to interact with varying systems.

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Authentication & Authorization

Integrating once with the Unified API allows access to hundreds of pre-built integrations without requiring further authentication for each platform.

Picture this: you’re building a product that needs to integrate with CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho. Normally, you’d have to manage each platform’s unique authentication - handling API keys, OAuth tokens, and ensuring all the permissions are set correctly.

With a Unified API, this complexity is abstracted away.

The API uses a standardized system to manage authentication across all platforms that it supports Integrations with.

Regardless of the platform you need to Integrate with, you only need to authenticate once with the Unified API. It handles all the platform-specific requirements behind the scenes, so you don’t have to work your way through multiple security protocols.

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Data normalization

Different platforms often label similar data in ways specific to the platform, making it hard to Integrate, especially when done at scale with multiple platforms.

A Unified API simplifies this process through data normalization, here’s how:

For example, your product might need to pull employee data from Workday and BambooHR. Workday might call a user's department "Dept_ID", while BambooHR labels it "Department_Code".

Rather than requiring manual mapping of these fields, a Unified API automatically normalizes them, converting both into a consistent field like "Department".

Your application now works with a unified structure, regardless of the data source, removing inconsistencies and making it easier for developers to work with clean, structured data.

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Real-time data sync & notifications

On top of normalizing data for developers, Unified APIs automatically updates and sync the data for you.

Many Unified APIs feature this functionality, but here’s a high level overview of how it works:

• The API sends a request to the platform you want to integrate with, sync frequencies are decided upon the developers’ requirements, and the data sync status (integration status) can be accessed within the Unified API’s dashboard.
• And whenever new sets of data is created or modified, the API can be configured to notify your application of changes and updates through a feature called Webhooks.

• You may access the newly updated data via the Unified API or further have it written back to your application by requesting for the same to your vendor.

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Error handling

Unified APIs, such as Bindbee, provide real-time visibility into API requests and response data, as well as uniform error codes for troubleshooting and resolution.

Unified APIs enable the retrieval of large data sets in a structured and manageable manner, facilitating fast and robust integrations.

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Unified API vs other Integration Methodologies

Unified APIs aren’t the only go-to for product Integrations.

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Here's a closer look at some popular alternatives and how they compare:

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Examples of Unified API

Unified API emerged as a distinct category in early 2018s, and since then has been changing how software companies approach Integrations as a whole.

Not only are the existing alternatives not practical for the operational scale of modern-day businesses, the intuitive, developer-friendly approach to data connectivity that comes with Unified APIs are second to none.

That said, here are a few real-world examples of Unified APIs powering product Integrations:

• Upduo, an LMS platform, transitioned from custom in-house integrations to using an Unified HRIS and Payroll API to manage employee data. Using the API, The company was able to drastically reduced the time spent on integrations from months to days, and helped them save over $80k in integration maintenance annually.
• Cypherworx faced operational challenges with manual data imports and fragile connections to HRIS platforms. After integrating with an HRIS API, they were able to reduce integration maintenance by 5 man-months, and accelerate customer onboarding from 24 days to just a few hours. This move saved them over $150k annually.
• Budgie Health, an insurtech company, optimized their employee insurance services by integrating with an HRIS & Payroll API. This move enabled them to sync employee demographics, benefits, and payroll data across 30 platforms in just 3 days. The result reported were improved customer satisfaction, reduced integration management overhead by 90%, and a quarterly savings over $100,000 in development costs.

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FAQs

What are the Benefits of Unified API?

Unified APIs simplify integrations by providing a single access point to multiple platforms. They reduce development time, lower maintenance costs, and improve data consistency for developers and security concerns for end-users.

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What is the difference between Composite and Unified API?

A composite API combines multiple API requests into one. A Unified API, however, standardizes multiple platform integrations into one interface, making it easier to connect with many services using the same model.

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What is the difference between Unified API and Embedded iPaaS?

Unified APIs lets you outsource the entire scope of integration-related work to a third party provider. The Provider will manage end-to-end integration requirements (building & maintaining) on your behalf.

Embedded iPaaS, on the other hand, is a low-code tool that adds the basic rails of integration functionality to your application, but it’s up to your development team to customize and configure connections as and when required.

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What is the difference between API and Integration?

An API allows two systems to communicate. Integration is the process of connecting different systems, which often uses APIs, but also involves syncing data and ensuring they work together.

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What is the difference between Horizontal and Vertical Unified APIs?

Horizontal Unified APIs work across different industries and services. Vertical Unified APIs, like Bindbee, focus on one specific industry like HRIS & Payroll, and offers deeper and broader functionality within the category.