Top 6 Economical iPaaS Vendors Offering Affordable Integration

In 2021, the average SaaS application portfolio of a company was 254¹ different apps (Figure 1).

However, when it comes to app engagement, more employees are engaging with shadow IT apps (54%), than those owned by their IT department (40%)² (Figure 2). The takeaway is that employees are using too many disparate systems that can often overlap with each other. This phenomenon could be because:

• Employees aren’t taking full advantage of existing tools already at their disposal
• They are unaware of their company’s existing app stack.

Poor app engagement results in lower ROI, suboptimal resource utilization, lost data and insights, and a reduced competitive edge. Given that most apps are cloud-based (Figure 3)³ , the remedy for integrating applications, data, and processes across various cloud environments is an iPaaS (integration platform as a service).

However, selecting the iPaaS solution for your company is difficult since:

• There are around 100 iPaaS tools in the market.
• Pricing can be opaque, with high prices blocking widespread usage and digital transformation.
• These tools tend to be closed source, making it hard to switch vendors once you invest in one. Therefore, we recommend that companies evaluate their options carefully.

To focus your vendor research, we curated a list of affordable iPaaS tools that can offer the same amount of features as expensive ones, but at lower prices.

Why is an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) important?

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) plays a significant role in enterprise integration in today’s digital business environment for several reasons:

1. Efficient data management: iPaaS tools have API management capability, allowing businesses to connect various applications and systems for efficient data exchange, data security, and easy data accessibility.
2. Real-time integration: iPaaS solutions can provide real-time or near real-time integration capabilities, ensuring that data across systems is always up to date.
3. Automated business processes: iPaaS solutions that have intelligent automation capabilities can enable trigger-based automation workflows by synchronizing data across various applications.
4. Scalability, flexibility, and agility: iPaaS solutions can be highly scalable because of their cloud-based architecture. This allows them to adjust to changes in data volume, integration complexity, or system demand without needing additional infrastructure.
5. Reduced IT complexity: With an iPaaS, businesses can reduce the complexity of their IT environments and free up their IT teams.
6. Cost savings: Automation and synchronization of processes reduces manual work and increases resource utilization. In addition, an iPaaS platform doesn’t require a physical infrastructure. All these translate to cost savings.

What is cost-effective iPaaS software?

Cost-effective iPaaS is a cloud-based integration platform for businesses to affordably integrate their different applications, various data sources, and processes across different cloud services and on-premise environments affordably.

Companies need an affordable iPaaS solution because:

1. Custom integration is costly, with organizations having spent $4.7M on custom integration last year (Figure 4)⁴

2. 30%⁵ of organizations have resource/budget allocation challenges in their digital transformation initiatives (Figure 5)
   

3. High upfront and maintenance costs associated with integration solutions can deter smaller enterprises with tighter budgets

What are the affordable iPaaS vendors?

There are +100 iPaaS sales and marketing tools around. Our main criteria is affordability. But we can’t sacrifice quality for price. We also can’t test out all iPaaS solutions independently. So our selection benchmark for affordable iPaaS provider is:

• A vendor with +25 employees
• Publicly-available pricing of <$5,000/year
• An enterprise level iPaaS solution capable of hybrid integration between cloud and on-premises apps
• Offering a low-code solution, +200 pre-built connections, error-handling and monitoring, and automation capabilities

These vendors passed our checklist:

1. Argos Labs

Argos Labs’ intelligent automation is a low-code integration tool built on Python. Its API management feature enables effortless integration between different SaaS apps integrating cloud,AI/ML and data science tools.

2. Albato

Albato has +500 of in-built API connectors that users can choose for application integration. Albato can also create an integration marketplace from scratch for users.

3. Tibco

Tibco cloud is a low-code tool that offers +200 API connectors. With their basic package, users can integrate data, apps, cloud, SaaS, and IoT devices.

4. Integrately

Integrately can connect with +1000 apps for data and application integration. It can also integrate with on-premise apps as long as they’re public or have webhooks.

5. Elastic

Elastic.io is a cloud integration platform designed for business users to integrate different cloud-based and on-premise solutions, enabling seamless data exchange between them.

Vendor	Pricing per year	Trial period	# of pre-built connectors	Automation capabilities
Argos Labs	$2,000	60-day full version	Unlimited with SDK	Python backend low-code RPA for unlimited automation steps
Albato	$1,944	7-day	+500	Yes, but limited to 30,000 automation steps every month. After that, it’s 1 cent per each step.
Dataddo	$1,200 for 3 data flows and 15 data sources	14-day, in addition to a limited-version free version	+200	Yes
Elastic	$2,592	14-day	+100	Yes
Integrately	$2,868	14-day	1,000	Yes
Tbico	$4,800	30-day	+200	Add-on

Other vendors

In addition to these, there are other iPaaS marketing tools that did not meet one or more of our criteria. Most vendors were not added to the list since they either didn’t offer transparent pricing, low cost, or a hybrid integration model. You can see some of those vendors below:

• MuleSoft
• Zapier
• Boomi
• Oracle integration cloud service
• Cleo integration cloud services
• Talend cloud data integration platform

If you are looking for more automation capabilities on top of iPaaS capabilities, check out our whitepaper covering low-cost automation providers:

Guide to Choosing an RPA Technology Partner

4 main features of iPaaS tools, explained

1. Pre built connectors

Pre-built connectors are software components for communication and data exchange between different applications without requiring custom development. Each connector is specifically designed to interact with a particular application’s API or data format. It’d know how to connect apps with:

• Authenticate the app
• Structure requests to the API
• Handle any special requirements or quirks of the API

These are developed and tested by experts and can save a lot of time and effort. Instead of having to understand the details of an application’s API and writing a custom code to interact with it, you can use a pre-built connector for API integrations.

For example, if an iPaaS platform has pre-built connectors for Salesforce, Slack, and Google Sheets, it means you can quickly and easily create API management and custom integrations with drag and drop interface without writing any code.

2. Low-code

A no-code iPaaS tool provides a user-friendly interface for users to create integration flows with drag- and-drop interface, drop downs, and other graphical elements without needing to write any code.

This is beneficial because it democratizes the technology and appeals to a broader range of non-technical users without needing to rely on developers or IT. It also speeds up the process of integration since there’s no need to write, test, and debug code.

However, it’s worth noting that no-code doesn’t necessarily mean limited. Many no-code iPaaS platforms offer powerful capabilities and flexibility, with options to handle complex data transformations, multi-step workflows, error handling, and more.

3. Error-handling and monitoring

Error-handling and monitoring ensure that your app integrations always run smoothly, allowing you to identify and address problems quickly.

3.1. Error handling

Error-handling is when the iPaaS integration solution can detect when the execution of an integration workflow has gone wrong. It would:

• Send a notification to the administrator
• Attempt a retry
• Execute a fallback or an alternative process

Many iPaaS platforms allow users to create customized error-handling based on their needs, such as defining the number of retry attempts or specifying IF/THEN scenarios for alert sending.

3.2. Monitoring

Monitoring hybrid integration platforms involves continuously tracking and recording the activity and performance of your integration workflows. Monitoring in an integration platform as a service may include:

• Real-time dashboards, displaying the status of your integrations, such as the number of tasks executed, data processed, successful completions, and failures.
• Logs of activity for each workflow, including details of any errors that have occurred.
• Alerts or notifications when conditionals are met, such as a high error rate or a workflow that takes longer than expected to complete.

Monitoring is essential for maintaining the reliability of key features of your integrations, understanding their performance and usage, and identifying areas where they may need to be improved or scaled.

4. Automation capabilities

Automation capabilities allow the integration platform to do more than just data integration. So the solution isn’t limited to transferring data, but also can automate processes by applying rules, conditions, or transformation to the data, performing these on a schedule or when triggered.

For your sales and marketing apps for instance, an integration platform as a service with automation capabilities allows you to set up a workflow that automatically syncs new customer data from your eCommerce platform to your email marketing system every night at midnight. Or you could create a process that monitors your CRM for new sales deals, and automatically sends a notification to a Slack channel and updates a record in the financial system when each is closed.

An iPaaS without automation capabilities would simply move data from one system to another without the ability to apply complex rules, transformations, or scheduling. While this can still be useful for certain use cases, it’s less flexible and powerful than an iPaaS with full automation capabilities.

For more on integration

To learn more about integration providers, read:

1. “The State of SaaS Sprawl.” Productiv. 2022. Retrieved on May 19, 2023.
2. “The State of SaaS Sprawl.” Productiv. 2022. Retrieved on May 19, 2023.
3. “The State of Cloud Report.” Flexera. 2022. Retrieved on May 19, 2022.
4. “2023 Connectivity Benchmark Report.”MuleSoft. 2023. Retrieved on May 19, 2023.
5. “2023 Connectivity Benchmark Report.”MuleSoft. 2023. Retrieved on May 19, 2023.