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The crucial metrics for evaluating the best integration platform for businesses are:

  • The connectors and integrations offered by the platform.

  • The platform’s ease of use.

  • The scalability and flexibility of the platform.

  • The platform’s data security and cybersecurity best practices.

  • The cost and pricing model of the integration platform.

With the right integration platform in your hands, your IT environment will be faster, more efficient and better connected. However, finding the best integration platform for your businesses is no easy feat. There are many integration platform options for organizations with different needs, from small businesses to massive corporations. What’s more, there are a variety of factors to consider, from use cases to pricing.

That’s why we’ve written this article on the best integration platform for businesses. Below, we’ll discuss what an integration platform is, why you need an integration platform and the criteria you should use when evaluating the question of the best integration platform for businesses.

Looking for a high-quality, powerful integration platform? Try Integrate.io for yourself with a 7-day pilot.

What Is an Integration Platform?

An integration is a connection between two different apps or services (usually built by different vendors) that enables them to communicate and exchange data.

According to a 2021 report, the average company uses 254 SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications. Integrations allow businesses to link up these platforms and software to make them a single cohesive IT environment.

Some applications make integration easy by exposing their data through an application programming interface (API), a set of rules and functions that defines how other software can access this data from a given endpoint. Others, however, require these third-party connections to be manually built, which is a highly complex and time-intensive endeavor.

Without IT integrations, most businesses would be unable to turn their isolated applications into a robust, intercommunicating ecosystem. This is because users would need to manually write their own connectors between each pair of applications, which quickly becomes infeasible for more than just a few services.

Instead, more and more companies use data integration tools such as an integration platform as a service (iPaas). This tool is a cloud-native data integration and management platform that helps with application integration. An iPaaS solution can connect many different systems and software simultaneously and can also interface between cloud applications and on-site systems. There are dozens of iPaaS offerings on the market, each one claiming to be the best integration platform for businesses.

Why Do You Need an Integration Platform?

Cloud integration software like iPaaS is highly valuable for companies with complex IT ecosystems. First, integration platforms help break down data silos: repositories of data in an organization that are only accessible to a single team or department. By consuming this siloed information and making it easier to use in your business processes and workflows, data management solutions like iPaaS can help you streamline and optimize your enterprise workflows. Therefore, integration platforms can be a crucial element of a broader digital transformation initiative.

For example, the data in your customer relationship management (CRM) software may currently only be available to your sales team. However, this information could be tremendously useful for other people in the company, from customer support agents to executives and key decision-makers. In particular, you could benefit by connecting your CRM to another major enterprise IT platforms, such as your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

The right integration platform is essential — but which one is best for your needs? Give Integrate.io a test drive and find out the answer for yourself. Start your 7-day pilot today.

How to Find the Best Data Integration Platform for Your Business

With so many integration platforms just a few clicks away, knowing where to start can seem impossible. Below is our list of suggested criteria for evaluating the best integration platform for businesses:

  • Connectors: Perhaps the most important feature of any integration platform is the number and type of connectors it has. Look for a platform that has both the integrations you need right now as well as potential areas of expansion in the future.

  • Ease of use: Having many connectors available is practically useless if you can’t efficiently deploy them. If your business has many non-technical users, look for an integration platform with a gentle learning curve and a visual interface.

  • Scalability: Many companies process gigabytes or terabytes of information daily. If you have big data needs, make sure that your integration platform choice can keep delivering excellent performance while under a heavy load.

  • Data security: The more data you process, the bigger your target is for malicious actors looking to breach your defenses. Your integration platform should, at a minimum, be able to meet industry-specific data security and privacy legislation.

  • Pricing: The price of integration platforms can be a dealbreaker or a selling point for many businesses. Consider not only the cost but also the pricing model. For example, Integrate.io uses a “per-connector pricing model:” users are charged based on the number of connectors in their IT environment, not the amount of data they consume. This makes Integrate.io the perfect choice for growing businesses that expect to consume more big data in the future.

How Integrate.io Can Help with Data Integration

Ultimately, the question of the best integration platform for businesses will depend on your precise business needs and objectives. However, what’s not up for debate is that you need one. So, given the factors above, where should organizations start their search for the right integration platform that can maintain high data quality and security?

Integrate.io is an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and data integration solution that has been built from the ground up to be both powerful and user-friendly, with a special focus on e-commerce data. Thanks to Integrate.io, even non-technical business users can leverage automation to create robust data pipelines from their data sources to a target location like a data warehouse.

The Integrate.io platform includes more than 140 pre-built connectors and integrations so that users can quickly get started defining custom dataflows. What’s more, Integrate.io offers a simple, drag-and-drop, low-code/no-code visual interface for people of all skill levels to perform their own self-service data transformation, extraction, and loading.

The benefits of Integrate.io for your data integration process don’t end there. With Integrate.io’s reverse ETL functionality, you can export your information out of the data warehouse and into a third-party system (like a CRM or ERP) for easier access and analysis. In addition, Integrate.io’s FlyData Change Data Capture (CDC) feature performs real-time data analysis to determine which records have changed since your last job.

Ready to see all the benefits of Integrate.io for your data integration process? Schedule a demo with our team of data integration experts today to discuss your business needs and objectives or to start your 7-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.