August 2024 Summaries

Nango is a comprehensive integrations platform that offers a seamless, white-label user experience, hundreds of pre-built integrations for 200+ APIs, support for both unified and direct integrations, and a modern developer platform to extend and customize integrations without adding engineering complexity. It is the most popular open-source integrations platform, with over 4,800 GitHub stars, used by more than 400 B2B SaaS companies in production. Nango's key features include its largest open-source catalog of integrations, a turnkey solution, unified APIs and direct integrations, developer-first approach, and flexible pricing plans. It is an ideal replacement for Codat if you prioritize a comprehensive catalog of pre-built integrations, productive developer experience, unified platform, security, and compliance. Tray Embedded is another alternative that offers a low-code interface to configure integration flows but may not be suitable for engineering teams. Apideck provides pre-built unified APIs for various categories but lacks banking APIs and supports fewer accounting APIs compared to Codat. Building integrations in-house can offer full control and flexibility but demands significant time investment and ongoing maintenance, with pros including no constraints and future-proofing, and cons including slow development, underestimated infrastructure needs, high maintenance demand, missing integrations block deals, scalability concerns, lack of external support, knowledge silos, and training new employees.

Nango is a comprehensive integrations platform that offers a seamless, white-label UX for users, hundreds of pre-built integrations for 200+ APIs, support for unified and direct integrations, and a modern developer platform to extend and customize integrations without engineering overhead. Nango has the largest open-source integrations catalog, a turnkey solution, unified APIs and direct integrations, and is a more modern and powerful integrations platform compared to Prismatic. Merge.dev provides a unified API for product integrations, abstracting different source APIs into a single data model and API interface, allowing for quick integration with multiple APIs. Tray Embedded is an add-on to Tray.io Enterprise subscriptions, offering a low-code/no-code experience with if-this-then-that workflows to build integrations. Building integrations in-house allows full control and flexibility but comes with significant time investment and long-term maintenance. Nango is considered a perfect Prismatic replacement for those looking for a large catalog of pre-built integrations, a productive developer experience, and security and compliance importance.

Nango is an open-source, comprehensive integrations platform that offers a seamless user experience, pre-built integrations for 200+ APIs, unified and direct integration support, and a modern developer platform to extend and customize integrations. It has the largest open-source catalog of integrations and provides turnkey solutions with UI components, pre-built integrations, full observability suite, and fanatical support from API experts. Nango is more modern and robust compared to Tray Embedded, offering built-in connectors and advanced features that save engineering time and reduce maintenance. Companies choose Nango for its extensive API and integration coverage, focus on developer experience, exceptional support, flexible pricing, self-hosting option, and ability to adapt to changing business needs. Merge.dev offers a unified API for product integrations, abstracting various source APIs into a single data model and API interface, allowing quick setup and customization options. Apideck provides pre-built unified APIs for CRM, Accounting, and HRIS, with limited customizations available. Building integrations in-house offers complete control but requires significant time investment and long-term maintenance commitment, with pros including no constraints, future-proofing, and flexibility, but cons including slow development, underestimated infrastructure needs, high maintenance demand, scalability concerns, lack of external support, knowledge silos, and training new employees. Nango is an ideal replacement for Tray Embedded if companies prioritize a comprehensive catalog of pre-built integrations, productive developer experience, unified platform, security, and compliance.

We recently migrated millions of tasks from Temporal to a Postgres-based task scheduler at Nango, a company that helps engineering teams build product integrations. The usage of their platform has grown significantly over the last year, requiring them to upgrade their stack. They replaced a core part of their infrastructure that schedules and runs interactions with third-party APIs, previously using Temporal. However, they were unable to leverage Temporal's key feature: Seamless resuming of failed workflows due to running untrusted user code. This reduced Temporal to an expensive and complex queuing and scheduling system for Nango. They evaluated different alternatives, including Hatchet and Postgres queuing libraries, before deciding to build their own queue and scheduler on Postgres. The new solution is simple, flexible, and allows full control over how schedules run. Nango was able to migrate millions of tasks with no downtime, using a dry-run strategy, feature flags, and monitoring performance and task completions. The migration was successful, and the new system excelled at handling three different workloads: main relational application database, object store for continuous data syncs, and queue and scheduler for orchestrating interactions with third-party APIs.

The challenges of integrating products are often underestimated, requiring more than just a few API calls to maintain them. Integrating data from various APIs can be particularly difficult due to issues such as task orchestration, resilient long-running tasks, and two-way syncing. Exceeding API rate limits can also disrupt integrations, with detection, retries, and avoiding penalties being key challenges. Additionally, APIs structure data differently, requiring validation to prevent integration failures, while growth increases complexity through resource management, storage optimization, concurrency control, failure handling, and performance tuning. Reliably monitoring integrations is also crucial for strong observability, involving comprehensive failure tracking, performance monitoring, rate-limit monitoring, network traffic logging, data quality monitoring, and customer-specific debugging. By addressing these challenges early, teams can prevent costly surprises down the line and ensure robust infrastructure for their integrations.