Finch vs. Unified.to: HR Specialist or Multi-Category Unified API in 2026?

May 28, 2025

Finch is a unified API for HR, payroll and benefits: as of 8 October 2026, its docs list 291 providers, most reached through assisted connections, and its API serves a copy it syncs every 24 hours or 7 days, priced per connection. Unified.to is a unified API across 36 categories, HR and payroll included, that reads the source system on every call and stores no customer records. Choose Finch when your product runs on US payroll and deductions data across a long tail of providers, including systems with no API; choose Unified.to when you need HR plus other categories, current data, or a hosted MCP server for agents.

How do Finch and Unified.to compare at a glance?

Finch and Unified.to differ most on scope, data currency and pricing unit; both offer an embedded authorization flow and a SOC 2 Type II report. Finch figures come from Finch's own site and docs, including its pricing page and provider list; Unified.to figures from unified.to and its docs.

Finch and Unified.to at a glance (checked 8 October 2026)

What does Finch do well?

Finch does US payroll and deductions data well: a long provider list that reaches systems with no API, typed pay statements, and deduction writes back to payroll systems. As of 8 October 2026:

• A long HR and payroll provider list: Finch's Provider Network includes ADP Run and Workforce Now, Paychex, Gusto, Paycor, UKG and QuickBooks Payroll.
• Typed pay statements: Finch's pay statements type each line: 13 earning types, 4 tax types and 19 deduction and contribution types in its API spec; Finch's own summary is "25+ different types". 71 providers publish pay statement fields.
• US employment and plan fields: Finch's employment record carries flsa_status, highly_compensated_employee, key_employee and union codes, its company record carries the EIN, and retirement deductions are typed by plan (401(k), 403(b), 457, Roth, SIMPLE).
• Deduction writes: Finch's Deductions product creates and updates company deductions and enrols or unenrols employees, as queued jobs. Finch's provider data publishes write operations for 26 providers (7 on API connections, 19 through assisted ones); its Integration Types page says 5 automated and 20+ assisted. Its separate Benefits product is read-only and in Early Access, on ADP Workforce Now and Workday.
• Documents API (beta) with W-4 parsing: ML extraction of filing status and withholding from 2020 and 2005 W-4s, on 4 providers, Pro and Premier (Documents).
• Data Refresh endpoint: trigger a resync of an automated connection between scheduled runs (limits in the data freshness section below).
• Official provider partnerships: in Finch's words, "Official partnerships with Gusto, Paycor, UKG, and others, delivering better data access, no API fees, and marketplace distribution support".
• Finch Connect (employer-facing auth UI): prebuilt authorization flow with privacy disclosures, granular permissions and authentication, with no custom frontend required; hosted on Finch's domain, with your name and logo on every plan.
• Webhooks on every plan: account, job-completion and data-change events, including deletion events such as directory.deleted.

How are Finch and Unified.to architected?

Finch syncs each employer's HR and payroll data into its own AWS databases and serves every read from that copy; Unified.to routes every call to the source system at request time and stores no customer records.

Finch. Finch serves every read from its last successful sync: "Finch API responses always return the most recent successful sync. Most requests complete in under 200 milliseconds." (Data Syncs). Responses carry Finch-Data-Retrieved and Finch-Last-Attempted-Update-Date headers that show when the data was pulled. Customer data, including compensation, tax records and company bank account details, is stored in AWS RDS until the connection is deactivated; Finch's DPA keeps daily backups "for at least one (1) week", with no maximum stated.

Finch's access tokens don't expire: "A Finch access_token does not expire unless you disconnect it" (Developer FAQs). You store them on your backend; Finch holds the employer's provider credentials or tokens itself, encrypted with keys it manages in AWS KMS, with no customer-managed option published (as of 8 October 2026).

Unified.to. Unified.to runs HR and its 35 other categories, such as ATS, accounting and CRM, through one pass-through model. For a deeper breakdown, see Pass-Through vs. Sync-Based Unified APIs.

How do Finch and Unified.to compare on data freshness?

Finch serves reads from its last sync, every 24 hours on automated connections and every 7 days on assisted ones; Unified.to reads the source system on every call.

Finch (as of 8 October 2026)

• Sync cadence. Those intervals come from Finch's Integration Types page, which also says assisted writes take up to 2 business days.
• On-demand refresh. The refresh endpoint resyncs one automated connection at most once an hour; assisted connections can't be refreshed on demand. Finch's docs describe it as an add-on for a "Scale" tier its pricing page no longer lists.
• Before the first sync. Finch attempts a live fetch from the provider, and requests "may return 202 or 500"; pay statements not yet fetched return 202 with data_sync_in_progress. Listen for job.initial_data_sync_payroll.succeeded before reading payroll.
• Change events. Data-change webhooks fire after Finch's own sync, on automated connections only. One event fires per changed record and carries its IDs, not the record, and "If all retries are exhausted without a successful delivery, the event is dropped."

Unified.to. Native webhooks deliver changes where the source sends them, and virtual webhooks detect changes and deliver the changed records as events where the source sends none, at a 1-minute minimum on paid plans and 60 minutes on the free trial. Events exist on supported integrations and objects: for payroll, payslip events on Paychex, Paylocity, Remote.com, Rippling, Justworks and Xero, among others, and none yet on pay runs, pay codes or Earning.

How do Finch and Unified.to compare on HR and payroll coverage?

Finch's provider list is built for the long tail of US payroll systems; Unified.to covers HR inside a wider catalogue and reads pay runs on some systems where Finch has organization data only.

HR and payroll coverage: Finch (its docs and provider API, 8 October 2026) and Unified.to

As of 8 October 2026, 236 providers are reached only through Finch Assist, where Finch acts as a third-party administrator in the employer's system and sends no data-change events.

Unified.to's Deduction object carries employer amounts, limits, garnishment types and pay codes, and deductions can be created on Abacus, Check, Gusto, Paycor (with a pay code), Paylocity, Team Software and Workday (Legacy); support varies by integration.

How do Finch and Unified.to support AI agents and MCP?

Unified MCP is a hosted MCP server that lets agents read and write customer data across Unified.to's categories; Finch's data MCP server is an npm package in beta that you run yourself, alongside a hosted MCP server for its documentation.

Finch (as of 8 October 2026)

• Data MCP (beta). @tryfinch/finch-api-mcp runs on your machine over stdio, or as a Streamable HTTP server you host. Since December 2025 it exposes two tools: a docs search and a code tool that runs Finch SDK calls. Finch's "general recommendation is to use a self-hosted LLM for usage with the Finch MCP Server."
• Docs MCP and Integration Skills. A public MCP server at developer.tryfinch.com/mcp searches Finch's documentation, and three Integration Skills (beta) help coding agents build or audit a Finch integration (Build or Audit with AI).

Unified MCP

• Transport. Unified MCP is Streamable HTTP only, with one host per region (US, EU, AU), and supports the stateless core of the 2026-07-28 MCP revision in production; a credential works only on its own region's host.
• Tools. Unified MCP serves 22,566 tools, counting normalized tools and each vendor's own endpoints. A connection's tool list depends on the integration's feature support and the permissions you grant: as of 8 October 2026, 30 CRM tools for HubSpot and 12 Ticketing tools for Zendesk. Many models handle only a limited number of tools (Groq 10, most OpenAI models 20, Cohere about 50), so permissions and tools narrow the list and defer_tools marks tools for deferred loading.
• Connection-scoped URLs. Unified MCP generates a URL with a signed token good for one connection and nothing else, so the workspace API key stays on your side. hide_sensitive strips names, emails and phone numbers from results before they reach the model.
• Enterprise-managed authentication. Enabled per workspace on request: your identity provider issues an ID-JAG for the end user, exchanged at POST /oauth/token for an ema_ bearer token whose scopes, such as crm.read, filter the tools offered.
• Writes. Agents write in the normalized model, so one create call adds a record in whichever system the connection uses.

Building the integration with coding agents. Unified.to publishes Agent Skills: SKILL.md packages for each How-To use case, including HRIS, and OAuth app-registration skills that walk an agent through vendor developer portals. A Claude Code plugin installs every skill with the Core MCP server; Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Windsurf add the skills with npx skills add https://docs.unified.to.

How do Finch and Unified.to compare on security and compliance?

Finch and Unified.to both have SOC 2 Type II reports and state HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA compliance; Unified.to also offers a BAA on Scale and states PIPEDA compliance, where Finch publishes neither.

Security and compliance (checked 8 October 2026)

On Pro and Scale, connection credentials can live in your own secrets manager (11 supported, including AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud Secret Manager and HashiCorp Vault) instead of Unified.to's database, where they are encrypted at rest per its privacy policy.

How do Finch and Unified.to price?

Finch bills each connection, one employer on one HR system, until you call /disconnect; Unified.to bills by API call, with unlimited connections on every plan.

Finch (as of 8 October 2026, pricing)

• Starter: $65 per connection per month, read-only, capped at 15 connections, 24 providers and employers under 500 employees; month-to-month contracts available; free sandbox for testing.
• Pro and Premier: quote-only, with volume discounts from 25 connections a month. Pro adds unlimited connections, all providers, assisted integrations, deduction writes, Request Forwarding, Okta SSO, RBAC and data access controls. Premier adds a customizable lookback, an uptime SLA (99.90% a month, per Finch's SLA) and enterprise support SLAs.

Unified.to (as of 8 October 2026, pricing)

• Grow: from $750 a month for 750,000 API calls; overage $1.00 per 1,000.
• Pro: $1,500 a month for 2,000,000 API calls; overage $0.75 per 1,000. Adds EU and AU workspaces, SAML SSO, your own secrets manager, IP restriction, an authorization CNAME (US and EU regions), and log shipping to Datadog, Grafana and ClickHouse.
• Scale: $3,000 a month for 6,000,000 API calls; overage $0.50 per 1,000. Adds a HIPAA BAA, 365-day logs and Multi-Region Sync.
• Grow, Pro and Scale include all 36 categories; Grow and Pro start with a 30-day free trial; Enterprise is custom.

Where the prices cross (our calculation). From published prices as of 8 October 2026, Finch Starter costs $715 at 11 connections, $780 at 12 and $975 at its 15-connection cap, against $750 a month for Unified.to Grow, so Starter is cheaper below 12 connections. What the difference buys on Grow: writes, such as deductions on Check, Gusto, Paycor and Paylocity, where Starter is read-only, and reads from the source system on every call, where Finch serves a copy synced every 24 hours. Past 15 connections, Finch requires Pro or Premier, which are quote-only, so there is no published price to compare. Caveats: a Finch connection is one employer on one HR system and is billed until /disconnect, whatever its call volume; Grow is billed by API call, with overage above 750,000 calls; Starter excludes assisted providers and SSO. For how the two pricing models behave as you grow, see usage-based vs. per-connection pricing.

How did MyHub move upmarket with Unified.to?

MyHub, an enterprise employee intranet platform, moved upmarket by using Unified.to to ship 60+ integrations in three months with a single part-time engineer, including HR systems, Microsoft and Google SSO, and Messaging APIs (Slack, Teams). Enterprise buyers wouldn't take meetings without integrations to their own HR systems, and building each one directly was too slow: Microsoft and Google SSO alone took three months to implement.

MyHub chose Unified.to after evaluating multiple unified API providers, and the architecture mattered as much as the speed:

"Unified.to's no-cache policy was a key factor in our decision. Their security-first approach is now part of our security and data privacy pitch to clients, especially enterprise IT stakeholders."

Steve Hockey, CEO, MyHub

MyHub needed deep HR integrations, Finch's home category, plus categories beyond HR (Messaging, Storage) and no third-party copy of HR records at rest for enterprise IT stakeholders to review. For products with those requirements, whether the vendor stores HR data can weigh as much in the decision as integration count or category coverage.

MyHub reports 3x ACV growth, faster sales cycles, and lower churn after integrations went live.

Which should you choose?

Choose Finch when your product is built on US payroll and deductions data; choose Unified.to when you need HR plus other categories, data current to the call, or agents acting on customer data.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to my customers' connections if I leave Finch? Finch publishes no token or credential export, its OAuth apps hold most connections, and a disconnected connection "cannot be reactivated" (as of 8 October 2026), so plan to re-authorize customers. Unified.to's Finch migration guide maps Finch's authorization, API calls, pagination, webhooks and passthrough to Unified.to. Finch access tokens can't be used with Unified.to, so existing customers re-authorize; credentials you hold yourself, such as customers' API keys, can be imported. On Unified.to, the API returns each connection's tokens, and only tokens issued to an OAuth app you own keep refreshing after you leave.

Start your 30-day free trial of Unified.to or talk to our team to see how the architecture fits your product.

Written by Mallory Greene.

About the author: Mallory Greene is Head of Marketing at Unified.to. She writes about integration infrastructure, unified APIs, and MCP for technical teams. Based in Toronto.