Nango vs. Unified.to: Build Your Own Unified API or Use One?

June 10, 2026

Nango and Unified.to both sit between your product and third-party SaaS APIs, but they make opposite bets about where the work should live. Nango is integration infrastructure: you write TypeScript functions that run on their compute, define your own data models, and own the mapping logic.

Unified.to is a managed unified API: predefined normalized objects per category, a published capability matrix, and operational read/write access without writing integration logic first. The choice is whether you want to build and own the abstraction layer, or use one that's already built.

What Nango does well

Nango's architectural premise is that fixed common models are too shallow for serious products. If your customers run complex Salesforce configurations with 40+ custom objects, or NetSuite instances with tenant-specific schema, a lowest-common-denominator CRM contact model loses most of the data that matters. Nango's answer: write TypeScript functions that call the provider API directly, define your own models, and run it all on their managed infrastructure. You get auth management, rate-limit handling, automatic token refresh, retries, and observability without building that plumbing yourself — Unified.to handles all of these too; the difference is that on Nango, your integration logic also lives on their infra, whereas on Unified.to the integration logic doesn't need to exist at all. The integration logic stays in your repository, version-controlled, reviewable, deployable through CI/CD.

Their 800+ supported APIs span CRM, HRIS, ATS, accounting, ticketing, productivity, and more. The open-source connector library means you can inspect exactly how data flows for any integration. Unified.to's connectors are not open-source; the equivalent transparency is the published capability matrix — every readable field, writable field, and webhook event per integration, available before you build. For teams where integration depth is a competitive differentiator and a specific customer's Salesforce configuration needs to show up faithfully in your product, Nango's native-access model and inspectable connector code are genuinely valuable.

The records cache lets you sync data from external APIs into a Nango-managed store that your app can poll via their Records API, with webhooks notifying you of changes. Sync functions handle pagination, incremental updates, and deletion markers. Their MCP server exposes your defined actions as tools for AI agents, scoped to exactly what you've built.

Why teams evaluate Unified.to

You don't write the integration logic. On Unified.to, a normalized Contact object works across Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and 50+ other CRMs without writing a sync function for each one. The mapping, pagination, rate-limit handling, and webhook normalization are already done. For a team that needs to ship 20 CRM integrations this quarter rather than build and maintain 20 sync functions, that's the difference between weeks and days.

The capability matrix is published before you build. Nango doesn't maintain a public per-integration read/write grid — what's readable and writable per provider is visible in your project's Endpoints tab and confirmed by inspecting prebuilt functions or asking their team. Unified.to publishes field-level read/write coverage per integration for every category. The accounting matrix (QuickBooks Online: 224 readable / 80 writable / 20 event types; NetSuite: 146 / 102 / 20) is available before you write a line of code. For an engineering team evaluating whether a category covers their requirements, that's the evaluation done rather than started.

No schema design required. Nango's flexibility is also its cost: you design the unified model, write the TypeScript for each provider, decide how to handle associations, custom fields, and deletion — then maintain that as provider APIs evolve. For teams where integration is infrastructure rather than a differentiator, that engineering investment goes toward features that don't ship instead. Unified.to's normalized schemas cover the objects and fields most products need, with raw passthrough when you need provider-specific fields the common model doesn't include.

No records cache to manage. Nango explicitly recommends treating their records cache as a transient sync buffer — "don't use Nango's cache as your primary datastore; store synced records in your own database." That's an architectural responsibility: you need a pipeline from the Nango records API into your own database, with the sync logic, deduplication, and retention that implies. Unified.to is pass-through: reads return the source system's current state at request time, writes confirm or fail at the source immediately. There's no intermediate store to drain, no cache to drift from the source of truth.

No customer data at rest in the integration layer. Because Unified.to is pass-through, your customers' CRM contacts, HR records, accounting invoices, and ATS candidates flow through to your application without resting in the integration platform's infrastructure. Nango stores sync records for up to 30 days (payload pruning) and connection metadata for 31 days after deletion. Both vendors are SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR-compliant — the difference is whether customer business data ever persists vendor-side at all.

28 categories, one integration. Nango supports 800+ APIs but you implement functions per integration. Unified.to's 28 normalized categories — HR, ATS, CRM, Accounting, Ticketing, Messaging, Calendar, Verifications, and more — work through the same object model and endpoints. A product that needs HR + CRM + Accounting doesn't write three sets of sync functions; it uses three categories through one API surface.

Architecture: where the work lives

Coverage

Nango: 800+ supported APIs across categories including CRM, HRIS, ATS, accounting, ticketing, productivity, communication, payments, and more. Coverage per integration is what your functions implement plus any prebuilt templates Nango ships; the catalog breadth is real, but read/write depth per object depends on what's been built for each integration.

Unified.to: 460+ integrations across 28 normalized categories. Every integration in a category exposes the same object model and endpoints — the field-level differences are published in the capability matrix rather than discovered during implementation. The accounting category alone covers 46 integrations including QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Odoo, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, MYOB, Dynamics 365 BC, and the adjacent financial platforms (Stripe, Shopify, Bill.com, Brex, Ramp) that feed the ledger.

How to choose

Choose Nango if your product's integration depth is a genuine differentiator — you need to faithfully mirror custom Salesforce objects, handle tenant-specific NetSuite configurations, or expose provider-native behavior that a common model would flatten. Nango is also the right answer if you want full control over the integration logic, prefer code-reviewed TypeScript over a managed abstraction, or are building on top of provider-specific APIs that don't map cleanly to SaaS categories. The engineering investment is real; the control is real too.

Choose Unified.to if you need to ship broad integration coverage without writing per-provider sync logic — invoices across 23 accounting platforms, candidates across 85 ATS integrations, employees across 247 HRIS properties — and you want to verify that coverage in a published matrix before building. If customer business data at rest in a third-party integration layer is a compliance concern, pass-through architecture eliminates that surface. If you're building AI products that need multi-category data access through a managed MCP layer rather than custom tool implementations, the first-party MCP server covers all 28 categories with the same normalized schemas.

For products that outgrow simple common models in specific categories, the two approaches can coexist: Unified.to for broad category coverage, Nango for the one or two integrations where a customer's specific implementation demands native depth.

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Frequently asked questions

Is Nango a unified API? Nango provides the infrastructure to build a unified API — auth management, a sync engine, managed compute for your integration functions — but the unified data model is yours to define. You write TypeScript functions that map each provider's objects to your schema. Unified.to provides predefined normalized models per category with a published capability matrix; you integrate against the unified schema without implementing the mapping.

Does Nango store customer data? Nango stores sync records in a records cache for up to 30 days (payload pruning) and connection metadata for 31 days after deletion, along with encrypted credentials for active connections. They recommend treating the records cache as a transient buffer rather than a primary datastore. Unified.to is pass-through: customer business data flows to your application without resting in the integration layer.

Which has better accounting coverage — Nango or Unified.to? Unified.to publishes a per-field accounting capability matrix covering 46 integrations, including invoice writes on 23 platforms, bill writes on 13, and journal entry writes on 12 — with field counts per integration for QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, MYOB, and others. Nango supports accounting APIs including QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, and others, with read/write depth depending on which functions have been implemented; there's no equivalent public matrix to compare before building.

How does Nango's MCP server compare to Unified MCP? Nango's MCP server exposes the actions you've defined for your project as tools — the tool catalog reflects what you've built. Unified MCP exposes all 28 categories with predefined read and write tools across 460+ integrations through normalized schemas; the tool catalog is available without implementing action functions first.

Can I use both? Some teams use Nango for integrations requiring native depth — specific enterprise CRM configurations, custom ERP objects — and Unified.to for the broader category coverage where common models cover the requirement. The operational cost of running two integration platforms is real; for most products, one platform handles the full requirement.