What is a Unified API?
May 7, 2024
What is a Unified API?
A unified API brings together multiple APIs from different platforms (such as HubSpot, Discord, Google Drive, and so on) and presents them as a single API. With a unified API, developers can integrate their applications with multiple SaaS applications via a standardized interface.
The purpose of a unified API is to simplify and streamline interactions for developers. By creating a layer of abstraction between an application and the APIs it uses, a unified API reduces the complexity and overhead associated with integrating data and functionality from different platforms.
What are the Benefits of Using a Unified API?
Faster Development
Every integration with an API demands developer time and effort, from reviewing the documentation to experimenting with integrations to debugging and testing. Managing multiple APIs adds considerably to the time and effort developers must spend working with different authentication/authorization schemes, data representation and formatting, and error handling.
Read about how our customers have used our Unified APIs to get to market significantly faster.
Reduced Complexity
Every API has its own way of representing the same concepts, even among APIs in the same category. For example, one API might refer to an end-user as a "User" while another would refer to them as a "Customer," and each representation may differ in their properties and the names for those properties.
A unified API offers a consistent approach for interacting with different platforms. This standardization means that developers can use the same methods to request and manipulate data, regardless of the underlying service or technology. Developers use a single set of tools for all their data needs instead of having multiple systems that need to be maintained separately.
Enhanced Functionality
Some APIs don't have features that would greatly simplify integrating with them, such as webhooks. This forces developers to build workarounds, such as a polling system so that their application can be notified of updates to data, or a filtering system to limit the amount of data they receive from the API.
A well-designed unified API can function as a "wrapper" around these APIs, adding much-needed functionality such as webhooks, pagination, and token refreshing.
Increased Total Addressable Market
An application that can access different types of data has greater utility, which in turn leads to a larger market of potential customers.
A unified API with a large set of integrations acts a gateway to data from third-party applications, which can expand an application's total addressable market and enlarge that application's potential user base.
What Should You Look for in a Unified API?
Unified API endpoints
A unified API needs to have common API endpoints for specific categories of integrations. That sounds obvious given the "unified API" term, but most API solutions actually do not offer this. An API call to get a list of CRM contacts should be identical regardless of which integration that it is getting data from (e.g., Salesforce vs Hubspot).
Unified Data models
Not only must API endpoints be unified, but the data models used by those APIs must be unified as well. A CRM contact object returned from Hubspot should have the same structure as a CRM contact object returned from Salesforce. The number of fields in those common/unified objects should be sufficient to satisfy most use cases.
Unified Authorization
Getting access to your customer's data from their third-party accounts needs to be simple to do and consistent across all integrations. Educating your end-users about the integration should be straightforward and accessible.
Unified Scopes
Along with common/unified authentication, there should be a mechanism for abstracted permission scopes so that you do not need to research each platform's OAuth 2 scopes for your use cases.
Learn more about how scopes are handled at Unified.to.
Unified Webhooks
While some platforms support webhooks today, the majority do not support them natively. A unified API should abstract all of the complexities of handling those platforms that do not support webhooks and provide a unified webhook experience.
Learn more about webhooks at Unified.to.
Security
Security is a primary concern, especially when building an application with multiple integrations. Make sure that the unified API you choose has a good track record of keeping data safe and secure and has established security processes in place.
Ask these questions:
- Do they encrypt their database, especially for OAuth 2 credentials (client ID and client secret)?
- Do they store your customers' access tokens in an external secure external storage (e.g., AWS Secure Manager)?
- Do they store any of your customers' third-party data at all or do they just have that data transit through their systems?
You can read more about Unified.to's security posture here.
Use Case Compatibility
Not all unified APIs are the same. Not all of them will support the use case that your application requires.
Some applications will want to only read in the name and email of a customer's Contacts in their CRM, but may need a large number of supported vendors in any one category (e.g., CRMs). The number of supported vendors in any one unified API category or overall is called breadth.
Other applications will require considerably more fields in the common data model. For example, an HR application may require additional information, such as the Employees' vacation history, date of birth, and years of tenure.
The number of fields supported in the common data model is called depth. The more complicated a use case is, the more depth it will require.
Does your application require more than one API category? For example, if you are building a customer monitoring application, you will want to synchronize with your customer's…
- CRM,
- Support ticketing,
- Call Center, and
- probably even Marketing Tech vendors…
All with the purpose of getting an accurate "picture" of your customer's customers.
Unified APIs that support multiple categories focus on clustering, the linking of several data models to a common object (in this case, a customer).
Pricing Models and Cost at Scale
Most unified API vendors have a free pricing tier, which allows you to try out their service. The more important pricing consideration is how much the unified API will cost as your application grows and scales.
Consider the following:
- % of your selling price that will be taken by the cost of the unified API vendor
- The pricing model — is it based on API usage, connections, or customers? How does it compare to your application's pricing model?
If you extrapolate out these two values on a graph or spreadsheet, you will clearly see if their pricing model fits your business model.
Check Out Unified.to for the Best Unified API for Your Use Case
We've built Unified.to with all of the above criteria in mind. We're offering the best in:
- Real-time unified API, where every call you make brings you the most up-to-date data in real time,
- Breadth — number of API vendors supported, with 160 and growing, and
- Depth — number of common data fields provided by our data models…
…all while also delivering common API vendors that are in a common Cluster.
We've done this to support as many use cases for our customers as possible, while being very security conscious and taking your customers' data security concerns very seriously.
Let us know how we can better support you and your application's use case.