Every growing business eventually reaches the understanding: silos should be dealt with. Your CRM needs to sync with your marketing platform. Your ecommerce store needs to push orders into your ERP. Your support ticketing system needs to pull customer data from your data warehouse. The question isn’t whether you’ll integrate — it’s how.
Two paths sit in front of most engineering and IT teams: build custom integration code from scratch, or adopt an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). Each approach has real strengths and real trade-offs. The right answer depends on your organization’s size, technical capacity, budget, and the complexity of what you’re connecting. This explainer lays out the key considerations so you can make an informed decision.
Integration Middleware vs Custom Code: At A Glance
| Factor | iPaaS Middleware | Custom Integration Code |
| Initial setup time | Faster for standard use cases | Slower — built from scratch |
| Ongoing maintenance | Platform manages updates and patches | Your team owns every fix |
| Reliability & monitoring | Built-in dashboards, alerts, retry logic | Must be engineered separately |
| Scalability | Managed by platform infrastructure | Requires engineering as volumes grow |
| Non-developer access | Visual builders on some platforms | Typically requires developer involvement |
| Governance & visibility | Centralized by default | Depends on team practices |
| Security & credentials | Managed secrets vaults | Varies by implementation |
| Compliance support | Often designed for regulated contexts | Must be built in deliberately |
| Reusability | Shared asset libraries | Varies — often limited |
| Vendor API changes | Connector updates managed by platform | Your team detects and fixes breakages |
| Total cost of ownership | Higher licensing, lower maintenance overhead | Lower upfront, higher long-term engineering cost |
| Flexibility | Constrained by platform capabilities | Full control |
| Best for | Standard SaaS stacks, governance needs | Unique systems, specialized requirements |
What Custom Integration Code Looks Like in Practice
Custom integration code is exactly what it sounds like: developers write scripts or services that move data between systems. At its simplest, it might be a scheduled job that pulls records from one API and pushes them to another. At its most complex, it can involve event-driven microservices, message queues, and sophisticated transformation logic.
The appeal is real. You have full control over behavior, performance characteristics, and data handling. There’s no vendor dependency, no licensing cost, and no platform constraints — you can build exactly what your systems need. For organizations with strong engineering teams and highly specialized integration requirements, this control can be genuinely valuable.
The challenge is that integration code doesn’t stay simple for long. It needs error handling, monitoring, retry logic, and alerting. When a vendor updates their API, someone needs to update the code. When it fails at an inconvenient time, someone needs to diagnose and fix it. Research from Gartner and others has found that organizations often spend more engineering time maintaining integrations than building them — something worth factoring into the true cost calculation.
What iPaaS Middleware Offers
An iPaaS platform — such as MuleSoft, Boomi, Workato, DCKAP Integrator, Zapier for Enterprise, or Microsoft Azure Integration Services — provides a pre-built infrastructure layer designed specifically for connecting systems. Rather than building integration plumbing from scratch, teams work within a managed environment that handles much of the underlying complexity.
Pre-built connectors: They cover the majority of common SaaS applications, databases, and protocols. Instead of writing and maintaining OAuth flows, pagination logic, and rate limit handling for each system, you configure a certified connector that already handles these concerns. This can significantly reduce initial build time for standard integrations.
Built-in monitoring and observability: Which allows teams visibility into integration health through dashboards, alerting, and structured logs — capabilities that require meaningful additional engineering effort to replicate in a custom solution.
Managed scalability: The platform handles infrastructure concerns as data volumes grow, without requiring teams to rearchitect their integration layer.
Accessible tooling: On some platforms which allows non-developers to build and maintain integrations through visual workflow builders, which can reduce the bottleneck on engineering resources for routine integration work.
The trade-off is cost and flexibility. Enterprise iPaaS licensing can be substantial, and some platforms impose constraints on what’s possible within their execution environment. For highly specialized or performance-sensitive integrations, those constraints may matter.
Related read: ERP Middleware: All You Need To Know [+FAQs]
Speed and Long-Term Velocity
Integration platforms offers a clear edge in time-to-integration for standard use cases. Pre-built connectors and workflow templates can cut a multi-week custom development project down to just days. This benefit grows over time. Teams standardizing on integration platforms accumulate reusable assets, patterns, and expertise that speed up future projects. In contrast, custom code often results in a patchwork of one-off scripts with inconsistent quality and documentation.
This speed shines brightest when integrations align with the platform’s library. For proprietary systems, unique protocols, or complex logic, custom code may prove faster to develop and maintain.
Governance, Security, and Compliance
Governance is an area where the approaches diverge significantly. Custom point-to-point integrations scattered across repositories can make it difficult to answer basic questions: What data is moving where? Who owns which integration? How are credentials stored?
Integration platforms address this through centralized visibility, enforced credential management, audit logging, and role-based access controls. For organizations in regulated industries — or those subject to GDPR or SOC 2 requirements — this centralized governance can reduce compliance risk and audit overhead.
Custom integration environments can achieve equivalent governance, but it typically requires deliberate investment in tooling, documentation, and process. It doesn’t come for free.
When Each Approach Makes More Sense
Neither option is universally superior. Some factors that tend to favor integration platforms include having a large number of integrations across standard SaaS applications, limited engineering capacity to build and maintain custom code, a need for non-technical staff to manage integration workflows, and strong compliance or governance requirements.
Factors that may favor custom code include:
- Highly specialized or proprietary systems with no available connectors.
- Extreme performance or latency requirements.
- Integration logic so unique that a platform’s abstractions create more friction than they remove, and organizations with strong engineering teams.
- Cost sensitivity around licensing.
The ERP-First Integration Choice For Distributors: DCKAP
Among the third-party integration middleware solutions available today, DCKAP occupies a distinct niche: it is built specifically for manufacturers and distributors. These are industries that often run complex ERP environments at the center of their technology stack and rely on tight data synchronization across eCommerce, CRM, and supply chain systems.
DCKAP Integrator is designed with years of experience working within the distribution space, and has been used to integrate eCommerce, ERP, CRM, and other business systems to ensure smooth operations. Where many general-purpose integration platforms are designed to serve broad horizontal use cases, DCKAP Integrator is purpose-built around the specific integration challenges that distributors and manufacturers face, making it a strong candidate for businesses in those verticals evaluating their middleware options.
As an ERP-first integration platform, DCKAP Integrator treats the ERP as the central source of truth, connecting it to eCommerce, CRM, shipping, and other third-party systems. It supports leading ERPs including Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP Business One, and Epicor, among others. Core capabilities include a no-code flow builder, real-time sync, advanced data mapping, and detailed transaction logging, with managed onboarding that requires no specialized IT resources on the customer side.
For organizations outside the manufacturing and distribution space, a more general-purpose iPaaS platform may be a better fit. But for businesses in those verticals looking to connect their ERP to the rest of their digital commerce stack, DCKAP Integrator is worth evaluating alongside the broader field.
Making the Decision
The build-vs-buy question in integration comes down to where you want to concentrate cost and effort. Custom code concentrates cost in ongoing engineering time; iPaaS concentrates it in licensing. Custom code offers more flexibility; iPaaS offers faster time-to-value for common scenarios.
For most organizations with a growing portfolio of SaaS tools and limited engineering bandwidth, an iPaaS platform offers a pragmatic path to reliable, governable integrations without diverting significant developer resources from core product work. For organizations with unique technical requirements or strong in-house engineering capacity, the control and cost profile of custom code may be the better fit.
The most important step is being honest about your actual constraints — engineering capacity, compliance requirements, integration volume, and budget — rather than defaulting to either approach based on familiarity alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is iPaaS middelware and how does it differ from traditional middleware?
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is a cloud-based platform that enables organizations to connect different applications, data sources, and business processes without managing on-premise infrastructure. Traditional middleware — including Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) and Message-Oriented Middleware — were typically deployed on-premise and required significant IT infrastructure to operate. An ESB, for example, routes messages between various systems using a centralized hub architecture based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Modern integration solutions move this capability to the cloud, making it more accessible and reducing infrastructure overhead, though Enterprise Service Bus approaches still have a place in some legacy enterprise environments.
What are common use cases for iPaaS vs. custom integrations?
iPaaS middleware is well-suited for use cases like syncing customer data between a CRM and a marketing platform, automating order flows between an ecommerce system and an ERP, enabling real-time data synchronization between cloud services, and connecting cloud apps across a SaaS-heavy technology stack. Support teams, for instance, often use integration platforms to pull customer data into their helpdesk automatically — improving customer support without any custom development. Custom integrations tend to be a better fit for use cases involving proprietary or legacy systems, specialized business logic, or data flows with unusual performance or transformation requirements.
What is the difference between integration platforms and API management?
These are related but distinct capabilities. API management focuses on creating, publishing, securing, and monitoring APIs — essentially governing how external or internal consumers access your services. iPaaS focuses on orchestrating application integrations and data flows between systems, often consuming those APIs as part of a broader workflow. Many enterprise integration platforms include API management features, or integrate with dedicated API management tools, but they serve different primary purposes. Custom integration code can fulfill either function but requires building the governance layer separately.
How do iPaaS solutions support scalability and operational efficiency?
As business needs evolve and data volumes grow, integration infrastructure needs to scale accordingly. Integration platforms are designed to scale horizontally with demand, managing the underlying infrastructure automatically. This contributes to operational efficiency by reducing the engineering effort needed to keep integration flows running reliably as the business grows. Custom integration code can scale too, but typically requires deliberate architectural investment — load balancing, queue management, concurrency handling — that adds to the engineering burden over time.
What should IT leaders evaluate when selecting a middleware solution?
Key evaluation criteria include the breadth of prebuilt connectors for your existing systems, ease of use for both technical and non-technical team members, support for real-time data synchronization where your business requires it, API management capabilities, scalability to meet future business needs, and total cost of ownership including licensing and implementation. It’s also worth assessing how well the platform supports enterprise application integration patterns your organization relies on, and whether the vendor’s support team has experience in your industry or with your specific technology stack.
