Top 5 Merge.dev Alternatives for Native Integrations

Are you looking for Merge alternatives to help you scale your SaaS product’s native integration roadmap? 

If so, you’re in the right place.

Unified APIs like Merge have emerged to tackle the challenge of a never-ending integration roadmap, but they are a secondary take to solving this long-standing problem. 

To ensure you’re equipped to pick the best solution for accelerating integration development, we’ll explore not only the top Merge alternatives in the unified API space but also worthy Merge alternatives in the embedded iPaaS category.

So, without further ado, let’s get right into it. 

TL;DR

▶️ Merge is a unified API platform that offers unified APIs across 7 different verticals: 

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS)

• Application Tracking Systems (ATS)

• Accounting

• Marketing Automation

• File Storage

• Ticketing

▶️ Paragon is the best Merge alternative in the embedded iPaaS category. It enables a fully white-labeled and native end-user experience and provides 1:1 parity with each third-party API (unlike Merge). It also has a load-tested infrastructure and robust error handling and monitoring.

▶️ If you want to stay with unified APIs, Apideck and Unified.to are your best bets. They save developers time by defining integration logic once and scaling across all third-party services.

▶️ Embedded iPaaS solutions provide 1:1 abstractions of third-party APIs to build deeper integrations. These solutions also provide many other infrastructure benefits and tooling that streamline the integration development process.

Why Look for Merge Alternatives?

Before we explore our picks for the best alternatives, let's first go over Merge’s strengths and why you might look for Merge alternatives in the first place ⤵️

Merge.dev’s strengths 

Merge’s biggest strength is definitely the sheer range of individual APIs that it integrates with for some of the seven unified APIs it offers. 

▶️ The solution now offers connections to over 200 third-party apps. While it currently only has seven unified APIs, it provides the best coverage for each category among other unified API solutions on this list., especially in the HRIS and ATS categories.

▶️ Merge offers managed sync primitives for standard record types, so you won't have to worry about data transformations for each underlying vendor.

On top of these, Merge supports pagination across all requests, which is advantageous compared to building in-house.

Note: Certain categories (such as file storage) only have 5 integrations.

Reasons why Merge.Dev customers look for alternatives

1 - Merge’s unified API can’t handle unique endpoints and bespoke use cases

Unified APIs have apparent drawbacks that simply don’t work for some people’s needs, like: 

• They support lots of integrations but with limited coverage.

• They only accommodate objects and endpoints that are the same across all supported apps. 

• Can’t handle abstracts of an API’s integration and bespoke experiences/workflows.

❗Scroll to the end of this article ⤵️ for a detailed breakdown of Unifed APIs’ strengths and weaknesses. 

All the limitations of unified APIs apply to Merge - as such, it’s a viable solution if you want to build a very surface-level integration to a group of apps in the same category. 

The unified model is too reductive for anything specific to any particular integration or user. Merge's unified API won't support endpoints specific to one app. 

Many companies have had to move off of Merge because of this, especially for specific categories such as CRMs, where end-users have different requirements.

2 - Merge is limited to specific verticals/integrations

The integrations you can build on Merge are strictly limited to the 7 verticals for which Merge provides unified APIs and the integrations they support within the unified API. If your app needs an integration not in one of those verticals, you’ll have to work with a Merge alternative or build that integration in-house.

This is a challenge all unified API solutions face, but is not necessarily the case for embedded iPaaS solutions, which we’ll highlight further down. 

3 - Lack of support for real-time or event-driven use cases

Merge provides sync out-of-the-box but at the cost of the sync running on a set frequency (like once every 24 hours). 

Because they don't offer webhooks for most of their integrations, if you need anything in real time, they either can't support it or will make it available at a hefty enterprise cost by running full syncs at a higher frequency.

Also, any non-technical support requests like re-authenticating or updating integration configurations must be triaged to engineering. 

This will result in longer incident response times and wasted engineering resources.

4 - Merge’s pricing will sneak up on you

While they have a lower starting price, Merge’s pricing scales linearly. The cost of each additional end customer will add up as you grow, making most integrations unfeasible at a COGS level as you scale.

5 - Lack of infrastructure for scale and AI models

Ultimately, Merge only provides an API. You will be tasked with building an integration infrastructure to handle the request volume you need to support at scale. 

This will require that you manually:

• Support high concurrency in a high-availability runtime.

• Design robust error-handling mechanisms.

• Auto-scale resources as needed.

For AI companies that want to ingest ALL the available data from a third-party app, Merge.dev also doesn’t support unstructured data sources very well, as those don’t fit neatly in a ‘schema.’

Now, let’s dive into some alternatives you should consider ⬇️

What are the best alternatives to Merge.dev?

According to experts and reviews, the best alternatives to Merge in 2024 are:

1. Paragon — Embedded iPaaS for developers that’s the best Merge alternative overall. 

2. Apideck — Unified API that displays integrations on your website.

3. Unified.to — Unified API with detailed documentation for all endpoints and data models.

4. Cyclr — Embedded iPaaS with lots of pre-built connectors.

5. Embedded Tray.io — iPaaS turned Embedded iPaaS that’s excellent for scalable enterprise integrations. 

Let’s take a detailed look at each one. 

Merge Alternative #1 - Paragon

Paragon is at the top of our best Merge alternatives list because an overwhelming number of Merge customers are switching to Paragon.

Paragon is an Embedded Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) that lets you quickly and reliably add dozens of integrations to your app. 

Unlike unified APIs that provide generalized solutions, Paragon empowers developers to create deep and robust integrations that meet specific needs and use cases, making it an ideal choice for engineering teams seeking more control and adaptability.

But what exactly makes Paragon so good?

Let's take a look ⤵️

Paragon’s Features

Paragon offers a range of robust features designed to simplify and expedite the integration process. 

1. Workflows

One of the core components of Paragon is Workflows, which lets you easily define the business logic for your product's integrations. 

And unlike other Embedded iPaaS solutions, Paragon enables engineering teams to build workflows in a visual workflow editor and in code with a Typescript Framework called Paragraph.

Workflows let you focus purely on defining the integration logic, without worrying about the plumbing. 

Not only are they self-documenting and highly observable, the workflow engine is battle-tested to support the scale of enterprise companies like Dropbox, and provides: 

• Built-in smart rate limits.

• Managed webhooks.

• Auto-retry. 

• And much more.

When building workflows, you have several common step types at your disposal:

• Integration Actions: Perform specific actions in your users' connected app accounts, such as sending a Slack message or querying contacts from Salesforce without having to understand the underlying 3rd party API.

• Requests: You can make requests to any API, including sending data to your application, which provides high flexibility in interacting with external services.

• Functions: Write custom JavaScript to transform data or execute custom business logic, with support for npm libraries, allowing for extensive customization and functionality.

• Conditionals: Add conditional branching logic to your workflows, ensuring that different actions can be taken based on specific criteria or conditions.

• Fan Out: Iterate in parallel over a list of data, processing each item concurrently and reducing results in downstream steps, which is useful for handling large datasets efficiently.

Experience building a workflow via this short product tour 👇

2. Ingest, Sync or Automate

Unlike Merge, which primarily focuses on sync jobs on a multi-hour frequency, Paragon gives you full control over the use cases you need to build through triggers.

You can trigger ingestion jobs upon a user authenticating the integration, sync data in real time or on a scheduler, or trigger workflows via third-party webhooks or events in your application.

For instance, you might trigger a workflow whenever new contacts are added to a user's Salesforce account, ensuring real-time synchronization of Salesforce contacts with your application. 

Additionally, Integration-Enabled Triggers can activate workflows when a user first enables your integration, such as syncing all leads from a customer's CRM to your application immediately upon integration activation. 

3. Custom integration builder

Another huge advantage of Paragon is the Custom Integration Builder, which enables you to create custom integrations with any app provider, even if it is not natively supported by Paragon's integration catalog. 

Aside from the API endpoint abstractions, you still get all the benefits of the Paragon platform including the embedded Connect Portal for integratoin auth and config, fully managed authentication across, the highly scalable workflow engine, as well as all the monitoring features such as the Customer Dashboard and Task History.

Additionally, you can access all API methods provided by the application's API.

You can access your custom integration through the Workflow Builder or Paragon SDK.

This flexibility allows you to support any integration your users might need, enhancing your product's capability and appeal, which is a downside with Merge.

4. The Connect API

Paragon offers a proxy API for authenticated requests to any integration in its catalog. This offers a lot of flexibility when you need to pull data from the third-party API dynamically outside the construct of workflows.

In fact, many AI companies leverage the Connect API heavily to enable their LLMs to make requests to their users' third-party APIs to grab data on-demand to answer queries.

How Does Paragon Compare to Merge?

There are a lot of additional benefits that Paragon offers above Merge, but here is a quick summary.

While Merge is excellent for building a large number of generic integrations within specific categories, it lacks flexibility and real-time capabilities. 

Merge’s unified API limits the API endpoints accessible, which means unique endpoints specific to individual products are often unsupported. Additionally, Merge’s minimal support for webhooks and the high cost of near real-time data synchronization can be significant drawbacks. 

In contrast, Paragon supports real-time and CRON/scheduler-based use cases, making it suitable for applications requiring timely data updates. 

Paragon’s pricing is also more scalable, making it more feasible as your number of end customers grows.

Paragon’s support for unstructured data sources and comprehensive API access make it a superior choice for AI companies needing extensive data from third-party apps. 

Overall, Paragon offers an extensible platform with an enterprise-ready, serverless infrastructure for high-throughput, real-time use cases, making it the more versatile option.

Paragon’s Pros and Cons

✅ Security
Paragon is SOC II and GDPR certified. For even more extensive security requirements, you can leverage their on-premise deployment options.

✅ Robust Monitoring
Connected Users Dashboard and the ability to stream errors into your existing error-management tools.

✅ Extensive Integration Catalog
Deep abstractions over the 3rd party APIs on over 100 integrations, as well as the ability to build Custom Integrations and make Proxy requests to the underlying 3rd party APIs.

✅ Support for real-time/event-driven integrations
Supports 3rd party webhooks for triggering workflows.

❌ Lack of a Unified Model
Unlike Merge, Paragon does not provide a unified model that allows you to define integration logic once and apply it across multiple integrations within a category.

❌ Limited Pre-Built Integrations in HRIS/ATS
While Paragon covers a broad range of integration categories, its pre-built catalog is not as extensive as Merge in specific areas like HRIS and ATS.

Unless you are confident that every integration you will ever need to build is encompassed within Merge’s unified API categories, an embedded iPaaS solution will be your best bet, and out of the embedded iPaaS solutions, Paragon is the most extensible and developer-friendly.

Merge Alternative #2 - Apideck

Apideck is a viable Merge alternative in the unified API category, and they are the second to market in this category. Currently, the unified APIs they offer are:

• Accounting

• CRM

• File Storage

• HRIS

• ATS

• Ecommerce

• Issue Tracking

• POS

• SMS

If the integration you need falls within one of their unified API categories that Merge does not offer, then Apideck would have a clear advantage.

But who is Apideck best for?

Who Is It For?

Apideck provides the infrastructure building blocks for B2B SaaS companies to build and market integrations through one platform. 

The platform is best suited for smaller B2B companies that don't require special integrations with software featuring unique capabilities. 

Apideck Features

In contrast to other solutions in this list, Apideck is primarily known for its integration marketplace. Branded as the Apideck Ecosystem, the portal displays integrations on your website. It is designed to make managing listings for integrations with third-party developers and other partners easier.

While this feature did get them big logos such as Gong and Lever, the Apideck Ecosystem is not an in-app integration marketplace, nor a place where you or your customers can build integrations. It’s essentially a marketing/partner portal.

In 2022, they began focusing more on their Unified API products - let’s take a look.

Apideck has taken a slightly different approach to Merge regarding their integration roadmap. Instead of competing head-on with Merge in terms of going deep in each vertical, they’ve focused on building more unified APIs, each with far fewer supported integrations (as few as two).

This shows an openness to accommodating integrations that don’t fit within their existing unified APIs, whereas Merge focuses primarily on their core unified API categories.

However, as you can see here, most integrations listed on their catalog are auth-only (aka don’t offer any API abstractions).

Apideck Pricing

Apideck offers two types of plans: Unified APIs and Integration Marketplace.

For Unified APIs:

• Launch: For startups that need to integrate with one Unified API. $299/month

• Growth: For more API calls, multiple Unified APIs, and custom field mappings. $599/month

• Enterprise: Custom setups and volume discounts. Please contact for pricing.

There is also a free trial available. You can start for free and use any API while building your project, with a limit of 2,500 API requests. 

For Integration Marketplace:

• Launch: For medium-sized ecosystems with up to 50 listings. $249/month

• Growth: For larger ecosystems with up to 100 listings and custom CSS. $499/month

• Enterprise: For unlimited listings, users, and customizations. Please contact for pricing.

Apideck Pros and Cons

Apideck offers several advantages and some limitations that are important to consider.

✅ Great customer support

The Apideck team has been very responsive and supportive throughout the integration process. 

✅ Expanding integration library

Apideck continuously adds new integrations. 

✅ Great onboarding experience

Great onboarding experience, which can be helpful given the complexity of their components.

❌ Limiting partnership requirements for some connectors
Partnering with companies for certain integrations is burdensome and time-consuming.

❌ Narrow use case coverage
Unfortunately, Apideck suffers from all the limitations that Merge and other unified APIs do in terms of use case limitations. 

❌ Limited number of live integrations
This can limit the immediate usability of their platform for some users.

Merge Alternative #3 - Unified.to

Unified.to is another strong competitor to Merge in the unified API category. It offers more than 170+ integrations across 13 different categories, including:

• Accounting

• Commerce

• CRM

• Call Center

• Ticketing

• Marketing

• Payment

• Storage

• HR

• ATS

• Authentication

• Enrichment

• Generative AI

Compared to Merge, Unified has fewer HRIS integrations but provides more integration support within each of the remaining categories (except ticketing).

Before we delve into the specifics of Unified.to, let's understand why this platform might be the right choice for you.

Who Is It For?

Unified.to is the Unified API developer platform for SaaS integrations. It is particularly beneficial for SMBs and startups who want to leverage pre-built integrations to save time and resources on development.

Unified.to Features

You can launch faster with a pre-built integrations directory. You can embed it into your product with just one line of code using Javascript, React, Vue, or Angular components.

The platform includes observability and transparency features for real-time logging, and it provides detailed and clear documentation for all endpoints and data models.

Unified.to Pricing

Unified.to offers five pricing plans:

• Free: Get 30 days of unlimited access to test their unified APIs in non-production applications. No credit card needed. $0/month

• Startup: For launching unified APIs in production applications. $250+/month

• Growth: For production applications with growing customer usage. $1,000+/month

• Scale: For large-scale applications with high customer usage. $5,000+/month

• Enterprise: Contact them for custom limits, pricing, and configurations.

They also offer a pricing calculator on their pricing page. This tool calculates the estimated monthly cost based on the number of users, average connections per user, and average daily API requests.

Unified.to Pros and Cons

✅ Authentication flexibility

Their embedded authentication script works great in no-code tools.

✅ Reduced development time

Lots of pre-built integrations for various APIs.

✅ Easy to get started

They make it very easy for developers to get started and launch integrations.

❌ Limited API coverage

Unified.to can offer more integrations across categories because the API coverage they support within each integration is limited. 

❌ Incorrect categorization and data mapping

For example, QuickBooks is an accounting software, not an HRIS. 

Merge Alternative #4 - Cyclr

Next on our list is Cyclr, one of the first embedded iPaaS platforms. Cyclr lets companies build native integrations with bespoke user workflows but doesn’t have Paragon’s developer friendliness and headless UI.  

Who Is It For?

Cyclr is designed specifically for B2B software companies. 

Cyclr Features

Cyclr comes with more than 500 pre-built connectors to third-party apps, more than any other Merge alternative in this article. 

Similar to Paragon’s custom integration builder, Cyclr also allows users to build custom connectors to third-party applications. This feature offers greater flexibility and gives Cyclr an advantage over Merge and other unified APIs.

Cyclr does not provide a headless implementation for the end-user experience but a white-labeled, out-of-the-box UI similar to what Merge and Paragon both offer. 

‍While Cyclr is one of the cheaper embedded iPaaS solutions (for the reasons we’ll share below), it does cover basic functionality, such as custom field mapping, that the unified APIs cannot support.

Cyclr Pricing

Cyclr offers a two-week free trial with access to the platform's full functionality. 

During the trial, Cyclr builds basic connectivity to your platform against a defined use case, enabling you to immediately see data in and out of your SaaS application. 

💡 You need to upgrade your account to a paid plan to push integrations to production.

• Growth Plan: $2,095 per month

• Scale Plan: $5,695 per month

• Self-Hosted Enterprise: Custom pricing

• Managed Hosted Enterprise: Custom pricing

These plans all incluse unlimited integrations and users. They vary based on the number of connectors included.

Cyclr Pros and Cons

✅ Vast integration library

500+ pre-built connectors.

✅ Doesn’t force a unified API interface

Cyclr’s API lets you maintain your app’s UI/UX.

✅ Flexible custom connectors

You can embed the builder directly into your software, making edits easy for everyone, not just technical managers.

❌ Clunky UI

Their documentation needs to be improved to make the tool truly self-service.

❌ Limited code Editor

Especially for workflows involving before_action or after_action scripts. A development-like editor would make debugging easier.

❌ Connector limitations
Cyclr limits users to its pre-built actions for each of the third-party applications. 

❌ No failure or event alerts
Unlike Paragon, Cyclr doesn’t feed integration errors back to developers, causing downtime risk.

Merge Alternative #5 - Embedded Tray.io

Last but not least, we have Embedded Tray.io, another embedded iPaaS solution, available as an optional add-on to Tray.io Enterprise customers.

Who Is It For?

Embedded Tray.io caters to B2B software companies looking to build bespoke, one-off integrations for specific customers or customize integrations to fit specific needs. 

It's particularly beneficial for businesses whose integration needs extend beyond standard product integrations. It supports both internal integration use cases and the management of API endpoints.

💡 Note that it’s currently only available to Tray’s existing enterprise customers. 

Embedded Tray.io Features

Embedded Tray.io offers a native integration experience for your customers, making it easy to white-label the integration process. 

The Configuration Wizard is intuitive and customizable. It guides users through the entire activation process, helping them with authentication, integration settings, and activation or deactivation with just a few clicks.

The Tray Integration Manager is designed for service experts to build, manage, and maintain third-party integrations at scale. It features a low-code visual workflow builder that enables technical teams to create complex embedded integrations. 

The platform comes with pre-built connectors to popular B2B SaaS applications and includes logic-based helpers to simplify the integration process. 

Embedded Tray.io Pricing

Embedded Tray.io is available as an add-on exclusively for Enterprise customers. 

This means that to access this feature, businesses need to subscribe to Tray.io's Enterprise plan. The plan includes 750k starter task credits, access to all add-ons, and the Embedded Bundle.

Embedded Tray.io Pros and Cons

✅ Low development work is needed

Tray.io helps teams leverage their APIs to expand product capabilities without extensive development work. 

✅ Easy to implement

Customer reviews often mention how easy Tray.io is to use and manage at scale.

✅ Highly scalable infrastructure

Tray’s integration infrastructure is made for enterprise scale.

❌ Poor customer support

Reaching the customer support team can be challenging, and response times are often slow. 

❌ Doesn’t offer headless, custom UI

Developers don’t have full control over embedding options. 

❌ Limited pre-built tool

Specific improvements like parallel execution and request trickle for APIs with low throughput are missing.

Benefits and drawbacks of unified APIs

If you’re looking to accelerate your integration roadmap, working with a unified API platform like Merge is just one solution of many. And, like every option on the market, unified APIs come with their own set of pros and cons. So before you make a choice for Merge alternative, it’s important to understand both strengths and weaknesses of unified API. 

Strengths

Building a native integration fully in-house is both time-consuming and technically demanding. 

One component of this process is that your engineers will need to spend weeks combing through API documentation in order to learn how to push or pull the data they need between your application and each platform you need to integrate with. 

The main advantage of a unified API is that it removes the need to learn the specifics of dozens of unique APIs. Instead, you only need to learn how to interact with a single unified API for any given category and build out the integration logic once.

The unified API will then communicate with all its supported APIs, and the vendor behind the unified API will maintain those integrations over time.

Weaknesses

Inherently, unified APIs can only accommodate the lowest common denominator of objects and endpoints across a group of APIs in order to provide a generalized data model across those services, which creates an inverse relationship between the number of supported integrations and the possible coverage that the unified API can provide.

In simpler words, Unified APIs can only support common features found in all the APIs they connect with. This means they can't handle unique features of specific services, as those features can't be generalized across all integrations. So, the more integrations a unified API platform supports, the fewer unique features it can offer.

Here are a few examples of scenarios where a unified API is unable to support the use case or creates severe limitations in what can be achieved, across both API coverage and other factors such as rate limits and required fields:

• One app in the unified API has an object or field that the others don’t, such as Salesforce having lead/contact objects that behave differently than the single contact objects of other CRMs like HubSpot. 

• One app in the unified API requires specific fields that the others don’t. An example here is that Salesforce requires you to enter your Last Name, Company, and Lead Status to create a new lead, while HubSpot does not. 

• One app in the unified API has a single field that corresponds to multiple fields in other apps. The classic example here is when one app requires you to enter First Name and Last Name as two different fields, whereas another just has one field for Name. 

• Two apps might have features that do the same thing, but in a way that’s irreconcilable. For instance, you cannot reconcile an applicant tracking system app that rates candidates with a score between 1-10 with another one that has a Yes/No system coupled with comments.

• If one app’s API has a significantly higher rate limit than another, what do you do if you need to make more requests per hour than is allowed by the app with the lower rate limit? In this situation, it’s not possible to update both apps concurrently. 

• Not all apps provide the same methods for updating objects and fields. For instance, sometimes one app might support specific webhooks while others do not.

• If a use case requires field mapping to custom fields in your customers’ apps, that cannot be supported.

While this is just a high-level overview of unified APIs, you can find a more in-depth analysis of unified APIs and the considerations you need to be aware of before working with one here.

Ship Every SaaS Integration Your Users Need Faster and Easier with Paragon

All five solutions listed above are solid products—there's no doubt about that. The distinction is whether you want to continue leveraging a unified API or get the flexibility of an embedded IPaaS.

With Paragon, you can build integrations 10-100 times faster by accessing a single integration layer with a rapidly growing catalog of APIs. This lets you focus on building your product rather than managing complex integrations. 

Unlike Merge, Paragon helps you save development resources by cutting implementation time, allowing your team to concentrate on core product development. 

Paragon also offers predictable and scalable pricing that adjusts with the amount of API calls, requiring no additional infrastructure to set up or manage at scale. 

Ready? Try Paragon for free today, or request a demo from our team.

Related Reading:

• Top Embedded iPaaS Providers in 2024

• Top Prismatic Alternatives - Embedded iPaaS Comparison

• Top Tray Embedded Alternatives

• Top Cyclr Alternatives