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Adding user-facing webhook integration in your SaaS platform

When trying to add integrations, most SaaS builders often choose to offer webhooks as a way to fetch or sync data between platforms.

But, what are webhooks and how can you leverage 3rd party webhooks to build integrations in your SaaS that your customers need? Let’s dive right in.

What are webhooks?

Webhooks are automated alerts that are sent when there is a change of any type on a platform. Think of it like a sms notification you receive when there is a change on a specific app.

A webhooks almost always contains a payload, the actual data package, with details on what specifically has changed. Once you receive this notification, based on the payload received, you can query the system to fetch the updated data.

Webhooks vs. Polling

Polling, essentially, is when you constantly send a request to a system (aka poll) to check if there are any changes. Polling can be set up to run a check anywhere from a few seconds to hours. As you can imagine, this is extremely resource intensive and not the most efficient way of checking for change.

This makes polling:

  • Resource intensive
  • Difficult to manage at scale
  • Face issues related to synchronization with large amount of data
  • Choke your local db with heavy Computing
  • Exhausting to debug and rerun on errors

On the other hand, Webhooks are:

  • Extremely efficient with light computing powers
  • Capable of offering in-time notifications
  • Able to re-run if there are failures
  • Capable to syncronize just a few records at a time

This is what makes Webhooks a more effective and efficient way of getting notified of any change.

Why should you care about webhooks?

When building user-facing integrations in your SaaS, you may want to offer the ability to keep their account updated with data from a 3rd party app. Polling the app for data changes would be not be the best way to do this.

You need Webhooks.

Setting up Webhooks

If you are building out webhook listening capabilities for each app provider, this can get a bit complicated. Every provider has their own, well defined, methods and processes to access and activate webhook listening. Not to forget the resources, servers and developer hours required. Building this can take anywhere from weeks, if not months for a single provider.

This is where an integration platform, such as Pathfix, can help.

Please note: the webhook functionality is only available in Pathfix Automation and works with the authentication provided by the Pathfix OAuth platform.

Pathfix Automation has pre-configured webhook connections to a few providers, this makes it easy for you to be able to connect, start listening for webhook events for each provider and add the integration to your platform.

The click-to-configure user facing webhooks can be setup in just a few minutes for any of the available providers. Once set up, you can trigger an API Automation within the platform and get mapped data back into your system.

The following example shows a simple use case, where:

  1. We listen for a webhook change notification if a new calendar event is created
  2. Then we create the same event in Google Calendar
  3. Create the event in Microsoft Calendar
  4. Send the data back to your database

This one-time setup allows you to enable webhook listening in your app AND get mapped data for each user, without managing servers or adding unnecessary code for you to manage.

Conclusion

Webhooks are a fantastic means for you to be able to sync data between your platform and any 3rd party application.

If you are ready to build out your integrations, check out the Pathfix platforms for your specific needs:

Need help with your integrations? Reach out to us and we will be happy to set this up for you.

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SaaS Integrations – Adding user-facing, native integrations in your SaaS

Let’s start at the beginning….

What is SaaS integration?

SaaS integrations are native, user-facing integrations that allow your users to connect your platform with any third-party software platform they use, allowing them to either push or pull data between the platform.

While there are several solutions that offer integrations for Enterpise platforms including on-premise, legacy connection etc., Pathfix's integration solutions is built for SaaS platforms that want to add native, user-facing integrations on their platform. This includes Startups, SMBs and Enterprise.

But… why should you add integrations to your SaaS?

We have spoken with thousands of developers, makers and founders over the years who decided to add integrations on their platform. The top reasons, and the subsequent benefits, always remain the same:

Scalability

Adding integrations to SaaS allowed them to add more value to their product. By giving their users the ability to connect to other softwares, their users got new ways of using/extending their product. This helped them scale their product significantly vs. if they had simply not added any integrations

Usability

By being a part of their users existing software stack, they increase the odds of their software being used. Offering integrations to other platforms also means that their users got to do much more with the data collected from your software AND data received from the other software platforms.

User Ease of Use

Not having to switch between apps, logins (think about those retention emails), they simplified how their users end up using the data collected by their app. They did not just build dependency on their app but you have also eased the users ability to use the platform.

Let's get down to implementation

Building integrations in your SaaS generally means that you are allocating a significant portion of your developer resources. There are many moving parts – framework, infrastructure, oauth, API understanding, API builds, code management, additional servers… you get it.

For any SaaS, developer resources are precious. This is time you would rather have them spend on building out your core product instead of have them spend time building features that are not core to your product.

There are 2 primary elements of integrations – OAuth and API Integration

Here is how you can solve both these elements, without building a team and spending resources on it:

OAuth Platform

The Pathfix OAuth Platform handles the entire OAuth infrastructure you need for your integrations. All you need is the provider ClientID, Client Secret and the Scopes you wish to access (this would help define the data you wish to access from the platform).

Once you have added the provider you want to add the integration for, copy the Pathfix script and add it to the integration page of your SaaS.

Thats it. Your SaaS will now have integrations enabled and your users will be able to click and connect their accounts.

Once the connection has been setup, you can make API calls to the provider and fetch the data in real-time. You can choose to call these APIs from your backend system directly, or chain multiple APIs and pull the mapped data directly in your database for the user. This is done with the Pathfix Automation Platform.

API Integrations (Automation Platform)

The Pathfix Automation Platform is a powerful API integration platform that runs API calls in your connected user’s context and fetches the data from the provider, maps the data to your database and send the information back to you – all without you needing a transformation engine, API management or integration servers.

Pathfix Automation is a powerful API integration platform, with a visual builder, that enables SaaS integrations by calling APIs and fetching data for all your connected users. The platform handles API chaining to multiple providers, data mapping and transformation, webhooks and much more.

This allows you to go from zero to integrated, in just a few days!

Conclusion

Integrations are critical for the growth of any SaaS platform and we at Pathfix have built integration solutions specifically for the SaaS creators.

With thousands of customers from Startup all the way to Enterprise, we have solved native integrations to hundreds of 3rd party apps.

If you are ready to build out your integrations, check out the Pathfix platforms for your specific needs:

Need help with your integrations? Reach out to us and we will be happy to set this up for you.