Unified APIs (application programming interfaces), also called universal or normalized APIs, provide a single “meta" API that is used to interact with multiple software applications within the same category. These tools act as an abstraction layer that handles communication with multiple applications by aggregating and standardizing their APIs and data models into a single API.
SaaS providers use these tools to improve the ease of building customer-facing integrations to multiple applications in the same category, such as accounting, banking, cloud storage, CRM, email, HR, payroll, or scheduling systems. They can save teams significant time and resources when building numerous similar integrations. For example, a SaaS product team may want to provide their customers with integrations that import employee data from multiple HR systems into their application. Rather than building a separate integration to each HR system, they can build one integration to a unified HR API that connects their application with all desired HR applications. Leveraging a unified API provides a single, simplified API design and a consistent developer experience.
There is some relationship between unified APIs and embedded integration platforms, as they allow product teams to build native integrations with their customers’ third-party applications. However, unified APIs are typically code focused and used by software developers to build straightforward integrations within a single category. In contrast, embedded integration platforms are typically low-code tools used by both developers and non-developers to build a broader range of integrations within both common and vertical-specific software categories.
To qualify for inclusion in the Unified APIs category, a product must:
Allow users to build integrations between their application and customer-facing applications
Aggregate multiple APIs within the same software category into a single API
Provide a standardized data model and developer experience