I’d love to hear from developers about their journey switching from custom-built integration solutions to IPaaS platforms like MuleSoft, Zapier, or Microsoft Power Automate.
Looking for insights on:
What type of integration project were you working on?
Which IPaaS solution did you pick and what influenced your decision?
What aspects worked out as planned?
What challenges or surprises did you encounter?
How did this change impact your development team or company structure?
I’m especially interested in hearing about any lessons learned during the migration process and whether you’d recommend others make a similar move.
Switched about 18 months ago when our API integration layer became a nightmare. We’re running e-commerce with inventory sync across multiple channels plus order management workflows. Went with Microsoft Power Automate mainly for the pricing - flat monthly cost instead of per-execution models that freaked out finance. Took forever to decide though, like 3 months just comparing platforms. What I love is the built-in error handling and retry stuff. Our old custom solution would just crash when third-party APIs went down, needed manual fixes every time. Now failed runs retry automatically with exponential backoff. Biggest pain was getting the team on board. Devs felt like we were losing control, and yeah, performance was slower than our optimized custom code at first. Had to show ROI over 6 months before everyone stopped complaining. Team structure changed too - moved one backend dev to ‘integration specialist’ who handles platform config. Less coding, more business logic design. I’d do it again, but only if you’re okay trading some performance for way better reliability and easier maintenance.
we’re still switching from our custom node.js setup to zapier - it’s been a ride lol. the biggest surprise? all the undocumented tribal knowledge hiding in our code. we had these random data transformations that just worked, but now we’re rebuilding everything and trying to remember why we built it that way. plus our cfo is thrilled about predictable monthly costs instead of those surprise aws bills when integrations went haywire.
I’ve done this twice - once at a fintech startup and again at my current job. Both times we had payment processing integrations that became total maintenance nightmares.
First time we picked Zapier because it was cheap and they promised business users could handle simple workflows themselves. Partly true, but we hit their execution limits fast and costs exploded as we grew. Debugging failed workflows was way harder than just looking at stack traces in our own code.
Second time we went with Microsoft Power Automate since we were already neck-deep in Microsoft stuff. Rolling it out was smoother because of our existing Azure setup, and the enterprise connectors handled compliance better.
What surprised me both times was how complex data transformation got. These platforms are great at moving data around, but once you need complex business rules or validation, you’re writing custom connectors anyway. We ended up keeping way more custom code than expected.
The real win though? Operational resilience. Our custom solutions would fail silently or break everything else when they crashed. IPaaS platforms have way better monitoring and retry stuff built in. Worth it just for that.
We switched 2 years ago when custom integrations were eating 40% of our dev time just on maintenance.
We had 15 different SaaS tools that needed to talk - CRM, marketing automation, support tickets, accounting, everything. Our homegrown solution was Python scripts and webhooks that broke whenever vendors updated their APIs.
Went with MuleSoft since we had enterprise budget and needed something for our data volumes. Came down to their connector ecosystem and our ops team already knew their monitoring tools.
Migration took 4 months. Pre-built connectors for most systems worked great - cut integration dev time by 70%.
Biggest surprise? The learning curve. iPaaS platforms claim ‘low code’ but you still need people who get data mapping and APIs. Had to train junior devs way more than expected.
Also ran into limitations with complex business logic we had to work around. Visual flow builders can’t handle weird edge cases like custom code does.
Team-wise, it freed up senior engineers for core product features instead of babysitting integrations. Ops took over daily integration monitoring.
I’d recommend it for standard use cases. Just budget extra training time and don’t expect completely ‘no code’.
This guide covers the business considerations we went through evaluating platforms.
