Build vs. Buy: The Pitfalls of Building your in-house Software Integration Solution

In the global knowledge economy, companies need agility to stay competitive. To achieve it, corporations continuously improve their business workflows for products and services. That’s given rise to work management systems that depend heavily on integrating data and information within the company to optimize internal processes.

But today’s corporations also live in an interconnected world. From large enterprises to small and medium businesses, companies exchange data with one another at many stages of their workflows, and integration between internal teams, while important, stops at company borders. 

Different organizations run different work management systems. Different data models. Different processes. And it’s this data in these different systems that must be connected if companies want to reduce friction and improve efficiency.

So the question remains: how do companies integrate data between themselves in the most efficient way possible? In an earlier article, The Journey of Software Integration, we concluded that to optimize work management systems without sacrificing internal processes, automated integration was the only viable answer.

But what’s the best method of cross-company integration? Should companies build their own integration or buy a best-of-breed software package? This article breaks down the advantages and disadvantages of each approach by walking through the phases of an integration project, and the hidden costs most teams don’t anticipate until it’s too late.

Key Takeaways

• Building integration in-house gives you control but creates compounding costs in customization, maintenance, and knowledge transfer that far exceed initial estimates.
• Buying commercial integration software reduces long-term costs because vendors handle upgrades, documentation, and support across the lifecycle of the project.
• The real cost difference between build and buy shows up after launch—during customization, maintenance, and system upgrades—not during initial development.
• Cross-company integration adds layers of complexity that in-house teams rarely plan for, including coordinating changes across independent organizations with different systems and processes.
• Autonomy, flexibility, and reliability are the three features that matter most when evaluating a commercial integration solution for cross-company scenarios.
• AI-assisted configuration and pre-built connectors dramatically compress implementation timelines and reduce the scripting expertise required to get integrations running.

When Does Build vs. Buy Become a Real Decision?

Not every integration scenario requires a formal build vs. buy evaluation. If you’re connecting two internal tools with a simple one-directional data push, a lightweight script might be enough.

The build vs. buy decision becomes critical when:

• Your integration crosses company boundaries. Cross-company integrations introduce variables you don’t control: your partner’s system upgrades, their security requirements, their data model changes. Building for these scenarios means building for unpredictability.
• You need bidirectional synchronization. One-way data pushes are straightforward. Bidirectional sync where changes on either side propagate to the other—while respecting each organization’s internal rules—is exponentially more complex.
• Multiple platforms are involved. If your integration spans Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Azure DevOps, Zendesk, GitHub, Freshservice, Freshdesk, Asana, or combinations of these, the permutations of data mapping, field transformations, and error handling grow fast.
• You expect your integration needs to evolve. Business processes change. New partners come on board. Systems get upgraded or replaced. If your integration can’t adapt without a development sprint, you’ll spend more time maintaining it than using it.

If any of these apply, the build vs. buy analysis is worth doing seriously.

The True Cost of Building Integration In-House

Building integration in-house looks attractive on paper. The development team is already on payroll. Initial costs seem manageable. It’s just another project, right?

Not quite. The actual cost of building an integration unfolds across several phases—and the expenses compound at each stage.

Phase 1: Requirements and Architecture

Before writing a single line of code, the team has to define the integration requirements in detail. This includes determining the communication path between environments (deployment model, authentication, authorization, network security), establishing a common data model with proper field mapping and data transformations, defining failure handling and notification protocols, and planning for data synchronization delays and rollback procedures.

This phase is foundational. A three-character text field won’t map to a two-digit field, no matter how much you want it to. That sounds trivial until your team spends days troubleshooting exactly this kind of mismatch, which happens more often than anyone admits.

For cross-company integration, the complexity multiplies. You’re not just aligning your own systems. You’re negotiating data models, security protocols, and change management processes with an external organization that has its own priorities and constraints.

Phase 2: Development and Validation

Assuming requirements are solid, development can start. But the real work isn’t coding the happy path; it’s handling errors and exceptions. Sophisticated integration applications capture and process data anomalies without crashing. They route integration problems back to the right technical personnel. And they do this reliably across different systems, data formats, and edge cases.

Validation is equally demanding. The integration must be tested for functionality, performance, stability, and availability. Tests must confirm that duplication or unintentional errors don’t corrupt data or crash the system. A country code like KOR won’t fit into a two-letter field expecting KR, and if your validation suite doesn’t catch that before production, your users will.

Phase 3: Production Rollout

Rolling out an integration application to production systems across multiple companies requires precision. Both sides must deploy simultaneously. The rollout must be transparent to end-users because unplanned disruptions to production work management systems can cost thousands or millions in lost revenue.

Every production rollout needs rollback plans. And ongoing monitoring must be in place to catch data anomalies and service interruptions before they cascade. Trained personnel need to know what to look for and how to respond.

Phase 4: Customization

This is where reality sets in. Business processes are dynamic. The integration you built last quarter doesn’t match today’s requirements because someone added a new data field, restructured a workflow, or onboarded a new partner.

Unless the original development team designed for end-user customization, every change request goes back to the development queue. For cross-company integrations, customizations must be coordinated between DevOps teams at both organizations. That’s a long, drawn-out process even in the best case.

The worst case? Your development team is juggling multiple projects. Customization requests compete with other priorities. Changes languish for months unless someone escalates them. Meanwhile, the business is working around the integration’s limitations instead of benefiting from it.

Phase 5: Maintenance

In software engineering, it’s well-established that maintenance accounts for the majority of total project costs. For cross-company integrations, those costs are even higher.

When underlying systems get upgraded or replaced entirely, applications built for the original systems need to be modified or completely rewritten. Documentation needs updating. And when the developers who built the integration leave, knowledge transfer to new personnel becomes a problem in itself.

Here’s a real case: a large corporation running in-house custom integration software faces maintenance difficulties every year with a major partner. The partner relies on short-term contractors to maintain their workflow systems. There’s no continuity between contractors from year to year. Every time the corporation tries to customize or upgrade the integration, it has to re-educate a new contract development team from scratch.

On one occasion, the corporation had to deploy its own developers to the partner’s site just to help with upgrades needed on their end. The integration is essential for the business, but these difficulties have caused costs to skyrocket.

This “perfect storm”—system upgrades, staff turnover, documentation gaps, cross-company coordination—dramatically drives up costs and makes custom integrations increasingly difficult to sustain.

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A Decision Framework: Build vs. Buy

Rather than defaulting to one approach, evaluate the decision against specific criteria.

The pattern is clear: building looks cheaper at the start, but the cost curve inverts during customization and maintenance. Buying looks more expensive upfront, but the total cost of ownership is significantly lower over the life of the integration.

What Makes Commercial Integration Software Worth Buying?

Not all commercial integration platforms are equal. The features that matter most for cross-company integration, where complexity, independence, and reliability are non-negotiable,  fall into a few categories.

Autonomy Over Configuration

Configurations evolve. Workflows change on one side, and the integration needs to accommodate that without forcing changes on the other side. The right commercial solution gives each organization independent control over how they send and receives data. Changes to internal processes on one side don’t break the integration or require the other side to reconfigure.

This autonomy is especially critical when integrating across company boundaries. Your partner shouldn’t need to modify their workflows just because you changed yours.

Flexibility for Unknown Future Requirements

With cross-company integrations, you never know what requirements will come next. Maybe you start with a simple mapping between Jira work items and ServiceNow incidents. Then you need to add Salesforce cases. Then a partner requests Zendesk ticket sync. Then someone wants to pull in GitHub pull requests.

A rigid integration that handles today’s requirements but can’t scale to tomorrow’s is a liability. The commercial solution you choose should handle multi-platform scenarios without requiring a rebuild every time you add a new system. 

The ability to connect ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Freshservice, Freshdesk, Zendesk), development platforms (Jira, Azure DevOps, Azure DevOps Server, GitHub, Asana), CRM systems (Salesforce, HubSpot), and additional platforms through custom connectors for any REST API-enabled system is what separates enterprise-grade platforms from point solutions.

Reliability Under Real-World Conditions

Systems go down. Your partner upgrades their Jira instance over a weekend. A network issue causes a six-hour outage. A data spike overwhelms the sync queue.

The integration must handle all of this gracefully. Changes need to sync in the same order they occurred, even after downtime. Data integrity can’t be compromised because of a temporary failure. Retry mechanisms, queueing, and ordering guarantees aren’t optional, but foundational.

AI-Assisted Configuration

Modern integration platforms use AI to compress implementation timelines and reduce errors. AI-assisted configuration converts natural language requirements into working sync rules, making complex integrations accessible without deep scripting expertise. This is particularly valuable for cross-company scenarios where each side may have different technical resources available.

Security Without Compromise

Cross-company data exchange demands robust security. When evaluating a commercial solution, verify that it supports data encryption in transit (TLS 1.2/1.3), JWT-based authentication, and role-based access controls. Look for platforms with certifications like ISO 27001:2022, which provide independent validation of security practices. 

For sensitive integrations, check the vendor’s Trust Center documentation to understand data handling, residency options, and compliance posture before committing.

Build vs. Buy in Practice: Use Cases

Use Case 1: Multi-Partner Service Delivery

Case: A managed services provider supports 15 clients, each using a different combination of ServiceNow, Freshservice, Freshdesk, and Zendesk. Internal work is tracked in Jira. Every client has unique escalation paths, SLA requirements, and data sensitivity rules.

Solution: Rather than building and maintaining 15 separate custom integrations—each requiring coordination with the client’s IT team—the MSP deploys a commercial integration platform with pre-built connectors for all five platforms. Each connection is configured independently, so adding a new client doesn’t require rewriting existing integrations.

Real-World Application: The MSP eliminated manual ticket mirroring that was consuming 20+ hours per week across the support team. New client integrations went from a 3-month development cycle to a 2-week configuration process. When one client migrated from Zendesk to Freshservice, the integration was reconfigured without affecting any other client connections.

Use Case 2: Engineering Collaboration Across Organizations

Case: An automotive OEM collaborates with a tier-1 supplier on embedded software development. The OEM uses Azure DevOps for work item tracking. The supplier uses Jira. Both need to share work item status, priorities, comments, and attachments—but neither organization will expose their full project data to the other.

Solution: A commercial integration platform with independent configuration on each side. The OEM controls exactly what data leaves their Azure DevOps environment. The supplier controls how incoming data maps to their Jira work items. Neither side sees the other’s internal workflows.

Real-World Application: The integration reduced the supplier’s status update cycle from weekly email reports to real-time sync. Escalations that previously took 48 hours (because they required someone to manually create a corresponding work item in the other system) now happen in minutes. When the OEM added a new custom field for regulatory classification, they updated their outgoing sync rules without requiring any changes on the supplier’s side.

Use Case 3: Scaling Integration After a Merger

Case: Two mid-size SaaS companies merge. One runs entirely on Salesforce and Jira. The other uses HubSpot, GitHub, and Asana. Leadership needs unified reporting across both tech stacks while keeping teams on their preferred tools during the transition.

Solution: A commercial integration platform connects Salesforce to HubSpot for customer data, Jira to GitHub for development work items, and Jira to Asana for cross-team project coordination. Each connection is configured independently and can be adjusted as teams gradually consolidate tools.

Real-World Application: Instead of forcing an immediate tool migration, which would have disrupted both teams’ productivity, the integration provided a unified view of customer and development data across both tech stacks. Over 18 months, teams migrated tools at their own pace while the integrations ensured no data was lost during the transition.

Hidden Costs of Building That Most Teams Miss

Beyond the obvious development and maintenance costs, building in-house integration has several costs that rarely make it into the initial budget estimate.

• Opportunity cost. Every sprint your development team spends on integration is a sprint they’re not spending on your core product. For most companies, integration isn’t a differentiator—it’s plumbing. Buying a solution frees your team to work on what actually drives revenue.
• Security overhead. Building and maintaining enterprise-grade security—encryption, authentication, access controls, compliance certifications—is a full-time effort. Commercial platforms invest millions in security infrastructure and maintain certifications like ISO 27001:2022 that would be prohibitively expensive for a single company to achieve for an internal integration tool.
• Partner friction. Every time you need to coordinate a change with a partner’s development team, both organizations incur scheduling, communication, and testing overhead. Commercial solutions that give each side independent configuration eliminate most of this friction.
• Scalability cost. Your first integration might connect two systems. But integrations tend to multiply. Once the business sees value in one connection, requests for more follow. Custom-built integrations rarely scale gracefully—each new connection is essentially a new project. Commercial platforms with pre-built connectors and reusable configurations scale horizontally with minimal incremental effort.
• Compliance risk. As regulatory requirements evolve, your in-house integration must evolve with them. Commercial vendors bake compliance into their platform updates. With an in-house build, compliance is your ongoing responsibility, and the cost of getting it wrong is steep.

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How to Evaluate Commercial Integration Solutions

If you’ve decided to buy, here’s what to look for based on what actually matters for cross-company integration.

1. Independent configuration per side. Each organization should control its own sync rules without requiring the other side to make changes. This is non-negotiable for cross-company scenarios.
2. Pre-built connectors with depth. Check that the platform supports native connectors for the systems you use today (Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Azure DevOps, Zendesk, GitHub, Freshservice, Freshdesk, Asana, HubSpot) and offers custom connectors for systems with REST APIs. But don’t just count connectors—verify depth. Can you sync custom fields, attachments, comments, and relationships? Or just basic ticket data?
3. AI-assisted configuration. Platforms that offer AI-assisted setup—like Aida, which helps scope integration requirements and generates configuration logic from natural language—significantly reduce implementation time and the scripting expertise required to get started.
4. Error handling and reliability. Ask about retry mechanisms, message ordering guarantees, and how the platform handles downtime on either side. These aren’t edge cases—they’re everyday realities of cross-company integration.
5. Vendor security posture. Review the vendor’s security certifications (ISO 27001:2022), encryption standards (TLS 1.2/1.3), authentication methods (JWT, RBAC), and Trust Center documentation. Cross-company data exchange demands enterprise-grade security.
6. Total cost of ownership. Compare the subscription cost against your estimated build cost over 3-5 years. Include maintenance, staff turnover, system upgrades, customization requests, and security overhead. Use a pricing calculator to quantify the comparison based on your specific data volumes and team sizes.

Conclusion

When cross-company integration becomes essential to optimizing workflows and work management systems, companies face a classic make-or-buy scenario.

Confronted with the upfront costs of enterprise integration software, many corporations are tempted to build internally. The development staff is already there. Initial costs seem manageable. But the cost curve tells a different story.

While initial costs for an in-house project may appear cheaper, the difficulties during customization and maintenance drive costs exponentially higher. Customizations must be coordinated across both organizations. System upgrades require application rewrites. Staff turnover creates knowledge gaps. And every one of these problems compounds over time.

Commercial integration platforms flip this equation. The upfront acquisition cost is higher, but it drops off dramatically in customization and maintenance. Vendors provide documentation, training, best practices for customization, and support at every phase. The software is built with underlying system changes in mind and operates independently of those changes.

The most critical advantage? Integration transparency. Your focus stays on optimizing your business, not wrestling with messy integration projects. The right commercial integration solution gives you the autonomy, flexibility, and reliability to execute cross-company integrations while keeping your attention where it belongs—on running your business.

Exalate was built to meet exactly these criteria. It connects Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Azure DevOps, Azure DevOps Server, Zendesk, GitHub, Freshservice, Freshdesk, Asana, HubSpot, and any platform with a REST API through custom connectors. Each side of the integration configures independently, so changes on one end never break the other. 

FAQs

What is the main difference between building and buying an integration solution?

Building in-house gives you full control over the integration but creates compounding costs in maintenance, customization, and staff-dependent knowledge. Buying a commercial solution like Exalate costs more upfront but dramatically reduces long-term expenses because the vendor handles upgrades, documentation, security certifications, and support. Research suggests self-maintained integrations exceed the investment in third-party solutions by 40-70% over time.

When should a company build integration in-house instead of buying?

Building makes sense when your integration is purely internal, involves a single connection between two systems you fully control, and is unlikely to change significantly over time. Once you’re dealing with cross-company scenarios, multiple platforms, bidirectional sync, or evolving requirements, a commercial solution typically delivers better ROI.

What platforms does Exalate support for cross-company integration?

Exalate supports native connectors for Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Azure DevOps (Service and Server), Zendesk, GitHub, Freshservice, Freshdesk, Asana, and HubSpot. For any platform with an available REST API, Exalate offers custom connectors that extend its reach beyond the pre-built options.

How does AI-assisted configuration help with cross-company integration?

AI-assisted configuration tools like Aida convert natural language requirements into working sync rules. Instead of writing integration scripts from scratch, you describe what you need in plain language, and the AI generates the appropriate configuration for review and refinement. This cuts implementation time significantly and makes complex integrations accessible to teams without deep scripting expertise.

How does Exalate handle security for cross-company data exchange?

Exalate is ISO 27001:2022 certified and implements TLS 1.2/1.3 encryption for data in transit, JWT-based authentication, and role-based access controls. Each side of the integration controls exactly what data is shared, so sensitive internal information stays internal. The platform’s security posture is documented in its Trust Center.

Can each side of the integration configure independently with Exalate?

Yes. Each organization controls its own outgoing and incoming sync rules. If you restructure a workflow on your side, you update your own configuration. The other side doesn’t need to change anything unless they want to handle the new data differently. This independence is what makes Exalate particularly effective for cross-company integration, where neither organization wants to depend on the other’s development schedule.

How long does it take to deploy Exalate compared to building a custom integration?

Custom integrations typically take months to years, depending on complexity, number of platforms, and cross-company coordination requirements. Exalate deployments with pre-built connectors typically take weeks. AI-assisted configuration through Aida compresses that further by generating sync rules from natural language descriptions rather than requiring manual scripting.

What’s the best way to calculate whether building or buying integration makes financial sense?

Compare the total cost of ownership over 3-5 years, not just initial development costs. Include maintenance hours, staff turnover and retraining, system upgrade adaptation, customization request turnaround, security overhead, and opportunity cost of developer time diverted from core product work. Exalate’s pricing calculator can help quantify this comparison based on your specific data volumes and team sizes.

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Can Exalate handle integration for managed service providers with multiple clients?

Yes. MSPs commonly use Exalate to manage integrations across dozens of clients, each running different platforms (ServiceNow, Freshservice, Freshdesk, Zendesk, Jira). Each client connection is configured independently, so adding a new client doesn’t affect existing integrations. When a client changes platforms, the relevant connection is reconfigured without touching others, which eliminates the rebuild cycle that makes custom MSP integrations so expensive to maintain.

Recommended Reading:

• How to Get the Most out of Your Workflow Integration
• Simplify Your Business Processes with Salesforce Integration Tools
• How Integration Service Providers Can Help Simplify Data Integration
• The Comprehensive Guide to iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service)
• SaaS Integration Challenges and Benefits