Integrations aren’t just back-end glue for IT services. They are mission-critical infrastructure that impacts everything from your onboarding speed to SLA compliance, user experience, and margin. If you have ever responded to a customer RFP with mandatory integration requirements stating: “The vendor must integrate to our core systems”. That’s it. That’s the level of specification you got, and now you should give them a price estimate, then you already know: integrations are not just technical—they’re strategic.

Why integration strategy matters now more than ever

Your integration strategy directly affects your ability to deliver. Whether you're connecting with client-side ticketing tools, enabling data sync between CRMs and ERP systems, or onboarding new customers with pre-built connectors, your choice shapes every layer of service delivery.

Here’s the problem: as your customer base grows and your toolset expands, your integration efforts become more fragile, more complex, and more time consuming. You’re dealing with multiple customers, each with unique systems and expectations. Your core product might stay the same, but the integration scope keeps changing. Every time you add a new tool or a new client-specific flow, your engineering team is pulled away from high-value tasks to revisit old code.

Meanwhile, your customer-facing teams start spending time on resolving integration issues instead of delivering outcomes. Sales and onboarding slow down. Service delivery lags. Costs rise.

Sound familiar?

If so, this article will help. We’ll break down the build vs. buy integrations debate in plain terms, using real-world cost models and business logic. We’ll compare the hidden costs of building integrations, the limitations of buying just an integration platform, and the upside of choosing a fully managed service like ONEiO.

The challenge with scaling IT service integrations

As your IT services business grows, the pressure to connect more systems, serve more customers, and keep your offerings modular yet reliable becomes intense. That’s when the big question hits: should you build or buy integrations?

This isn’t a philosophical debate. It’s a practical business decision—one that affects your cost structure, available developer resources, customer experience, and long-term scalability. Whether you're a Service Owner, ITSM Platform Lead, or the Head of Managed Services, you need to form your own opinion when to build integrations in house and when to buy integrations as a managed service.

Ownership gives you control… with a cost

Let’s be clear: building integrations gives you complete control. You own the code, the logic, the flow. But it also means you own every bug, every breaking API change, and the ongoing cost of maintaining integrations. You’ll need developer resources skilled in different systems, fluent in the quirks of software documentation, and available to support your integration work day and night.

Buying, on the other hand, offers speed, standardization, and stability. You get a service that’s purpose-built to manage the entire workflow, monitor and resolve issues, and keep the logic up to date—even as the underlying systems evolve. You pay for outcomes, not engineering hours.

What you're really committing to when you build integrations in-house

At first glance, building integrations internally seems like the most logical option—especially if you want complete control over how your systems interact. Your dev team already knows your core product, and with access to low-code tools or even embedded iPaaS platforms, spinning up integrations can look deceptively fast and affordable.

But here’s the reality: the moment you take ownership of integration delivery projects, you’re also taking responsibility for maintaining integrations over time. That includes every API version change, every system upgrade, and every unanticipated edge case that breaks the flow. Your team isn’t just building integrations—they’re committing to an ongoing, evolving product line of integration services.

You’ll need to manage

• Business/customer relations 
• Backlog planning and resourcing (including budgeting)
• Integration service levels
• Integration support and maintenance
• Integration changes
• Integration monitoring
  
  

And you’ll do all of this while still trying to build and improve your core business

Worse, your primary focus—whether that’s building better services or delivering value to customers—starts to erode. Your best engineers spend hours debugging integration issues instead of working on something more strategic  Your service delivery teams spend more time on workaround processes and manual tasks due to missing end-to-end processes and broken links. And your cost savings evaporate under the weight of custom code and technical debt.

So yes, you get control—but at a significant investment of time, talent, and budget.

When "build and buy" becomes the worst of both worlds

Many IT service providers attempt to meet halfway between full DIY and full outsourcing by choosing an integration platform (like an iPaaS) and pairing it with a consultancy or systems integrator to do the hands-on work. On paper, this hybrid model looks promising: buy software, hire experts, and avoid owning the plumbing.

But this “build and buy” approach often results in high upfront project fees, ongoing license costs, and unpredictable support expenses. You pay for the platform, then pay again to get anything meaningful done on it. And even with the pre-built connectors and reusable templates etc., each new integration still requires planning, configuration, testing, and long-term maintenance.

Limitations of hybrid “buy and build” iPaaS integrations

With this approach you gain speed during early implementation, but you lose in agility long-term. Every change or issue still falls on your shoulders—or land in a growing queue with your integration partner. You're not truly freed from integration work—you’re just outsourcing the bottleneck.

This model also adds friction when you need to scale. Adding more customers means unpredictable costs. Your costs scale with complexity, not efficiency.

What does it really mean to buy integrations

When you choose to buy integrations through a fully managed service like ONEiO, you’re not just purchasing yet another platform—you’re buying outcomes. That means no more juggling tools, vendors, consultants, and internal teams. You hand off the complexity and focus your energy where it belongs: delivering value to your customers.

With a managed integration solution, the provider runs and is accountable for the entire lifecycle of the integrations—planning, implementation, maintenance, and 24/7 monitoring. You no longer have to worry about whether the integration’s requirements are changing, if the third-party system pushed an undocumented update, or if your SLA is at risk because of a missed data sync.

Instead, you:

• Offload the engineering burden of maintaining dozens of live integration flows
  
  
• Automatically adapt to API changes without triggering rework
  
  
• Integrate with more systems without slowing down onboarding
  
  
• Ensure uptime with built-in observability and support
  
  
• Benefit from a value proposition that focuses on continuous operations, not just delivery
  
  

What makes this different from buying an integration platform is that you focus on your core business, an integration service provider focuses on delivering the needed outcomes. You're not expected to spend time building or modifying workflows, maintain integration infrastructure, or debug why a customer’s field mapping just stopped working. That’s the provider’s job—and they’re accountable for keeping it running.

Managed integrations help IT service providers scale predictable growth

This model is particularly effective for IT service providers working across multiple customers and complex business environments, where every new onboarding introduces new tools, processes, and integration scope. Buying a managed integration service means you can scale without investing into setting up a new function. 

More importantly, in a modern multi-sourced IT ecosystems, your customers see integrations as a requirement. If you can’t integrate quickly, reliably, and securely, you’re not meeting expectations. Managed integration service designed for IT, let you deliver integration as part of your offering, without building an entire integration business within your company.

Cost is only half the story—but it still matters

Of course, the decision to build or buy integrations isn’t just about effort—it’s about cost. Many IT leaders assume that building is cheaper. But once you factor in salaries, project delays, downtime from integration issues, and opportunity cost from pulling developers off strategic projects, the equation shifts fast.

In the next section, we’ll break down exactly how these costs accumulate—across planning, implementation, operations, and monitoring—and show how the managed service model outperforms both DIY and hybrid approaches over time.

The four hidden cost drivers of IT service integration

Whether you’re evaluating a new integration project or trying to improve how your teams handle them today, you need to look beyond the initial implementation price. The real costs of integration accumulate over time—and often in places you don’t expect.

To compare build vs. buy accurately, you should evaluate costs across four critical categories:

1. Plan – This includes defining integration scope, designing the architecture, aligning systems, and involving stakeholders. When you build, this often requires product managers, solution architects, and developers to collaborate across multiple systems. With a managed service, much of this effort is standardized and guided by best practices.
   
   
2. Implement – This is where most leaders mistakenly think the majority of cost lies. In-house development, low-code tools, or integration platforms still require your team to design, build, test, and validate flows. If you’re working with an external integrator, you also pay for scoping, workshops, and custom delivery.
   
   
3. Operate – This is the most underestimated cost category. Once integrations go live, someone needs to maintain them. That includes adjusting to technical operations like message queuing, API changes, resolving integration issues, updating data mappings, and also processes and tools for supporting users, not mention security and compliance. If you’re using a platform, these costs fall to your internal team. If you’re buying a managed service, ongoing operations are already built in following the Integration Ops best-practises..
   
   
4. Monitor – Finally, maintaining observability is essential. Without proper end-to-end integration and infrastructure monitoring, small failures become big disruptions. You need tools to track failures, alerts to trigger escalation, and staff to respond. This is often a 24/7 requirement—especially for customer-facing integrations. Buying a managed service means monitoring and support are baked in, so your team doesn't have to stay on call.
   
   

When you look at the full lifecycle of integrations and consider integrations as products, not one-off projects, buying integrations as a managed service gives you predictability and cost stability. Building, or even partially building through a platform or partner, introduces variable costs that rise with complexity.

Here’s a breakdown of what these models look like side by side over three years when considering no previous investments into the models:

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This isn’t just a matter of budget—it’s about unlocking your ability to scale without expanding headcount or reducing service quality.

Build vs. buy isn’t just about tools—it’s about business fit

Choosing whether to build vs. buy integrations isn’t a technical decision alone. It’s a strategic one. It affects how your business delivers value, allocates resources, and scales. And depending on your size, customer mix, and service model, the right path may change as you grow.

To make the right call, you need to ask the right questions:

• Do you have enough available developer resources to own integrations from end to end?
  
  
• Is integration your primary focus—or is it a distraction from what you really want to be doing?
  
  
• How many existing apps and customer-specific systems do you need to support?
  
  
• Are your customer-facing teams spending time resolving integration issues instead of delivering services?
  
  
• Do your clients require fast onboarding, data reliability, and deep integration with their processes and systems?
  
  
• Are your current integration efforts scalable—or are they already a bottleneck?
  
  

If you're like most mid-market IT service providers, your answers will point toward one clear priority: reliability, scalability, and cost control.

This is where managed integration services offer a strategic edge. You reduce your exposure to platform complexity, reduce headcount growth, and enable your business to onboard more customers without rethinking your entire architecture.

Here’s a high-level framework to help you evaluate your options:

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Integration Use Case is Your Guiding Light for Choosing the Right Approach

Why native connectors and adapters only take you part of the way

Modern software tools often ship with built-in or native integrations. CRMs sync with email platforms. Service desks push data to chat tools. It’s tempting to rely on these for connectivity. After all, they’re already available, often free, and require minimal setup.

But native connectors are limited by design. They’re built for a single use case—one integration between two systems. You typically can’t extend them, change the logic, or add additional data routing without breaking or duplicating the flow. And when you operate in a business model where you serve multiple customers, that rigidity quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Native integrations also rarely provide the observability tooling or failover mechanisms you need in enterprise environments. If the sync fails, there’s often no alert. No retry. No audit trail. And certainly no proactive support.  And when one tool changes its integration behavior, your team scrambles to understand how it affects other parts of your stack.

Why low-code and integration platforms aren't the silver bullet

It’s easy to be drawn to the promise of low-code tools and drag-and-drop integration platforms. They advertise faster time to value, less need for senior developers, and the ability to scale quickly. And for point-to-point integrations where you control “the both sides” and you have deep understanding of the process and related workflows or just need to release an API (which is not actually considered as integration) they often work well.

But when you're dealing with complex, multi-endpoint workflows in enterprise environments that require domain expertise and dealing with multitude of different processes and systems, the picture changes.

Low-code platforms still require people who understand the business logic, data mappings, and underlying systems. You may not need to write code, but someone still needs to know what the integration is supposed to do—and how to make it do that reliably across environments. These platforms don’t eliminate effort. They just shift the effort to configuration, testing, and maintenance. It’s like building a bridge from both sides and hoping that the ends meet in the middle.

Low-code often means high maintenance

In IT service business, the more customers you support, the more fragmented and specialized those integrations become. And while low-code can reduce the actual integration development time, it doesn't eliminate the need to plan and define the requirements and then monitor for breakages,adjust when process changes or vendors change APIs.

Many IT service providers find that low-code tools introduce a false sense of simplicity. Over time, those "quick integrations" stack up into a tangled mess. No single person understands how all the logic works. There’s no central ownership. When an issue arises, your team wastes hours tracing workflows and dependencies. And when someone leaves the company, that knowledge often leaves with them.

Using a platform instead of building from scratch gives you better tooling and some pre-built adapters, but you still own the integration’s behavior. In the worst case, integrations are dependent on the person you develop them; yet your team is still accountable for supporting them. And when issues arise, you’re responsible for resolving them—even if you built it using a visual interface.

Build vs. buy integrations decision framework

Now that we’ve covered the full state of your alternatives, you can use our proven decision framework to find your best-fit integration solution.

The framework is divided into 16 assessment areas grouped under skills & staffing, cost & delivery model, operational capability, and technical tooling. Each category includes indicators for when to "make" (build in-house) or "buy" (outsource or partner).

1. Skills & staffing

2. Cost & delivery model

3. Operational capability

4. Technical tooling & infrastructure

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Real-world impact: What happens when IT service providers buy integrations instead of building them

IT service providers that choose to buy integrations as a managed service don’t just save money—they gain operational freedom. They stop chasing bugs, managing timelines, and troubleshooting brittle workflows. They start focusing on what actually drives their business: faster onboarding, reliable service delivery, and scalable growth.

Take, for example, a mid-sized MSP that previously relied on custom-built integrations between ITSM tools, ERP systems, and CRM platforms. Their dev team spent an average of 25–30 hours per month just resolving integration issues—not building new features, not improving the customer experience. Every new client onboarding required two weeks of scoped project work and added another layer of complexity to their already fragile system landscape.

After switching to ONEiO’s fully managed Integration Ops model, that provider saw:

• A 90% reduction in integration-related workload
  
  
• A 75% drop in support tickets linked to integration errors
  
  
• Integrations were not anymore slowing down their Customer onboarding and transition projects.
• Flat, predictable integration costs—even as they doubled their client base
  
  

These aren’t just marginal gains. They’re business-altering results. Freed from maintaining integratios  and managing changes, the provider reallocated engineering team capacity to customer-facing initiatives. Their sales team confidently promised custom integrations without caveats, as a one standardized line item in their service offering with fixed cost, fixed scope and fixed (and guaranteed) timeline. And their cost savings were tangible—over six figures annually, simply from eliminating legacy support and platform license fees.

Final take: Build if you must, but buy if you want to scale

It’s tempting to default to building integrations in house. You’ve got talented developers. You want complete control. And sometimes, for very specific edge cases, that’s the right choice.

But if your business relies on integrating multiple tools, across multiple customers, with service reliability and SLAs on the line—you need something more robust. You need predictability. Flexibility. Scalability. And a team whose primary focus is not managing integrations, but delivering services that grow the business.

Buying integrations through a managed service like ONEiO isn’t a shortcut—it’s a smarter model. It gives you faster delivery, continuous operations, and better outcomes for your clients. It reduces cost, complexity, and risk—while freeing your internal teams to focus on what matters.

So if you’re at the crossroads of another integration decision, ask yourself this:

Are you ready to evolve your integration strategy—or are you still spending your time maintaining code that someone else could run better?

ONEiO’s Integration Ops as a Service delivers faster, smarter, and more resilient integrations without the headaches. Whether you want full control or want it fully managed, we’ve got a tier that fits your model.

→ Get started with Integration Ops today.

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