2024

State of SaaS
Integrations
We asked and leaders across SaaS answered.
Here’s everything you need to know about the state
of integrations as you head into the new year.

Report by
Table of

contents
By Brian Yam, Forrest Herlick,

Kelsey Johnson, and Chloe Tse

Introduction 3 Bigger companies are 21

leading the way for
The claim 3 integrations

Bigger businesses 21
provide more integrations
Key takeaways from 4 — here’s what we can
the report learn from them

Data and insights from 6

B2B SaaS Conclusion 24
professionals

Customers and 7
prospects of B2B SaaS
companies want
integrations
Integrations are brought 7
up in 60% of all sales
deals.

B2B SaaS companies 12

can execute their
integration strategies
better
Trends for integration 18
analytics

State of SaaS Integrations 2024

Introduction

As B2B SaaS buyers continue to opt for fewer “all-in-one”

solutions and instead choose “best-in-class” products, the

modern tech stack is growing. These buyers increasingly

demand that their solutions integrate seamlessly, a trend we

expect to see grow in the coming years.

So, how are B2B SaaS companies living up to these buyer

expectations? What should product and engineering teams,

partnerships professionals and leadership be prioritizing in

2024 and beyond to better serve prospects and customers

the integrated solutions they require?

What can be learned from enterprise corporations who are

accelerating growth by scaling their integration ecosystems?

How can we modify our integrations and partner strategy to

get ahead of the competition?

Frankly, there was almost no publicly available data to help

answer these questions. So, Paragon, PartnerFleet and

PartnerStack stepped in to fill the gap.

The claim

After surveying leaders at more than a hundred B2B SaaS

companies, with participants across product management,

tech partnerships, exec leadership and more, it’s clear that

integrations may be key to scaling growth in 2024.

According to original data collected by PartnerStack, Paragon

and PartnerFleet, we consistently found that integrations drive

revenue through reduced churn, increased ACVs (Annual

Contract Value), and improved win rates. Additionally, bigger

companies tend to work with partners who build integrations

and companies of all sizes are increasingly adopting

integration platforms to accelerate the development process.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 3

Survey at a glance:

Key takeaways from the report

The survey was conducted in 2023 and included data and insights across
B2B SaaS. Some highlights include the following.

Customers and prospects of B2B SaaS companies want

integrations

Integrations help Integrations increase sales

reduce customer churn. win rates and customer
upsells.

B2B SaaS companies can execute their integration strategies

better

It takes most A significant percentage

companies three of companies are
months or longer to leveraging embedded
build a single iPaaS and unified APIs to
integration in-house. build integrations faster.

Companies aren’t
maximizing the go-to-
market opportunity for
their integrations.

Bigger companies are leading the way for integrations

They support far more A higher percentage of

integrations. their integrations are built
by partners.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 4

Some questions to ask yourself as you dive into this research:

What’s the standard for building, tracking and

promoting integrations? 

Is your company on track, ahead of, or behind

your peers in terms of the investment and
progress of your integration strategy? You should
consider not only the number of integrations your
product provides, but how you’re measuring
usage/adoption and their impact on revenue, your
tech partnerships strategy and your go-to-market
strategy. 

What are larger SaaS companies doing

differently? How can you drive growth in your
business to mimic the enterprise companies that
have scaled their integration ecosystem and use?

Ready? Let’s dive into the data.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 5

 We asked, you answered:

Data and insights from B2B

SaaS professionals
Here are some demographics about the survey respondents:

chart
Leaders by department
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

47.2% 27.0% 13.5% 10.0%

2.2%
Partnerships Product C-Suite Engineering Other

chart
Company size by employees
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

13.5% 31.5% 30.3% 10.1% 14.6%

1-10 11-100 101-500 501-1000 1000+

chart
Number of respondents by SaaS category
25

20
NUMBER OF RESPONDENTS

15

10

Marketing Sales Productivity iPaaS Finance Other HRIS Business

CX ERP E-commerce EdTech Data
Services

DEPARTMENT

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 6

Department The majority of our respondents are in
partnerships (47%), product (27%) and executive
leadership (14%).

Company size This report required us to collect data from every

segment of the market, to get segment-specific
insights as well as to compare trends across
company stages. This data tells us that 45% of
our respondents are SMBs or startups (1-100
employees), 40% of respondents are from mid-
market companies (101-1000 employees) and
15% are from enterprises (1000+).

SaaS category Respondents come from B2B SaaS companies

across categories, from marketing, sales,
productivity, finance, sales, human resources
(HRIS), CX, to many others. Marketing, sales and
productivity SaaS make up 51% of the responses,
which may be reflective of the sheer number of
companies in these categories compared to the
rest.

Now let’s dive into what you’re here for — the

insights.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 7

Customers and prospects of
B2B SaaS companies want
integrations
Integrations are brought up in 60% of all sales
deals.

To measure the importance of 1 Value for prospects and

integrations, we had to look at it customers
from two angles:

2 Value for the SaaS

company

It’s clear that customers seriously value integrations

The data overwhelmingly shows that integrations are a key consideration
to B2B SaaS customers:

84% of respondents Only 1% of respondents

said integrations were said integrations aren’t
“very important” or a important for their
“key requirement” for customers.
their customers.

This is a good indicator of customer preference right now and going

forward. 

A product feature that’s a key requirement or very important is considered

a deal breaker if you don’t have it. The fact that product integrations are
deal breakers for 84% of business’ customers is a huge indicator of
customer needs.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 8

chart
How important are integrations for your customers?
Turns out, it matters quite a bit.

VERY IMPORTANT 48%

KEY REQUIREMENT 36%

NICE TO HAVE 15%

NOT IMPORTANT 1%

KEY METRIC KEY METRIC

62%
respondents said integrations are
24%
respondents said integrations were
brought up in the sales process brought up in 90+% of deals
more than half the time

It’s not just customers — prospects want integrations too

On average, integrations are brought up in approximately 60% of all sales
cycles, which is probably no surprise to your product team given all the
requests they likely get from sales.

Breaking this down, 62% of respondents said integrations are brought up in

the sales process more than half the time while 24% of respondents said
integrations were brought up in 90+% of deals.

We wanted to see if customers’ demands varied across categories,

however, the data demonstrates that the trend is consistent across the
board. This comes as no surprise because we have all become accustomed
to the integrated experiences that industry leaders such as Slack, Jira or
HubSpot now offer.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 9

 chart
The percentage of deals involving integrations by SaaS
category
100%

75%
PERCENTAGE OF DEALS

50%

25%

0%

Sales CX Data E-commerce EdTech ERP Finance HRIS iPaaS Marketing Other Productivity Business

Services

SAAS CATEGORY

The fact that integration requirements are coming up in the majority of

sales conversations shows that integrations aren’t just an afterthought or a
‘nice to have’ for buyers. Buyers understand the efficiency and value of
having an integrated tech stack and they’re keeping it top of mind as they
evaluate SaaS platforms.

The impact on your core SaaS business

metrics
We just validated that your buyers want and expect integrations, but what’s
in it for you? There are benefits for your SaaS business if you’re going to
invest months of engineering to develop these integrations.

Two of the most important metrics for every SaaS business are new ARR
(annual recurring revenue) growth and NRR (net revenue retention) growth
— or, put simply: closing new customers and retaining and upselling
existing customers. Let’s look at what the data tells us about the impact
integrations have on these two metrics.

Integrations lead to lower churn

Of the respondents that had insight on the impact their integrations had on
churn, an overwhelming 92% of them shared that customers who have
enabled integrations are less likely to churn.

After all, the more integrations you offer, the more processes and
dependencies your customers will build on top of your application.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 10

Ripping out your application from their stack (or churning) would require a
painful transition period and potentially a lot of operations work to ensure it
does not disrupt their day-to-day workflows.

chart 80

Are customers with

integrations less likely to 60

churn?

NUMBER OF RESPONDENTS
Note: 30% of the respondents 40

didn’t know if integrations had an

impact on churn, which shows an
opportunity for organizations to 20

become more data-driven when

driving integrations and tech 0

partnerships decisions. Yes No I don’t know

COUNT

Integrations also drive expansion and upsells

Retaining a customer is just the start. The best SaaS companies achieve
net revenue retention (NRR) upwards of 140%, which means for every
dollar their customers pay them today, a year from now, those same
customers will be paying them an additional 40%.

The only way to achieve >100% NRR is by upselling existing customers at a

faster rate than they’re churning. So let’s take a look at how integrations
play into driving upsells.

On average, integrations drive 35% of expansions and/or upsells for

respondents. In partnerships, this is also true — and more and more
partnership integrations are being built and implemented to support the
business.

“[Integrations have a] huge impact on customer

expansion/upsells. As a data company, integrations
are key to our success. While many customers
purchase integrations with their initial contract, I'd
say about 40-50% of expansion/upsells are tied to
integration.” — Survey Respondent

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 11

“[Impact on customer expansion/upsells] is hard to
quantify. Even if the prospect does not ask for it,
they will need it. Today's marketplace does not
have room for a silo application.” — Survey Respondent

Revenue insights and takeaways

The impact of product integrations on B2B SaaS businesses is clear. 

Integrations are:

1 Important to nearly 2 A key driver to

every buyer, and often reducing churn
a dealbreaker

3 Requested in over 4 Driving expansions/

50% of deals which is upsells for current
consistent across customers at an
SaaS categories average rate of 35%

This largely aligns with why the respondents are investing in integrations at
their own SaaS companies. Besides extending product functionality, these
are the top three reasons companies invest in product integrations:

KEY METRICS

67% 63% 30%

Improve close rates Improve retention Create expansion
levers

If building new integrations and driving adoption of those integrations isn’t

a priority for your business, these findings suggest hat it should be.

With this in mind, make sure your product and partnerships teams have the
data infrastructure and processes in place to prioritize integrations
effectively. Set up systems and processes to accept integration requests
from prospects and customers, talk directly to your customers, sales and
success teams and run win/loss analysis to see how specific integration
requests correlate to your team winning a specific deal.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 12

 B2B SaaS companies can
execute their integration
strategies better
With the data showing the value of integrations, it makes sense that B2B
SaaS companies would be shipping dozens of new integrations and
improvements every year and promoting these integrations to maximize
adoption. But we’re seeing that it’s not that simple.

1 Engineering teams are faced with challenges across the

integration development lifecycle, primarily with maintenance.
2 There is a strong adoption of third-party tooling to help
abstract away engineering challenges around integrations.
3 Companies are not maximizing the go-to-market opportunities
for promoting their integrations.
4 Companies can further build upon their analytics and tracking
around integrations.

Let’s take a look at each of these insights in more detail.

chart
Average time to build an integration

40%
PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS

30%

20%

10%

0%

less than 1 month 1 month 3 months 6 months 9 months 1 year or more

TIME (MONTHS)

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 13

 75% of respondents said it takes three months or longer to build an
integration.

From researching the third-party APIs to development and testing, this

makes sense. But as we prioritize building more integrations, is there a way
to accelerate development and testing?

How many employees are allocated to integrations?

First, let’s take a look at how much headcount companies are dedicating to
their integration strategies.

At an aggregate level, the median headcount allocated to integrations is six

and the average for companies with fewer than 1000 employees is 10. 

Some respondents broke down the headcount by role as well and

consistently most of the headcount fell within engineering.

This ties quite directly into the next insight which is around the biggest pain
points companies face when shipping and maintaining integrations for their
products.

chart
Biggest pain points in shipping and maintaining integrations
30%
PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS

20%

10%

0%

Building
3rd party
Monitoring Debugging and
API changes Feature
other
authentication documentation
support discovery
research

PAIN POINTS

What’s interesting is that the top two challenges that respondents shared
were both pain points around maintaining their integrations after it is
shipped to customers. While building is in some ways a one-time cost, the
nature of integrations creates dependencies on third-party applications’
APIs. This means that your team needs to handle scenarios when the third-
party APIs have downtime or when they release breaking changes to their
APIs which can break your integration.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 14

These challenges are likely drivers behind the adoption of third-party
integration platforms, which brings us to the next point.

How are teams building the integrations?

While building in-house is still by far the most common approach to
building integrations, both embedded iPaaS and unified APIs are being
adopted across all segments. Note that 50% of the companies leverage
more than one approach, generally building in-house and adopting a third-
party solution.

KEY METRICS

80%
are building in-house
29%
use an embedded
iPaaS

24%
use a unified API
21%
use an outsourced
dev shop

It will be interesting to see how this data shifts over the next few years as
both embedded iPaaS and unified APIs have come to market within the last
two to years, and have taken the startup segment by storm.

When we look at this data by segment, you’ll notice that the adoption of
third-party solutions is slightly higher in the startup and enterprise
segments.

The rationale for startups is clear — they don’t have the bandwidth to build
integrations in-house and want to focus their engineers on core product
initiatives. These third-party solutions enable them to rapidly ship dozens
of integrations with a fraction of the engineering effort, so the ROI is
obvious.

As for enterprises, they dedicate more resources in general towards

integrations and tend to have a more objective, leadership-driven ROI
mindset when it comes to adopting solutions that can help them further
expand their ecosystems.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 15

 chart
Tools to build integrations by company size

1-10

11-1OO

101-500
COMPANY SIZE

501-1000

1000+

0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

PERCENTAGE OF TOOLS

In-house Embedded iPaaS Unified Outsourced

How to action now

Instead of accepting the long development cycles building an integration
in-house requires, product and engineering teams should at a minimum,
take the time to evaluate Embedded iPaaS and Unified API solutions as it
may save them significant engineering resources and enable them to go-
to-market with new integrations faster moving forward.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 16

There are plenty of resources out there that help with the build versus buy
decision and the most optimal solution could be a combination of tools and
building in-house, as the data above indicates.

Go-to-market opportunities
The impact that integrations have on churn and upsells can only be
experienced if customers are made aware of the integrations and adopt
them. That’s why go-to-market strategies for integrations are extremely
important — yet they’re overlooked.

Across the board, we see that companies are not leveraging as many
channels and mediums to launch new integrations as they should. Never
dismiss the opportunity to partner up.

chart
Marketing channels used to promote integrations
1-10 11-100 101-500 501-1000 1000+

BLOG SOCIAL MEDIA

0% 25% 50% 75% 100% 0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

EMAIL MARKETPLACE

0% 25% 50% 75% 100% 0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 17

chart
Marketing channels used to promote integrations (cont’d)

1-10 11-100 101-500 501-1000 1000+

PAID ADS IN-PRODUCT EXPERIENCES

0% 25% 50% 75% 100% 0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

In-app experiences
56% of companies leverage in-app experiences to promote new
integrations. This is likely due to their product teams’ ownership of the end-
to-end experience for discovering and enabling integrations within their
applications. Even then, that means nearly half of the companies are not
promoting the integrations actively amongst their most active users.

Social and Email

Besides in-app experiences, social is the most leveraged channel, followed
by email. More than half of the companies are sharing the launch via their
social media channels, likely due to the lower lift required and general
practices around posting frequencies. Interestingly, SMBs are leaning into
email more so than the other segments, likely due to it being their primary
channel for communicating product updates to both leads and customers.

Marketplaces
Adoption of marketplaces is 80% among the mid-market and enterprise
segments. This comes hand-in-hand with their partnerships strategies,
which we’ll get into later in the study.

That said, in 2024, companies know that most buyers are doing research
on their own through companies’ websites. That’s why even SMB and mid-
market companies that may have relatively low marketing bandwidth are
starting to leverage marketplaces as a marketing tool for their integrations.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 18

Content
Articles or blog posts are not being leveraged as much as some of the
distribution channels which indicates that companies are investing more in
announcing that an integration is available than educating users on why an
integration is valuable — which is what this type of longer-form digital
posts are best suited for.

Paid ads
This is by far the lowest utilized channel due to it requiring a budget to run.
Companies are likely only using this channel if they have a very specific,
targetable audience of prospects for the integration, otherwise, the
benefits will not justify the ad spend.

How to action now

Before the integration is even built, make sure to have close cross-
functional collaboration across product and marketing to ensure that:

1 The specific segment 2 Core messaging

of customers for which around the value of
the integration is the integration is
relevant is clear. created.

3 All relevant channels 4 Create a marketplace

and mediums (from where customers and
above) are included in prospects can find, buy,
the launch plan. and install integrations.

Now we arrive at the last piece of the puzzle: measuring success.

Trends for integration analytics

We’ve noticed that companies’ abilities to prioritize investing in integrations
generally comes down to whether or not executive leadership is bought in.
That’s why it’s critical that your team has the data to quantify not only the
revenue opportunity that shipping new integrations could bring, but also
the adoption of existing integrations and the impact they’ve had on core
business metrics.

Based on the responses, we see an opportunity for companies to increase

the coverage of their analytics on integrations.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 19

What metrics are being tracked?
The top three metrics currently being tracked are integration usage (71%),
adoption (61%) and the impact of integrations on retention (47%).

chart
Integration metrics that are currently being tracked
Usage and adoption top the chart.

USAGE 71%

ADOPTION 62%

IMPACT ON RETENTION 47%

INTEREST 46%

IMPACT ON UPSELLS 41%

OTHER 1%

What metrics are being tracked?

To prioritize integrations on the roadmap effectively and maximize the ROI
on existing integrations, B2B SaaS companies need to continue investing in
their analytics infrastructure.

Tracking integration interest will help quantify the potential impact on sales,
tracking adoption will help go-to-market teams optimize the launch
strategy, and measuring the impact on upsells and retention will help build
a case for investing further in additional integrations.

Having this data available will not only drive better decision-making, but
also help uncover insights to present to leadership that can lead to more
investments in companies’ integration strategies.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 20

Bigger companies are leading
the way for integrations
When we look at what the larger SaaS companies are doing differently, it
boils down to these two key takeaways:

1 They provide their 2 The majority of their

customers with integrations are built
significantly more by partners.
integrations.

Let’s drill into the details.

50% of enterprise companies have 51 or more integrations.

Bigger businesses provide more integrations

— here’s what we can learn from them
How many integrations do B2B SaaS companies have on
average?

On average, the businesses we surveyed had 29 integrations, but what’s

more interesting is the undeniable correlation between a company’s size
and the number of integrations they have.

The larger the company, the more integrations they have.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 21

 chart
Percentage of integrations by company size
100%

75%
PERCENTAGE OF INTEGRATIONS

50%

25%

0%

1-10 11-100 101-500 501-1000 1000+

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES

No integrations 1-10 11-30 30-50 51+

Over 50% of enterprise companies have more than 51 integrations,

whereas that number falls to approximately 10% for SMBs under 100
employees.

This doesn’t come as a surprise — larger companies have larger product

and engineering teams which in turn allows them to ship more integrations.
However, that’s not the only reason behind their expansive integration
catalogs.

Their partners are doing the heavy lifting

Naturally, as a company grows their ecosystem and customer base, there
are more incentives for other SaaS companies to build integrations
‘towards’ their APIs. This is the second reason why bigger companies can
provide so many more integrations — they’re not building the integrations
themselves.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 22

 chart
Partner-built integrations by company size.
100%

75%
PERCENTAGE OF INTEGRATIONS

50%

25%

0%

1-10 11-100 101-500 501-1000 1000+

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES

Mostly partner-built 75% 50% 25% <10% 0%

In fact, for the majority of enterprise companies, more than 50% of their
integrations are built by their partners. This is in line with what we’ve
observed with the leaders in SaaS — they are rarely releasing new
integrations themselves and dedicate their efforts to their marketplace
strategy.

Instead, the majority of their integration efforts are dedicated towards

partner-enablement, to make it easier for other companies to integrate with
them and provide co-marketing and/or co-selling opportunities.

How to action now

Smaller companies who are catching up should recognize that as you grow,
other SaaS companies will naturally begin to ask to integrate. Start
investing in your own API strategy as early as possible. The easier it is for
other companies to build on top of your API, the more likely they’ll become
an avenue of partner-sourced revenue through an integration that they
build.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 23

Conclusion
This original data collected by PartnerStack, Partner Fleet and
Paragon aims to support the good work industry folks are
doing every day in the B2B SaaS space. It’s clear that
integrations may be key to the growth many of us are after in
2024. After all, integrations continue to drive revenue, reduce
churn, increase ACVs and improve win rates within your
partner ecosystem.

State of SaaS Integrations 2024 24

Report by