The Hidden Limitations of Low Code and No Code Integration Platforms

Every day, the team at Pandium talks with B2B SaaS companies seeking a more efficient way to build integrations. Many mention that they’ve considered low-code tools, but have quickly realized that there are many limitations that make them unsuitable for integrations their customers will use.

Low-code and no-code integration platforms promise faster delivery and expanded access to integration work, but they often introduce hidden constraints that show up only when your product, ecosystem, or customers start to scale. These limitations can slow roadmap velocity, reduce reliability, and make it harder to deliver the integration experiences your buyers expect.

This article explores where low- and no-code integration platforms break down for B2B SaaS, when they might be “good enough,” and what a code-first embedded iPaaS approach offers instead.‍

The Promise vs. Reality of Low-Code Integration

Low-code and no-code integration platforms are typically marketed as a way to:

• Ship integrations faster without relying on scarce engineering resources.
• Enable non-developers to build and maintain integrations.
• Standardize how integrations are built across your ecosystem.

For simple, low-volume use cases, those benefits can be real. But as soon as you are supporting customer workflows, high data volumes, or a growing partner ecosystem, the underlying tradeoffs become far more apparent.

But First, Understanding API Connectors

Before we dive into the limitations of traditional low code and no code embedded iPaaS solutions, it's important to understand the role of API connectors in facilitating integrations for these systems. This understanding sets the stage for exploring how these connectors shape the capabilities, limitations, and flexibility of embedded iPaaS platforms.

API ≠ API Connectors

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) enable communication between different software systems, allowing one system to request data and digital assets from another. Embedded iPaaS solutions often provide connectors, or API connectors, to facilitate communication between APIs, simplifying the integration process and reducing the workload for developers.

What are API Connectors?

Pre-built connectors offered by low code or no code embedded iPaaS tools typically handle authentication and provide predefined actions and endpoints. These actions are presented visually within a workflow builder tool, allowing users to create integrations.

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These predefined actions mostly facilitate what are called CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete), which, at a high level, define how data will be interacted with, organized, and maintained for an integration. The API connectors created by the low-code iPaaS vendor put a layer of restrictions on top of the API that limit how another tool can interact with that API based on what the low-code tool can support. We’ll dive into this deeper in our first limitation. 

Limitation #1: Limited Flexibility with API Interactions‍

Traditional embedded iPaaS solutions simplify API interactions by standardizing data and presenting it in visual blocks. However, this approach limits SaaS companies to a predefined set of functionalities, hindering their ability to customize integrations to meet unique needs. Real customer workflows rarely map cleanly onto simple trigger–action recipes. They require branching logic, conditional behavior, retries, backfilling, and careful handling of edge cases.
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For example, CRUD or webhook functionality might not be consistent across all API connectors an embedded iPaaS offers. If an API gets updated (this could be your API or your partner's API), or you want to work with a beta API there is often a significant time delay as you need to wait until the embedded iPaaS vendor releases an updated connector version based on the general availability API. 

In addition, low code / no code platforms often need to prioritize which API connectors they build and maintain. If the API you need to connect to isn’t consistently requested by other customers, then support may not be available and maintenance and updates might be discontinued. 

As applications and use cases grow, traditional embedded iPaaS solutions often struggle to keep up with evolving integration needs, creating bottlenecks for B2B SaaS companies. Changes to integrations have to follow the platform’s predefined actions and connectors, which limits flexibility and agility. This lack of adaptability can hold back innovation and prevent companies from fully harnessing the full power of APIs.

Limitation #2: Developer Frustration

Low code and no code tools were created so "citizen" developers could tackle tasks that once required coding expertise. In integration, they promise users can build workflows with a visual builder.

However, just as in other areas (like web development), these tools often don’t deliver the productivity gains hoped for. Non-developers may be able to handle basic tasks, but someone with coding experience is often still needed to complete or troubleshoot integrations.

Using these platforms still requires significant time and training, especially for complex integrations. Even simple workflows can require intricate branching, with hundreds of decision trees. 

Take a look at the example below—this integration, built in a visual workflow tool, shows how quickly things can get complicated. 

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This reliance on embedded iPaaS-specific knowledge ultimately reduces integration developers' productivity and slows down maintenance and updates.

Key practices like code reviews, automated testing, and version control can become challenging or simply unavailable in some low code/no code environments, which compromises both productivity and quality. Developers generally prefer working with code and familiar tools, where they can maintain high standards and operate efficiently.

Justuno (a marketing automation platform), switched from a popular no code integration solution for many of these reasons—seeking more flexibility, control, and efficiency.

Justuno Case Study

For years, Justuno relied on in-house developers to build and maintain their integrations with technology partners. However, as their platform expanded and APIs evolved, this approach became increasingly unsustainable due to enormous developer debt. 

Seeking a solution, Justuno turned to a well-known traditional embedded iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) tool. They planned to outsource integration development entirely. Initially, things seemed promising. But after six months, 3rd-party development came to a standstill, leaving Justuno at the mercy of a stagnant platform and unable to make crucial updates or add new integrations.

>> Read the full case study

As integrations become more complex, teams end up stacking workarounds and custom scripts on top, eroding the original promise of simplicity and making the system harder to use over time. Low-code often quickly becomes low-code with code on top and all around it, frustrating any developer that has to work with it. 

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>> Read more comments from low-code users

Limitation #3: Scalability Issues 

As you win larger customers and support more integrations, performance characteristics start to matter as much as functionality.

• Many low-code integration platforms struggle with large data volumes, high-frequency syncs, or strict SLAs, because they were designed for ease of use rather than for fine-grained performance tuning.
• You may encounter throttling, unpredictable latency, or opaque resource limits, without the observability or control needed to diagnose and fix issues efficiently.

For simple integrations where you need to process something like an email update a low code / no code tool may work very well. However if you need to do more significant actions (eg. get 200M records, do the ETL and then batch and feed them into your own API) then these systems often don’t have the resiliency to deal with that type of data volume. This is due to a number of factors including: 

• Design choices: Many are designed with discreet, event-based integrations in mind and these typically only process a small amount of records at one time. 
• Legacy technology: Older, enterprise focused iPaaS tools claim the ability to process high volumes, but their platforms use older technologies that make syncs slow and users may experience timeouts or other technical issues with longer runs. 
• Call and transaction limits: They often have limits on the number of webhooks they can accept in an hour, or limits on the number of API calls, transactions, workflow ‘tasks’ or ‘recipes’ they can process in one run. 

These scalability issues place restrictions on the business value an organization can derive from their integration strategy and limit the use cases that an embedded iPaaS solution can be leveraged for. 

Limitation #4: Vendor Lock-In Risks

Low- and no-code platforms typically store your workflows, configuration, and sometimes business logic inside their proprietary environment.

• If you want to switch vendors or bring integrations in-house, it is often impossible to cleanly extract and reuse that logic; instead, you must rebuild integrations from scratch using another tool or your own infrastructure.
• If the iPaaS vendor shifts their focus, reduces the development support that was initially promised or lacks support for APIs you may need in the future, the lock-in to the iPaaS platform can create bottlenecks to integration development and maintenance. 
• This lock-in also applies to your partner ecosystem: if partners build on your chosen low-code platform, their ability to extend or repurpose their work elsewhere is limited, which can complicate strategic decisions later.

The more your product and go-to-market rely on these integrations, the more painful this lock-in becomes.

Limitation #5: Unpredictable Pricing 

Many embedded iPaaS tools use a pricing model that includes a standard SaaS license fee to use the platform, and then additional usage based pricing. While usage-based pricing is becoming more and more common, embedded iPaaS tools typically calculate pricing on usage metrics that are very difficult for their customers to understand, measure, and use to predict costs.  

Pricing is often calculated based on data volume and/or activity that is being sent from external systems back to the embedded iPaaS to sync with your API. While you may be able to understand and count what you have in your own systems, what will be sent from your customers is something that is impossible to understand with any certainty. 

If a customer decides that they need to click a button constantly which triggers an API call, a recipe, workflow or task, then you are charged for this. If a customer decides to import and sync hundreds of records, you are charged for this. While many iPaaS vendors provide estimates of average use, these are only estimates and customers often find that in real-life there are too many unpredictable ways that other systems might be used. 

Where Low-Code Integration Can Still Work

Despite these limitations, low- and no-code integration platforms can be useful in specific scenarios:

• Internal operations automations that are not part of your product surface and do not carry customer-facing SLAs.
• Prototyping new integration ideas before committing engineering resources.

The key is to recognize the best use-cases for these platforms, and ensure that you understand the specific challenges of each integration use-case. 

Why Code-First Embedded iPaaS is Different

A code-first embedded iPaaS approach starts from the assumption that integrations are a strategic part of your product and ecosystem, not an afterthought.

Compared to low- and no-code platforms, a code-first model enables you to:

• Implement any logic your customers or partners require, using familiar languages and tooling, without running into unnatural abstraction limits.
• Scale to any number of integration installs, handle traffic spikes and high volume, and create integrations with more complexity. 
• Maintain full ownership of your integration logic so you can move platforms, refactor, and extend integrations without vendor lock-in.
• Design native-feeling integration experiences that align with your product’s UX, objects, and permissions model.

With the right embedded iPaaS, your engineers and integration specialists can still move quickly, while retaining the control and depth needed for complex, high-value use cases.

How to Decide What’s Right for Your Team

If you are evaluating or re-evaluating your integration strategy, ask:

1. How complex are the workflows our customers expect today—and in the next 12–24 months?
2. How important are integrations to our product’s differentiation and to revenue generation?
3. How much do we need the integrations to feel truly native inside our product?
4. How important is it that we own our integration code? 

If integrations are central to your product, ecosystem, and revenue strategy, then it’s worth considering if code-first approaches would be a better fit. 

What to Do If You Are Already On a Low-Code Integration Platform

Many SaaS companies start with low-code integration tools and later outgrow them. If that is where you are today, consider:

• Auditing which integrations are mission-critical, high-volume, or high-visibility, and prioritizing those for migration.
• Identifying where limited logic, poor observability, or performance issues are already creating support tickets or customer friction.
• Building a phased plan to move key integrations onto a code-first embedded iPaaS, while keeping low-code tools for low-risk internal automation or prototyping.

This approach allows you to reduce risk and support load while improving the quality and reliability of your most important integrations.

An Alternative Approach to Low Code and No Code Integration Platforms

Pandium is a code-first embedded iPaaS solution that offers B2B SaaS flexibility, customization, and direct API access. It also provides the infrastructure needed for seamless integration deployment and management. 

Pandium acts as a facilitator rather than an intermediary in the integration process. It empowers developers to quickly build, iterate, and deploy integrations at scale, providing a middle ground between in-house development and low code or no code iPaaS solutions.

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Access the Full Functionality of an API 

While Pandium also offers connectors, its connectors don’t include predefined workflows and actions, and it doesn’t use a visual builder. Pandium connectors facilitate authentication between APIs and offer developers access to API Clients that support them with seamless API interactions. 

Pandium provides developers with resources and code scaffolding to automate and streamline the local development of integration business logic, simplifying and accelerating the process. Meanwhile, the Integration Hub takes care of the necessary infrastructure to efficiently launch and manage integrations at scale.

Built for Scalability 

Pandium is optimized for large data volumes with syncs processing much faster than more traditional iPaaS tools. Processing large data volumes was incorporated into the platform design from the beginning and is treated as a first-class concept. Syncs can be batched to enable more failsafe processing, and customers can implement concurrency within syncs to optimize for speed (which leads to better resilience.) 

Local Integration Development = No Vendor Lock-In 

Pandium facilitates integration development by connecting to developers' repositories of choice. Developers are supported by Pandium’s Integration Development Kit to quickly code the business logic for their chosen integration and the Pandium CLI to allow developers to build, deploy and manage integrations directly from the command line. Pandium also provides an AI code generation tool that allows integration teams to create integration code in just a few minutes. Because the AI generated code is built on top of Pandium's integration development kit and API clients, the code actually works in production and can be easily edited by integration developers.

Value Based Pricing 

Pandium provides unlimited integrations and daily executions, meaning your customers can sync with your system as much as they want without creating additional cost. 

Choosing Embedded Integration Platform Solutions Wisely

When selecting an embedded iPaaS solution, it's essential to align the choice with strategic goals and integration needs. While low-code or no-code iPaaS may be great for simpler use cases, Pandium becomes a compelling choice for companies looking for a combination of innovation, flexibility, and speed.