The Ultimate Integration Buyer's Checklist (2026 Edition)

Integration platforms all demo beautifully. The differences that matter — what happens when an API changes, when volume spikes, when a flow touching money fails at 2 a.m. — never appear on the demo script. This checklist is built to surface them. Put the same 28 questions to every vendor, score the answers, and the decision usually makes itself.

1. Security & Compliance

• Can you share a current SOC 2 Type II report — including the exceptions section?
• Is all data encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest (AES-256), including queues and logs?
• How do payment flows stay PCI-compliant — is card data fully tokenized and out of our systems?
• Do you support least-privilege API credentials and role-based access for our team?
• Will you sign a BAA if we handle health data?

2. Scalability & Reliability

• How are bursts handled — queuing, throttling, retries — and what's the guaranteed-delivery story?
• What happens when a destination system is down for six hours? Show the recovery, not the slide.
• How do you manage each platform's API rate limits at month-end volumes?
• What's your published uptime, and what does the SLA actually credit?

3. No-Code & Configurability

• Can a business analyst modify a field mapping or approval threshold without a developer?
• Are common processes (quote-to-cash, payment reconciliation, dunning) pre-built, or built from scratch every time?
• How are changes tested and promoted — is there a sandbox, and version history with rollback?
• When the vendor's connector updates for an API change, do our flows keep working without rework?

4. AI Capabilities

• Can AI agents take multi-step actions — retry, notify, escalate — or only classify and summarize?
• Are approval thresholds and human-in-the-loop checkpoints native platform features?
• Is every AI decision logged with what it saw, what it did, and why?
• Can autonomy be dialed per process, so payment retries and contract credits carry different trust levels?

5. Monitoring & Visibility

• Is there a live dashboard of every flow's health, throughput, and error rate — readable by a non-developer?
• When a record fails, does it land in an exception queue with context and an owner, or in a log file?
• Can we trace one customer record end-to-end across systems with a full audit trail?
• Do alerts reach us before our customers notice — configurable by severity and channel?

6. Support & Partnership

• Who implements — your team, ours, or a third-party SI we have to hire?
• What are real response times for a production-down issue on a revenue flow?
• Do we get a named contact who knows our flows, or a ticket queue?
• Can you give us three references at our size, on our systems?

7. Pricing & Total Cost

• What drives price — tasks, records, connectors, flows? What does our volume cost at 2× and 5× growth?
• Is implementation a fixed scope or open-ended billable hours?
• Are connector updates and maintenance included, or a separate line?
• What does leaving cost — can we export our mappings and history, or are we hostages?

"The best vendor answer to any of these is specific, boring, and verifiable. Be suspicious of exciting answers."

We publish this list knowing our own platform will be scored against it — that's the point. InterWeave was built to answer these 28 questions well: SOC 2-aligned security, tokenized payment flows, pre-built processes on 200+ maintained connectors, human-in-the-loop SmartAgents, full-visibility monitoring, and a named team that knows your flows. Bring the checklist to the demo.