What Are the Four Types of Integration?

Integration is the backbone of modern digital systems. Whether you are connecting Salesforce with marketing tools, syncing data between platforms, or enabling real time automation, integrations allow systems to work together as one.

At a high level, there are four main types of integration that most enterprise and SaaS systems rely on. Understanding these types helps you choose the right architecture, reduce failures, and scale integrations correctly.

This guide explains each integration type in simple terms, with examples and best use cases.

The four main types of integration are data integration, application integration, process integration, and user interface integration. Each type serves a different purpose depending on how systems need to share data, trigger actions, or work together.

Not all integrations solve the same problem. Some move data, some trigger actions, and others unify user experiences.

Choosing the wrong type of integration often leads to:

• Data inconsistencies

• Broken automations

• Performance issues

• High maintenance costs

Knowing the four integration types helps teams design systems that are reliable, scalable, and future ready.

Data integration focuses on moving and synchronizing data between systems. The goal is to ensure the same data exists across platforms in a consistent and accurate way.

This type of integration is often batch based or scheduled.

• Syncing customer records between Salesforce and a data warehouse

• Replicating CRM data into analytics platforms

• Importing product or pricing data from ERP systems

• APIs

• ETL tools

• Data pipelines

• Change Data Capture

Use data integration when your primary goal is reporting, analytics, or maintaining a single source of truth.

Application integration allows different applications to communicate and exchange data in real time. This is the most common integration type in operational systems.

Unlike data integration, application integration is usually event driven.

• Creating a Salesforce Lead when a form is submitted on a website

• Updating an Opportunity when a payment is completed

• Sending call data from a telephony system into Salesforce

• REST APIs

• Webhooks

• Platform Events

• Middleware

For Salesforce based systems, this is where platforms like Appnigma simplify integrations by removing heavy middleware and manual development.
You can explore how modern Salesforce integrations are built at https://appnigma.ai/

Use this type when systems must react immediately to events or actions.

Process integration connects entire business workflows across systems, not just individual data points.

It ensures that multi step processes flow smoothly from one system to another.

• Lead creation triggers onboarding workflows across CRM, support, and billing

• Order creation starts fulfillment, invoicing, and notifications

• Customer status updates drive actions in multiple tools

• Orchestration across systems

• Business logic and rules

• Error handling and retries

Process integration is often layered on top of application integrations.

Use this when your business process spans multiple platforms and requires coordination.

User interface integration brings multiple systems together at the screen level, allowing users to interact with different applications through a single interface.

The systems may remain separate behind the scenes, but the user experience is unified.

• Embedded Salesforce components inside external portals

• Showing ERP or support data inside Salesforce screens

• Unified dashboards pulling data from multiple tools

• Embedded components

• Iframes

• Widgets

• APIs powering UI layers

Use this when user experience and productivity matter more than backend data synchronization.

Most enterprise architectures use more than one integration type together.

Salesforce is a great example of a platform that supports all four types:

• Data integration using Change Data Capture and ETL tools

• Application integration using REST APIs and webhooks

• Process integration using flows, events, and automation

• User interface integration using Lightning components and embedded apps

Modern platforms like Appnigma build on these capabilities to simplify Salesforce native integrations without heavy custom code. Learn more at https://appnigma.ai/

• Clearly define the business goal

• Identify the system of record

• Decide whether real time behavior is required

• Plan for scale and error handling

• Avoid over engineering

Choosing the simplest integration type that meets your needs usually leads to better long term outcomes.

For official technical concepts and standards, you can refer to:

• Salesforce Integration Architecture documentation on Salesforce Help

• REST API fundamentals on developer.salesforce.com

These resources provide deeper technical implementation details.

The four types are data integration, application integration, process integration, and user interface integration.

There is no single best type. The right choice depends on whether you need data sync, real time actions, workflow orchestration, or unified user experience.

Yes. Most modern systems use multiple integration types together.

Yes. Salesforce provides native support for all major integration types.

Understanding the four types of integration helps teams design smarter systems and avoid common integration failures. Instead of treating integration as a technical afterthought, choosing the right integration approach upfront leads to scalable, reliable, and future ready architectures.

If you are building Salesforce integrations and want a faster, simpler approach, platforms like Appnigma make it easier to design and deploy Salesforce native integrations without complexity.