Cyclr Vs. Konnectify: What’s The Difference And Which One Should You Choose?

Introduction

Among the wave of iPaaS businesses that launched between 2010-2013, Cyclr is the first company to offer embedded iPaaS capabilities. Fast forward to today, Cyclr is a well-known brand in the iPaaS space competing with heavyweights like Zapier, Workato, and Make.

But is Cyclr the perfect iPaaS solution for your integration needs? Are you in the market to evaluate other, more affordable iPaaS vendors? Perhaps you are a Cyclr user who wants to switch to a different platform that doesn’t cost a bomb?

If you are looking for answers to any of the above questions, this blog is for you. In this blog, we will compare Cyclr with Konnectify — an up-and-coming iPaaS solution that offers both iPaaS and embedded iPaaS solutions at a much more reasonable price.

Cyclr has made a great brand for itself over the years, but it has a few downsides that make it hard to scale for fast-growing companies. Plus, it’s mighty expensive. Read on to find out how Konnectify has an edge over Cyclr.

Konnectify vs. Cyclr Key Differences

Cyclr was launched in 2013 and it had the first-mover advantage in the embedded iPaaS niche. Since then, it has expanded its connector library, added more app integrations, and built new features on its platforms.

Konnectify was launched in 2020 and it offers two-in-one platform capabilities — iPaaS and embedded iPaaS solutions. As a young startup, it’s already giving a tough fight to incumbents like Zapier and Make who only offer API-based integration and automation features via their iPaaS solution.

With its embedded iPaaS solution, Konnectify is also in a position to challenge the monopoly of players like Cyclr and Workato — both of whom specialize in the embedded iPaaS domain, are priced heftily, and are hard to scale.

When pegged against Cyclr, it’s much easier to justify your investment for Konnectify which pays for itself in a matter of days — not months. Konnectify also offers robust reporting and analytics, something that Cyclr users seem to constantly complain about. Both platforms are no-code, and yet, Konnectify eclipses Cyclr when on the user-friendy front.

Key Evaluation Criteria

When you are evaluating two or more SaaS products, it’s always better to evaluate them from four critical lenses. These are criteria that most buyers use to gauge a product’s value thoroughly and objectively:

1. Ease Of Use

Consider the ease of using an iPaaS and embedded iPaaS since it determines the product’s user adoption in your organization. When evaluating for ease of use, ask questions like:

• Are you able to figure out how the product works on your own?
• Do you need a dedicated person to administer the tool?
• How good is the product UI and UX?
• How easy is it to set up the tool?
• Is it a low-code, no-code platform?

2. Product Capabilities

The core capabilities of a product are of top priority for every team buying a software. While different iPaaS platforms offer varying degrees of product features and capabilities, some functionalities should be table stakes. Look for answers to these questions:

• Which market is the app primarily marketed to?
• How many apps does it integrate with?
• What other features does it offer?
• How big is its app marketplace?
• What are their flagship features?

3. Pricing

Budgeting for buying new software is always a top-of-mind concern for growing startups. An ideal iPaaS tool is affordable for your organization, offers you the highest return on investment (ROI), and is worthy of a long-term subscription. Analyze the price of an iPaaS solution by asking questions like:

• Is the product priced fairly?
• Are there any hidden costs?
• Are the pricing plans easy to understand?
• Is it aimed at startups, SMBs, or enterprises?
• Do they offer free trials or a freemium subscription?
• Do they have flexible monthly and yearly annual plans?

4. Scalability

Buying a software often is an investment not just to solve your current use cases, but to scale it for your growing needs of the future. Therefore, ask yourself:

• How easy is it to add more users to the platform?
• How frequently do they ship new features?
• Does it offer enterprise-level features?
• Are the functionalities customizable?
• Do they have a product roadmap?

Cyclr vs. Konnectify In-Depth Comparison

1. Cyclr: Ease of use

Unlike some of the other tools that we have reviewed in our earlier blogs, Cyclr is easier to set up and use even for first-time users. Every iPaaS solution these days claims to have a drag-and-drop interface, but not all of them have it easy to navigate. Cyclr’s drag-and-drop interface is pretty easy to follow and creates integrations even for users who don’t know coding.

The only downside to Cyclr’s user-friendliness is that it sometimes is tough to debug errors that are introduced to the platform while enforcing new upgrades. This can impact live integration flows and overall customer experience.

1. Konnectify: Ease of Use

Since Konnectify is a relatively new product, its user interface is amazingly simple and intuitive. Its dashboard doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of buttons or redundant elements. The UI is less noisy and it’s easy for you to locate what you are looking for without getting lost. 

Source

Konnectify offers a simple point-and-click design which makes it easy for no-code users to follow. It has a chat widget right within the app in case you need help navigating the product.

Konnectify offers a 7-day free trial with three pricing tiers: Free Forever, Starter, and Growth. You can sign up using your Google, Microsoft, or email address — no restrictions against your personal email.

2. Cyclr: Product functionality

Cyclr doesn’t offer an iPaaS-only solution — it’s a pure-play embedded iPaaS vendor. As such, it offers the following three features on its platform.

‍Templates

Cyclr offers configurable integration templates that you can create once and reuse many times over. You can create templates from Cyclr’s template library and name them to deploy at a later date.

Cyclr’s templates also come with versioning, meaning you can “draft” an integration template you are building from scratch and test new additions to it before pushing it live. This gives users an audit trail for the templates to build, reiterate, and reuse integration templates for improved efficiency.

‍Connectors

Cyclr has a connector library with over 500 API connectors. Businesses can use Cyclr’s connectors to build a wide variety of integrations. It’s an exhaustive list of apps, but many of Cyclr’s existing users complain that the platform does miss some more common connectors.

The good news — if an application is not found in the library, users can request Cyclr to offer a connector creation toolkit that they can use to build their own connector.

‍Embedded Marketplace

The embedded integration marketplace in Cyclr allows businesses to create a central marketplace of app integrations for their users to access within their SaaS app/website. Businesses can publish the workflows created in Cyclr and personalize the marketplace design to reflect their brand style.

2. Konnectify: Product Functionality

Konnectify is an up-and-coming integration platform with plenty of useful features in its arsenal, including an embedded iPaaS offering. Konnectify’s product team has added a lot of firepower to its existing capabilities since its launch.

In the past couple of years, Konnectify has already delivered more than 500 public and custom integration applications and acquired over 200+ customers worldwide — including big brands like Freshworks, Zee5, TCS, and ATAG.

As an integration solution provider, Konnectify is segmented into two main categories: iPaaS and KOEMP (short for Konnectify Embedded Marketplace).

As an iPaaS provider, Konnectify offers six core features:

‍Pre-defined Templates

Konnectify has “Konnector” — the functionality that enables you to create automated workflows. To make it easy for you to build automated processes, Konnectify offers an exhaustive list of ready-to-use and pre-defined templates that you can choose from or modify to suit your use cases.

Of course, you can also use Konnector to create customer workflows from scratch.

‍Rule Engine

Konnectify's Rule Engine lets you create conditional logic and build custom protocols for handling data between two or more workflows. It lets you implement factors, filters, and transformations passing through your automation.

Smart Forms

This is a functionality where Konnectify outshines Workato. Konnectify’s drag-and-drop Smart Forms lets you build custom forms from a wide range of elements like text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, file uploads, etc.

Once the form is ready, you can embed it in your CRM, CMS, or other customer-facing touchpoint to improve your lead generation or customer support experience. No need to buy a new form builder at an additional cost.

Cyclr integrates with a handful of form builders like Gravity Forms, JotForm, and Typeform — but it doesn’t have a form builder feature of its own. You either have to use free form builders like Google Forms with limited capabilities or pay extra to embed a third-party form builder app.

‍Parse Engine

Konnectify’s Parse Engine helps you retrieve specific data such as email, SMS, or web form submissions from a massive database in an application.

Once you enter the data that you want to retrieve from an app, the Parse Engine runs a query within the app and extracts the information in no time. You can use the parsed data in your workflows to trigger events or perform specific actions.

Lookups

In the array of data integration features offered by Konnectify, the "Lookups" function stands out as a vital component. This functionality facilitates the precise exploration of designated data elements within both source and target applications, based on specific criteria. Beyond its search capabilities, Lookups play a pivotal role in Konnectify by enabling the seamless integration of the extracted data. This integrated data can subsequently be harnessed to execute targeted actions through the platform's Konnectors.

‍Webhooks

Konnectify's robust engine possesses the advanced capability to both send and receive webhook requests. This empowers you to seamlessly gather real-time data from any application you opt for. Furthermore, the engine enables you to dispatch outbound webhook post requests effortlessly.

3. Cyclr: Pricing

The good thing about Cyclr’s plan is that, unlike some other iPaaS vendors like Workato, its pricing info is publicly available on the website. The downside? It’s a little too much to process and very expensive when compared with platforms like Konnectify.

Cyclr offers a 14-day free trial, but it’s important to note that it doesn’t have a free forever version. Its paid plans are priced at $2,095 per month (Growth) and $5,195 (Scale). Additionally, it has two more Custom tiers that are enterprise-focused paid plans for big organizations to choose between self-hosted or managed enterprise services.

Cyclr segments its pricing tiers by the number of connectors it offers — 10 for Growth, 20 for Scale, and custom connectors for its enterprise plans.

The biggest surprise that’s there in Cyclr pricing is perhaps its “onboarding fee” — which isn’t necessarily bad given many SaaS companies these days have some sort of platform fee or implementation fee to monetize their add-on services. The surprising part is the cost of the onboarding fee — $6000 for Growth and Scale plans — and custom pricing for both of its enterprise plans.

Cyclr’s extra cost is not just limited to onboarding. It also charges you extra for the Staging Environment ($310 a month) and Application Connector Creation Toolkit ($515 per month).

Long story short, Cyclr has a clear-cut pricing plan — but it comes at a hefty price tag. Startups and fast-growing scaleups will definitely think twice before going with a premium price like that.

3. Konnectify: Pricing

Konnectify has a better edge over Cyclr when it comes to pricing — and not just because it’s priced more reasonably. Konnectify also packs more value in its offerings than Cyclr.

Konnectify has three pricing plans: Free, Startup, and Growth. The plans are very straightforward and have a lot less information to process. Plus, if you start with its ‘Free’ or ‘Startup’ plan, it’s less intimidating for you to upgrade to a higher tier because of this simplicity.

Konnectify’s pricing chart: simple yet value-packed.

Unlike Cyclr, Konnectify has a free forever that allows you to work with 2000 tasks a month. Plus, there’s a 7-day free trial for each of the paid plans. The Free plan offers 5 Konnectors per month while the paid plans come with unlimited connectors — the equivalent of Cyclr’s enterprise-grade plans.

Konnectify’s Startup plan is priced at $14.99 a month and the Growth plan is priced at $39.99 a month respectively. Konnectify also offers many other functionalities such as email support, event logs, lookups, and conditional workflows — most things you won’t get in Cyclr’s plans.

The paid plans are fairly priced to reflect the value offering that you would get out of them. For instance, the Startup plan gives you 7500 tasks a month while the Growth plan offers 25K tasks a month — with an option to buy more tasks at an extra cost.

The biggest plus of Konnectify over Cyclr is that there are no additional costs with Konnectify. The platform offers your support for all of its plans — including the free version — at no extra cost. You don’t have to worry about forking up money for onboarding, staging environment, or application connector and creation whatsoever.

4. Cyclr: Scalability

Cyclr’s scalability is directly proportional to its affordability on a time-value scale. From a platform standpoint, Cyclr certainly offers all the embedded iPaaS functionalities that help enterprises build reliable integration development.

When you factor in its steep pricing — and all the additional costs that you have to bear month over month — Cyclr’s scalability becomes questionable in the long run.

And if you are thinking of scale in terms of having an iPaaS tool that non-tech business users can also use, you might want to give Cyclr a pass. Cyclr proudly talks about being “built by real developers” (I mean, what application isn’t?), and that is reflected in its user interface. Many customers complain of its documentation being hard to understand and riddled with confusing terminologies — which can be a frustration for no-code users.

Also, Cyclr requires you to put in a heavy amount of effort for your integration use cases. That means, when your integration needs grow bigger, you will need to dedicate more manpower and resources to babysit the integration process. Not the best use of your time.

4. Konnectify: Scalability

Unlike other platforms like Cyclr, where product companies are required to independently develop their applications to be listed on the marketplace, Konnectify streamlines this process significantly. In the case of Konnectify, the responsibility of listing an app within their app ecosystem is handled entirely by their team.

This eliminates the need for product companies or customers to engage in the intricate development process. All that is necessary is for the concerned parties to send an email to Konnectify, and from that point onward, Konnectify takes on the complete task of managing the process.

Despite its small size and still-emerging product capabilities, Konnectify offers a lot of scalability potential. To start with, scaling the tasks per month is not an issue with Konnectify.

If your business needs to automate 80000 tasks a month, it would still cost you under $129.98. This makes it easy (and affordable) for you to add new seats/users to a plan without breaking the bank.

In theory, Konnectify doesn’t offer an enterprise plan. But the value it packs in its paid plans, the customizations it offers for the end users, and the rate at which they are building new apps and capabilities — all make Konnectify a reliable enterprise-ready iPaaS vendor.

If you were to chart a Value Matrix based on pricing and features, Cyclr pales in comparison to Konnectify. And it shows in how customers talk about Konnectify.

The Verdict

Cyclr is a great embedded iPaaS platform with lots of useful functionalities — but it comes at a pretty penny. Going by its pricing strategy, it’s clear that Cyclr is aimed at enterprises that can loosen their purse strings and don’t mind budgeting for extra developer resources. If your business fits the bill, you probably should ‘apply for trial’ — as the folks at Cyclr put it.

On the other hand, Konnectify is a two-in-one iPaaS and embedded iPaaS platform with lots of new functionalities added to its repertoire. It edges Cyclr on all fronts hands down, but its most significant over Cyclr is its easy and affordable pricing. It doesn’t have hefty onboarding fees and extra monthly charges like staging environment or connector toolkits.

If you want a reliable iPaaS and embedded iPaaS that’s affordable and pays for itself in a matter of weeks, Konnectify is a walkover compared to Cyclr. Sign up today for a free trial.

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