3rd party Integration Tools for Dynamics 365

After spending several years of building integration between Dynamics 365(CRM) and other systems, we thought of comparing these two widely used 3rd party integration tools.

(Beware of the publication dates because of the innovative nature of the IT industry)

Before comparing these 2 integration tools it is worth noting Microsoft’s power automate called MS Flow before rebranding.

Power Automate

Microsoft built this cloud tool to automate the process/data flow within a system or between systems, which are either connected through CDS (common data service) or provided connectors.
For integration, this tool can be considered for the simple flow of data between systems without complex if-else scenarios

Here are some of the reasons why it is not considered an integration tool:

• No Upsert (UpdateInsert) functionality
• No lookup/seek functionality (one must list records and handle them)
• No parent-child relation (difficult to process transactions)
• The trigger-based event cannot filter on fields (update trigger cannot be restricted to certain fields)
• Data manipulation is difficult which requires complex expressions

Beside all these limitations PowerAutomate is still a handy cloud-based tool for automatic processing of functions and simple data flow.

Enough of PowerAutomate, let’s get to our main topic of comparing Tibco Scribe and Kingswaysoft with their respective pros/cons

Tibco Scribe vs Kingswaysoft

 

SSIS_Kingswaysoft	Tibco scribe (insight/online)
Requires SQL Server integration services	No SQL or SSIS required works independently
Existing SQL server with SSIS can host kingswaysoft toolkit	Requires separate server for scribe insight though not for online
No queue-based integration	Requires windows MSMQ (message queuing) for queue-based integration
Requires development environment with Visual Studio, SSIS and kingawaysoft_toolkit	Scribe online requires no installation or dev environment setup, though Scribe insight requires full server installation
No trigger-based integration Though toolkit has a complex EntityChanges mechanism to achieve trigger-based integration which is based on Input/output token variables and DB tables	Trigger-based integration is very easy through the provided adapter using a publisher for scribe insight (on-premise) For Scribe Online we must generate endpoint for event-based integration and then extend the source system to send data to the endpoint to achieve trigger-based integration.
Requires experience of SSIS for complex integration scenarios	No SSIS or other such experience required
No standard/persistent mechanism for error logging	Very persistent and intuitive mechanism for error logging including transactional errors
Free developer edition	Not free, only one month’s trial
Much Better performance especially for large datasets because of SSIS based processing	Not so efficient in performance when compared to SSIS based solutions
Can be very difficult to build DTS for complex integrations which require SSIS scripting, especially if one dosn’t have SSIS experience	No coding or scripting required, though sometimes one must build strong logics using DTS steps and flow operations
A small set of source/target-system dependent functions and that’s why SSIS scripting comes into play to achieve certain requirements which can be cumbersome	A large set of source/target-system dependent functions at our leverage
No integration centric database	Has its own integration centric database (scribe insight)
Once the development environment is set with SSIS and kingswayssoft toolkit and Visual Studio. Development of integration maps is a seamless experience	Scribe online sometime is very slow and irritating with long response time especially while building integration maps and debugging, but that is not the case for Scribe insight luckily
Very difficult error tracing	Very easy error tracing due to the extensive error logging built-in mechanism
Much cheaper than Scribe	Costly. At least 4 times more expensive than kingswaysoft

 

Conclusion:

Tibco Scribe (insight) is great for complex integration where error tracing is very important, having no developer resources.

Kingswaysoft is great for companies with low budget for integration where error tracing is not so important and have some developer resources, though it will require more time to build integration maps.

We hope it will help someone in making the right choice and apologies if we missed something 🙂

https://flow.microsoft.com/

https://www.kingswaysoft.com/products/ssis-integration-toolkit-for-microsoft-dynamics-365

https://www.tibco.com/solutions/microsoft-dynamics-365-integration