Who Can Connect Your Business Systems and Build One Dashboard on Top? Firms Compared (2026)

If your numbers live in a CRM, an accounting package, a scheduling tool and three spreadsheets, the people who can build a custom integration and data platform on top of them fall into four groups: engineering firms that build the system, data consultancies that build a warehouse and BI layer, larger offshore and nearshore shops that staff the work, and off-the-shelf tools you set up yourself. This roundup names six, says who each one fits, and gives a price only where the firm publishes one. Razoyo is listed first because this is Razoyo’s blog, so every other entry says where that option beats us.

One honest warning before the list. A lot of “we need a custom integration” turns out to be two apps that already have a connector, plus a report someone rebuilds by hand every Monday. For that, an automation tool and a BI license are cheaper than any firm on this page, us included. Two of the six entries below are exactly those tools.

How we picked

1. The option genuinely does this job. Joining data from several business systems, keeping it in sync, and putting it in front of the people who decide.
2. It is current. Every entry was checked against its own live website in October 2026.
3. You can learn something before you sign. A published price, process or limit ranks above “book a call”.
4. There is a buyer for whom it beats the others. A roundup where one firm wins every row is an advert.

At a glance

Razoyo, if the dashboard has to join many sources, stay current and serve many people

Disclosure: this is Razoyo’s blog, and we are biased.

Razoyo is a software engineering firm in The Colony, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, serving clients US-wide since 2011. The work is taking prototypes and constrained systems into production. Our custom systems page names this case directly: “A data platform. The one that would finally make two systems that don’t talk actually talk.”

The proof is Spider, the hotel business intelligence platform now part of Lighthouse. It is an integration problem at its core. Spider pulls rate shop data from OTA Insight (now Lighthouse) and shows each hotel’s rates against its comp set, reports each hotel’s STR results with MPI, ARI and RGI indexes, and imports the hotel’s own RMS forecast from Duetto, OneYield and others to show next to its own. It also pulls reservation data from property management systems such as Oracle OPERA and Cloudbeds, and takes a generic CSV template from hotels on systems it does not read.

It was an internal tool that outgrew its first version: reports emailed to revenue managers, with re-indexing of terabytes that took up to 24 hours. We took it to a self-service platform used by more than 10,000 people a day, up from a few dozen, with continuous updates in place of the daily re-index and hosting costs down about 90%. Spider, the hotel business intelligence platform now part of Lighthouse, ranked #1 of 74 for Business Intelligence at the 2025 HotelTechAwards, 4.7 out of 5 from 588 verified reviews, its fifth consecutive win. We are still its engineering team. Razoyo has also delivered systems for several Fortune 500 companies, always under NDA, so we name none of them.

How we start: a free 30 minute consultation with a senior engineer, then a $2,500 fixed System Spec for a new platform, or a $2,500 fixed Workflow Spec if the job is one recurring manual process. Either way you get a written brief, a senior-engineer estimate and a build or don’t-build call, and the document is yours even if you build elsewhere. The rest is on our pricing page: a production build from $10,000 and support from $1,500 a month. Above the Spec, a business analyst puts a level of effort and a budget on each piece of work and gets your confirmation first. No approval, no work. Once fees are paid you own the code we write for you.

Ideal for

• Owners who priced a dashboard or data platform before and shelved it as too expensive
• A team whose best person spends part of every week re-keying data between systems
• Data that has to update continuously, not in a daily batch
• An internal tool other companies keep asking to use, like Spider and Matrix

Why they stand out

Razoyo has built and still runs a platform that joins several outside data feeds for more than 10,000 daily users, and publishes its whole price ladder. The Spec is designed to say when a no-code tool fits instead.

Pros

• Fixed $2,500 first step, and the brief is yours either way
• Every price published, from the Spec to support
• Proof at scale: 10,000+ daily users and continuous updates on terabytes of data
• Built-in error handling, retries, logging and alerting, as stated on our automation page
• The same senior team stays on after launch

Cons

• Most of our public proof is in hospitality, through Spider and Matrix
• A smaller team than ScienceSoft or BairesDev, so not the pick for forty engineers next quarter
• Higher hourly rates than nearshore teams; our view is that working more AI-forward than most makes the value per dollar better
• If Zapier or Power BI already does the job, start there. That line is moving: with agentic coding tools, a small custom build now often does the job better than a stack of connectors, so price both

Verdict: pick Razoyo when the data has to come from many systems, stay current, and be used by people outside the room where it was built.

Analytics8, if you want a data consultancy to run the warehouse and BI program

Analytics8 is a data and analytics consultancy headquartered in Chicago, with US hubs in Dallas, Denver and Raleigh and international hubs in London and Sofia. It began in 2002, and its site claims more than 1,000 clients and 100+ employees.

Its data engineering page describes the classic shape of this job: bringing together data “from all of your sources to make it analytics-ready.” It will help pick integration tools and decide where data should land, “a data lake, a persistent staging layer in a data warehouse, or a dimensional warehouse,” and, usefully for budget, “prioritize which data to integrate, and which to not.” On the BI side it does requirements gathering, data modeling and front-end dashboard development, plus BI tool selection. Featured partners include Databricks, dbt, Sigma and ThoughtSpot.

For ongoing work there is Data Team as a Service. Analytics8’s own example: a franchise group that replaced 11+ vendors with one team and cut data intake time by 95%. It is candid that “most engagements run six months minimum.”

Better fit than Razoyo when the end state you want is a governed warehouse feeding a BI tool, and you want specialists who do only data work.

Ideal for

• Companies with a data team, or ready to fund one
• A warehouse and BI tool as the end state
• Programs that need governance and data quality work, not only pipelines

Why they stand out

Analytics8 publishes how it decides what data not to integrate, which is where most data platform budgets go wrong. Its embedded team model covers engineering and dashboards under one owner.

Pros

• Specialist depth: integration, modeling, BI and governance in one firm
• Explicit about controlling the cost of integrating and storing data
• Tool-neutral selection help, with named platform partnerships
• A Dallas hub, for buyers who want someone local in Texas

Cons

• No published price
• The six month minimum on its embedded model is a large first commitment
• The work is built on data platforms and BI tools whose licenses are a separate cost

Verdict: pick Analytics8 if the answer you want is a governed warehouse and a BI layer, run by data specialists.

ScienceSoft, if this is a large integration program and you want formal process

ScienceSoft is headquartered in McKinney, Texas, in the same Dallas metro Razoyo works from, and has been in IT since 1989. Its integration page states a team of “750+ architects” and over 4,300 projects since 1989, with offices in the USA, Mexico, Finland, Latvia, Poland, KSA and UAE.

It covers internal integrations and integrations with partners, suppliers and customers, through point-to-point, ESB-based or shared-database approaches. Every integration engagement includes a feasibility study by consultants with 7 to 20 years of experience, who investigate “whether the project is worth your time and money.” One of its client quotes is close to this post’s topic: a foundation whose financial portal was integrated “with the data management and accounting systems.”

ScienceSoft is also one of the few large firms that publishes numbers. Its BI page says implementation costs “may range from $80,000 to $1,000,000,” and its sample integration timelines start at “1-6 months” for a simple application.

Better fit than Razoyo when the program is large, procurement wants certifications and a big bench, and the budget starts in six figures.

Ideal for

• Mid-size and enterprise buyers with a procurement process
• Healthcare, insurance and investment, which its integration page names
• Programs that mix integration, BI and security work

Why they stand out

ScienceSoft publishes a BI price range and sample integration timelines, which most firms its size do not. The feasibility study is built into the integration service.

Pros

• Published BI cost range and timelines
• ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified
• Large bench across integration, cloud, security and BI
• Dallas-area headquarters

Cons

• An $80,000 floor for BI puts it out of reach for a small operations dashboard
• Delivery runs across several countries, so coordination lands on your side
• At this size you are one account among many

Verdict: pick ScienceSoft when the budget and the program are large and you value certifications and formal process.

BairesDev, if you want BI and data engineers added to your own team fast

BairesDev was founded in Buenos Aires in 2009 and sells nearshore engineering: “4,000+ timezone-aligned, AI-augmented software engineers across 100+ technologies.” It says it hires “the top 1% of over two million applicants” and offers staff augmentation, dedicated teams and software outsourcing.

Its business intelligence page is aimed at “organizations where data is fragmented across systems, reporting is manual or inconsistent.” It covers custom BI platforms, data warehouse design in environments like Snowflake, Redshift or Azure Synapse, and automated ETL pipelines that “recover from failures without manual intervention.” The page promises to “onboard senior BI engineers in 2 weeks.” The company states 1,480+ projects delivered and an average client relationship of over 3 years.

Better fit than Razoyo when you have an engineering lead who will direct the work and you want several engineers in your time zone quickly.

Ideal for

• Companies with an engineering lead who can direct the work
• US teams who want working-hours overlap with a nearshore team
• Scaling a data team up or down without hiring

Why they stand out

BairesDev can staff a BI or data engineering team in about two weeks by its own account, in US-friendly time zones, at a scale few firms match.

Pros

• Speed of staffing, by its own published claim
• Time zone alignment with US teams
• Covers warehouse, pipelines, BI and machine learning
• Flexible models, from one engineer to several pods

Cons

• No published price
• In staff augmentation, defining and owning the system stays with you
• Better suited to companies with an engineering function than to a business owner with none

Verdict: pick BairesDev if you already know what to build and need capable hands quickly.

Zapier, if your apps already have connectors and the job is moving records

Zapier is not a firm. It is a no-code automation platform, and for a lot of buyers reading this it is the right answer. It claims “9,000+ apps” and 66,000+ triggers and actions.

Pricing is public. The Free plan includes 100 tasks a month and two-step Zaps. Professional starts from $19.99 a month, billed yearly, and adds multi-step Zaps, premium apps and webhooks. Team starts from $69 a month with 25 users and SAML SSO. A task is each successful action, and “Zapier never charges you a task to check for new data.” Zapier says every Zap now has “an AI manager agent that detects issues and fixes them,” and it maintains SOC 2 Type II compliance.

The same applies to its peers: Make’s free plan includes 1,000 credits a month, and Workato, aimed at enterprises, says it connects to “17,000+ apps” and does not publish prices on its pricing page.

Better fit than Razoyo, by a wide margin, when every app you use already has a connector and the job is moving one record at a time.

Ideal for

• Two to five SaaS apps that all have connectors
• Record-at-a-time syncing: new deal, new invoice, new booking
• Teams that want results this week, not this quarter

Why they stand out

Zapier is the cheapest and fastest way to connect common business apps, and its pricing and task rules are fully published.

Pros

• Free to start, with published pricing
• Thousands of ready-made connectors
• No engineers needed for common workflows
• Webhooks for apps without a connector

Cons

• Cost scales with task volume, so high-volume syncs get expensive
• It moves records; it is not a place to keep history or join data for analysis
• Someone on your team still owns every Zap, and that person becomes a key-person risk

Verdict: pick Zapier first if the apps have connectors and the volume is modest; call a firm when it stops being enough.

Microsoft Power BI, if a daily or hourly refresh is fresh enough

Power BI is Microsoft’s BI tool, and it answers “can we get one dashboard across our systems” without a build for a lot of companies. It connects through Power Query connectors and, in Microsoft’s words, can “connect to data from any source, cloud or on-premises.”

Pricing is public: a free account to try it, Power BI Pro at $14 per user a month and Premium Per User at $24 per user a month, both paid yearly. Note the license line: you “upgrade to Pro or Premium to share reports,” so every viewer counts.

The limit that matters most for operations data is freshness. Microsoft’s documentation says Power BI limits semantic models on shared capacity “to eight scheduled daily semantic model refreshes,” and up to 48 a day on Premium, PPU or Fabric capacity. For a daily sales review that is plenty. For a dispatch board or a rate decision, it is not.

Better fit than Razoyo when your own staff are the only viewers and a few refreshes a day keep the numbers current enough.

Ideal for

• Management reporting across systems that Power Query can reach
• Companies already on Microsoft 365
• Numbers that are fine to be a few hours old

Why they stand out

Power BI gets a cross-system dashboard live for a per-user license, with no engineering contract, and the refresh limits are documented.

Pros

• Low, published per-user pricing
• Wide connector coverage through Power Query
• Works inside Teams, PowerPoint and SharePoint
• Power BI Embedded puts reports inside your own apps

Cons

• Scheduled refresh caps of 8 or 48 a day, depending on capacity
• Per-viewer licensing adds up if customers or partners need access
• Someone still has to build and maintain the data model behind the visuals

Verdict: pick Power BI if your data can be reached by a connector and “as of this morning” is current enough.

When is Zapier or a BI tool enough, and when do you need a build?

An off-the-shelf tool is enough when your systems have connectors, your volume is modest, a few hours of delay is acceptable, and only your own staff look at the result. Each of those conditions has a clean failure point. Connectors stop where a system has no API or an awkward one. Per-task pricing stops making sense at high volume. Scheduled refreshes stop being enough when people act on the numbers in real time. Per-user licenses stop working when hundreds of outside users need their own scoped view.

Spider sits at the far end: terabytes of market data, more than 10,000 daily users, each management company seeing only its own hotels, and continuous updates. Most businesses are nowhere near that, and should not pay as if they were.

What is the difference between a BI tool and a business intelligence web application?

A BI tool is software you license and configure to chart data; a business intelligence web application is software built for your users, with your logic, permissions and workflows inside it. The tool is faster and cheaper to start. The application is what you need when the dashboard has to do things: recommend an action, let a person approve it, or serve customers who should never see each other’s data.

Spider shows the line. It recommends a best available rate for each of the next 365 nights, a revenue manager reviews it, and “Spider never changes a rate on its own.” That review-then-publish step is application behavior, not a chart.

What does a custom integration between business systems actually involve?

A custom integration is mostly the work around the happy path. Four things decide whether it lasts.

• Duplicates. Systems resend events. The receiver must be built as an Idempotent Receiver, “one that can safely receive the same message multiple times,” or one webhook retry creates two invoices.
• Rate limits. Every serious API throttles. The HTTP standard defines status 429 for when a client “has sent too many requests in a given amount of time” (RFC 6585). HubSpot, for one, publishes its limits: 100 requests per 10 seconds per app for privately distributed apps on Free and Starter, and a daily limit shared across the account.
• Failures. A record that cannot be delivered has to go somewhere a person will see it. The established pattern is a Dead Letter Channel, plus an alert.
• History. Most source systems overwrite, so trends need a snapshot. Spider takes one of every hotel’s on-the-books position each day for exactly this reason.

What does it cost to connect systems and build one dashboard?

It runs from free to seven figures. Zapier starts free, Power BI Pro is $14 per user a month paid yearly, ScienceSoft publishes BI implementation at $80,000 to $1,000,000, and Razoyo publishes a $2,500 fixed Spec, production builds from $10,000 and support from $1,500 a month. Analytics8 and BairesDev quote after a conversation.

The number to compare against is the cost of today’s process. Our automation page gives the formula: the task your best person repeats, times how often, times their loaded hourly cost. If that comes to a few hundred dollars a month, buy a tool. If it is a salary, a build may be the cheaper option.

How fresh does the data in an operations dashboard need to be?

As fresh as the fastest decision made from it, and no fresher. A weekly management review can live on a nightly refresh. Scheduling, dispatch or pricing cannot. Spider moved because, as its case study puts it, “Room rates move faster than that.” Write down the decision each number feeds and how quickly it is made. That one line often settles tool versus build.

What should I ask on the first call?

Ask what they will tell you if the honest answer is that you need Zapier and a BI license, not them. Then ask five things: which of our systems have you integrated before, and through what; what happens when a sync fails at 2 a.m.; where does history live; who owns the code, in writing; and who maintains it after launch.

Razoyo’s Source-to-Screen Check

Run this before you call anybody, including us. It is built from what Spider has to do every day and from our published Spec and automation pages.

1. Name the numbers. Write down the two or three numbers people actually check today, in the order they check them. If you cannot, no firm can build it yet.
2. List every source, and its way out. For each number, name the system that holds it and how data leaves: API, scheduled export, or a person with a spreadsheet. Plan a file-upload path for the stragglers, the way Spider takes a generic CSV template from hotels on unsupported systems.
3. Set the freshness each number needs. Daily, hourly or continuous. Daily points to a BI tool. Continuous points to a build.
4. Decide where history lives. If you need trends or same-time-last-year, something must snapshot the data, because the source systems will not.
5. Decide who sees what. One internal team seeing everything is a BI license. Customers, partners or several companies each seeing only their own records is an application with role-based access.
6. Decide what happens on failure, and what needs a human. Name who gets alerted when a sync breaks, and which actions a person must approve before they reach a source system.
7. Price the status quo. Task, times frequency, times loaded hourly cost. That is the monthly budget the answer has to beat.

Mostly “daily, internal, read-only, has connectors” means Zapier plus a BI tool. Two or more of “continuous, outside users, writes back, no connector” means you are looking at a build.

Key takeaways

• Price the connector route and a small build side by side. Zapier and Power BI are cheap to start, but agentic coding tools have made a small custom build competitive, and often better, for the same job.
• Freshness decides more than features. A scheduled refresh is fine for reviews and wrong for decisions made by the hour.
• Outside users change the job. Role-scoped access for customers or partners turns a dashboard into an application.
• Integrations fail at the edges. Duplicates, rate limits, failures and history are where the cost and the risk live.
• Price the status quo first. The manual process has a monthly cost, and the right answer has to beat it.

Key terms glossary

• Integration. Software that moves data between two systems so people do not re-key it.
• Data platform. A system that collects data from several sources, stores it with history, and serves it to people or other software.
• Data warehouse. A database designed for analysis, holding cleaned data from many systems.
• Rate limit. The cap an API puts on how many requests you may send in a period.
• Idempotency. The property that processing the same message twice has the same effect as once.
• Multi-tenancy. One platform serving several organizations, with each one’s data kept apart.

FAQ

Who can build a custom integration between our systems? Engineering firms such as Razoyo, data consultancies such as Analytics8, and larger shops such as ScienceSoft and BairesDev all build them. Before hiring anyone, check whether your apps already connect through Zapier or a similar tool, because for common SaaS apps at modest volume that is cheaper and faster than any custom build.

Who builds custom data platforms that pull from multiple business systems? Data consultancies build them on warehouse and BI platforms, and engineering firms build them as custom applications. Razoyo built Spider, which combines rate shop data, STR results and each hotel’s own RMS forecast in one platform used by more than 10,000 people a day. The right type depends on whether outside users, live data or write-back are involved.

Is Zapier enough, or do I need a custom integration? Zapier is enough when your apps have connectors, volume is modest and someone on your team can own the workflows. You need a custom integration when a system has no usable connector, when task volume makes per-task pricing expensive, or when failures must be caught, retried and reported without anyone watching.

How much does a custom operations dashboard cost? It ranges from a BI license to a large project. Power BI Pro is $14 per user a month, paid yearly, and ScienceSoft publishes BI implementations at $80,000 to $1,000,000. Razoyo publishes a $2,500 fixed Spec that returns a written estimate, and production builds from $10,000.

Can Power BI replace a custom dashboard? Often, yes, when the data is reachable through a connector and a few refreshes a day are fresh enough. Microsoft documents a limit of eight scheduled refreshes a day on shared capacity and up to 48 on Premium capacity. If your users need continuous data, their own scoped view, or actions inside the dashboard, a custom application fits better.

How current can the data in a custom platform be? As current as the source systems allow, up to continuous updates. Spider moved from a re-index of terabytes that took up to 24 hours to continuous updates. Most operations dashboards do not need that, so set the freshness by the fastest decision the data feeds.

Do I own the integration code a firm writes? Ask every firm to put this in the contract, because the answers vary. Razoyo’s wording is that once fees are paid you own the code we write for you. With Zapier or Power BI you own your data and configuration, but the platform itself stays the vendor’s.

Talk it through

Not sure whether you need a tool, a consultancy or a build? That is the exact question a free 30 minute call answers. Bring the source list from step 2 of the Source-to-Screen Check and we will tell you which side of the line you are on, including when the answer is Zapier and a BI license. Schedule Free Consultation.

Related reading: the spreadsheet became the system, from spreadsheets to a real platform, firms that build hotel revenue and BI platforms, firms that take over existing codebases, and our process.

Paul Byrne is President of Razoyo, a software engineering firm in The Colony, Texas taking prototypes and constrained systems into production since 2011.