#1 most frequent
United States of America
66.7%2 installations of 3
Cloud Elements (discontinued)
13 Reviews and Ratings
What is Cloud Elements (discontinued)?
Cloud Elements was a cloud API integration service acquired by UiPath in 2021. It used cooperative apps to connect an organization’s customers, partners and employees to the cloud services they use. The product was discontinued in 2023.
Categories & Use Cases
Videos
Who Buys & Uses Cloud Elements (discontinued)
Cloud Elements: An Arsenal of Integrations
Pros
- Maps a single integration to multiple systems, cutting down on the time and complexity to support multiple systems
- Robust and interactive documentation that guides the developer every step of the way
- Responsive and friendly customer success that supports your team's efforts
Cons
- When Cloud Elements rolled out their "Admin Console 2.0" it was a rough launch with many bugs
- Cloud Elements has a large variety of integrations, but certain desirable systems (EG, Workday or Xero) are not covered in their catalog
- Providing a truly unified API that returns the same format of data from each system requires writing transforms for each endpoint rather than it being an out-of-the-box feature
Return on Investment
- Cloud Elements provided an initial ROI of accelerating delivery on integrations at about 4x speed as we were able to connect to a unified hub rather than building them one-by-one
- On an ongoing basis, Cloud Elements has likely saved us about one developer-worth of effort to extend and maintain our platform's integrations
- Cloud Elements has provided the unique capability for our pre-sales and customer success team to provide one-off demo integrations to customers to win deals and prove ROI to customers
Alternatives Considered
Workato and Zapier
Other Software Used
Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft Azure
Cloud Elements is simple yet powerful.
Pros
- 2-way sync.
- Time out management.
- Authentication.
- Developer platform.
Cons
- Slightly expensive compared to other platforms.
- Not so simple for non-tech people.
Return on Investment
- Quick time to market.
- Integration platform for connecting multiple businesses.
Alternatives Considered
Zapier
Big Fan of CE's Document Cloud
Pros
- Ease of integration - Our dev team had no problems getting the integration up and running quickly.
- Support - CE's support team is very responsive and they do a nice job of communicating if/when any issues arise on their end.
- Not a huge investment - There is obviously a cost associated with the usage of their service, but since they handle all the maintenance of the various service-provider endpoints, we are saving dev resources constantly.
Cons
- We did have to do some custom work to create a better user experience when interfacing with CE's Document Cloud. The Document Cloud service doesn't come equipped with a file browser out-of-the-box, and their recommended plugin was pretty rough. We had to do quite a bit of work to get it up to par with our user experience standards.
Return on Investment
- CE's Document Cloud has played a key role in helping us expand the value of our offering.
Cloud Elements, an IPaaS for a more thorough, in depth integration into the software you love
Pros
- The API itself is very robust and easy to use, being a standard REST interface, standard HTTP response codes, well-packaged error messages, etc.
- Their uptime is great! I think I've seen one (short) 5-minute' blip' the entire time we've been connected for any type of primary function.
- Their support is top notch, they respond quickly, and the team that works with you is communicative and knowledgable.
Cons
- Their UI, which was in beta when we first chose them as a software, needs a lot of work still. It's relatively slow, there are a number of bugs with things appearing/not appearing. That being said, you can do 100% of the functions you can do on the UI through the API, which we prefer anyway, so it's not really an issue.
- Pricing can be high, depending on your business model.
- Some of the API documentation was a little unclear at first, and required some back and forth on things.
- Required fields in the third party software you are integrating with were unclear.
- If there are special 'rules' around validation going into the software (not CE, third party), then it's all trial-and-error in figuring out how exactly to format your fields.
- Unless you are REALLY strict about your development practices and using CE 'correctly,' it's incredibly easy to get off track and lose all of the benefits of using an IPaaS like CE, because their platform is so flexible.
Return on Investment
- We don't have incredible tracking around this, but the biggest ROI is if we create a new integration to a product in a similar 'bucket' to one that we've done before. A good example of this is we did an integration to MailChimp, which took about a month total, then our integration to ConstantContact, which is also a 'marketing' bucket, only took about a week realistically.
Other Software Used
Postman, Visual Studio IDE, Sublime Text
A flexible platform with great support
Pros
- Customer Support -- They have a knowledgeable team and are very responsive.
- Communication -- Most questions are addressed quickly
- Documentation -- The API documentation is well organized and easy to follow.
Cons
- Cost
Return on Investment
- Less time on API maintenance.
- Quickly build new integrations.
- Effortless field mapping customization for our customers.
