Has anyone else built integrations for hubspot and just been completely fed up with their terrible developer experience compared to other sales tools? Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, and Salesforce have just blown them out of water in that aspect.<p>Some of my complaints:<p>1. Hubspot released Sequences 10 years ago, and somehow they still don't have API suppport.<p>2. Meanwhile if I need to fetch associations between objects I have to use their V4 associations API but if I want to fetch contact lists I need to use their V1 API, and to fetch contacts themselves I sometimes have to use a V1 API and sometimes a V3 API. Who is versioning all of this<p>3. It's 2024 and somehow none of their APIs support sorting, ordering or filtering and to do so you need to use their /search endpoint. The problem is there's a 4 requests per second rate limit on the endpoint. That leads to my next complaint<p>4. A 4 rps limit is fine, if HubSpot allowed you to have an individual user go through oauth, but for some reason they suggest and push you to authenticate only 1 super admin, which means if you have 10+ users the search endpoint is pretty much useless and needs to be throttled significantly<p>There's so many other issues with fields that should be deprecated but aren't, fields getting deprecated and the only answers being some community message 5 years ago, lack of API support for workflows and other new features, and there's even issues where I noticed we'd get small bursts of 401's for no reason and Hubspot's response was that when they rotate the credentials used to verify tokens it can cause temporary downtime daily.
As someone who has had a lot of experience with their platform and API - I do not think it was actually designed. It's duct taped and glued together.
You have to understand that most APIs, most codebases, most designs, most documents, most ... everything<p>was done by people who did not receive the appropriated training in design patterns and has to glue something that worked in order to be proved by someone else<p>outside of a few orgs who chase excellency in every regard this is the reality for most companies, organizations and people. it makes sense given the circumstances they found themselves in.<p>it's actually quite impressive that anything works when you REALLY think about it<p>#
API gets thrown around pretty loosely, but what Hubspot has isn't really an application programming interface. It is a state transfer service, as echoed in the documentation.<p>While am I sure their service is not free of flaws (the versioning as described comes off especially strange), the biggest issue here may be taking "API" too literally. What you are looking for is, indeed, an API, but that is not what they have on offer. Presumably their expectation is that you will build your API on top of the transferred state.
Based on the way you have described their API, I can make 2 assumptions<p>1. The might have had well supported API until the point at which they realized they wanted to have more people to use the webapp, rather than having the data sent through an API. More time spent on the Hubspot webapp means, more chances the customer notices the other services Hubspot provides and pays for them.<p>2. The versioning APIs that you see are most likely due to an enterprise deal Hubspot made with a large company who asked for variations in the API, and Hubspot introduced a v2/v3/v4 instead of modifying v1 (to not cause disruptions for their customers using v1).
I marvel that anyone would use a CRM system or any important HTTP API that doesn’t support conditional operations. I mean, this is mission critical data, right?<p>Support for If-Match seems like a low bar and yet few clear it.<p>When asked about data quality issues (“data in a weird state” or “shouldn’t be possible”) and the API has zero protection for lost updates… I sigh. Nothing to do.
A lot of companies historically wouldn't have an API at all, but MBAs started learning about it as a way to differentiate yourself, probably around the time the Jeff Bezos "API mandate" started to make the rounds on news sites. So now we get "APIs" outsourced to bottom-dollar firms.
Yes, we built an integration to ingest data from Hubspot at $DAYJOB and it was one of the worst we’ve had to deal with. They’re horribly inconsistent with what is documented and what isn’t. Even Meta’s has been better.