A form rarely needs to talk to just one system. Salesforce gets the primary record, a marketing platform gets an email trigger, a sales person gets a notification, and a spreadsheet gets an entry for reporting. How that routing gets built – through native connectors, raw webhooks, or a middleware layer like Zapier or Make – changes what breaks first and who has to fix it.
Native Connectors
A native connector is purpose-built for one destination system, maintained by the form platform’s own team, and mapped to that system’s actual data model rather than a generic API call. FormAssembly’s Salesforce connector is a great example: it’s designed to understand objects, field types, and relationships in Salesforce well enough to create an Account, a related Contact, and a Case from one submission in a single configured mapping, with no code and most importantly, no external service in between.
The tradeoff is scope. A native connector only reaches the systems the form platform has built one for. Routing the same submission to a fourth or fifth system outside that list requires a different mechanism.
Webhooks
A webhook fires a raw HTTP request to any endpoint the moment a form is submitted, carrying the submission data as a payload. It is the most flexible option because it can reach literally any system with an API, but that flexibility comes with more responsibility on the receiving end: someone has to build and maintain the code that receives the webhook, parses the payload, and does something with it. Webhooks are the right tool when the destination system is internal, custom-built, or otherwise not covered by an existing connector.
Middleware: Zapier, Make, and Similar Tools
Middleware platforms sit between the form and its destinations, offering a way to route data to dozens of common apps without writing code for each one. They are a reasonable choice for lightweight routing to consumer or SMB-oriented tools, and for teams without engineering resources to build or maintain a webhook receiver.
The cost shows up at scale. Middleware adds a third-party dependency, a data mapping layer that has to be maintained separately from both the form and the destination system, and, for Salesforce specifically, a connection that is rarely as deep as a native integration built specifically for Salesforce’s object model, field-level security, and relationship structure. There’s also a compliance concern when handling sensitive data, introducing risk with every handoff.
Choosing Based on the Destination
The practical decision usually comes down to what the destination system is and how central it is to the workflow. Salesforce, as the system of record for most FormAssembly customers, is best served by a native connector purpose-built for it. A secondary internal system with its own API is often a webhook.
Where FormAssembly Fits
FormAssembly runs its Salesforce integration as a native connector rather than through middleware, mapping directly to Salesforce objects, fields, and relationships so a single submission can create or update several related records at once. FormAssembly workflows support many of the actions that are often left to middleware; notifications, document generation, approvals, etc., are handled on the platform. Webhooks remain available for routing to systems outside Salesforce, giving technical teams both the depth of a native connector where it matters most and the flexibility of webhooks everywhere else.
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