When you should use APIs
Cloud4Wi APIs allow to extract the data programmatically from your account, process it and import in an external system.
Once you have developed your integration, the data is transferred automatically from your Cloud4Wi account to your system based on the logic you implemented in the integration code.
When using API, you can create a logic to extract the data periodically, for example on a daily basis. For example, every day you can retrieve via API all the users whose "last modified date" was yesterday, so you can pull both new profiles and profiles that have been updated and add them into your system.
APIs are free for all Cloud4Wi customers. Cloud4Wi provides RESTful APIs built according to industry standards and best practices.
The documentation about how to use them be found in the developer portal including code example to get started retrieving your data.
Should I use webhooks?
Webhooks are real-time notification triggered when some event occurs, such as a new user is added to your Cloud4Wi account.
Webhooks allow integrating the profiles of new customers in an external system as soon as they are available in your Cloud4Wi account. This may be useful if you actually need the data in real-time, for example, because you have a clienteling application pulling customer data from the CRM and you need store associates to see the profiles of the guests as soon as they register.
Please note that if the destination server is busy for any reason, Cloud4Wi won't try to send the webhook again, so you shouldn't rely solely on webhook to sync customer data between systems. You should always have a batch sync process that periodically retrieves new Customer contacts using the APIs.