SOAP API Developer Guide

Getting Started
Reference
Using the API with Salesforce Features
Implementation Considerations
Outbound Messaging
Data Loading and Integration
Choosing the Right API
Client Application Design
Salesforce Settings
Best Practices with Any Data Loader
Integration and Single Sign-On
Data Replication
Feature-Specific Considerations
Glossary
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Choosing the Right API

The first decision that you must make is which API to use for your data loading process.

SOAP API

Use SOAP API to create, retrieve, update or delete records, such as accounts, leads, and custom objects. With more than 20 different calls, SOAP API also allows you to maintain passwords, perform searches, and much more. Use SOAP API in any language that supports web services.

REST API

REST API provides a powerful, convenient, and simple REST-based web services interface for interacting with Salesforce. Its advantages include ease of integration and development, and it’s an excellent choice of technology for use with mobile applications and web projects. For certain projects, you may want to use REST API with other Salesforce REST APIs. To build UI for creating, reading, updating, and deleting records, including building UI for list views, actions, and dependent picklists, use User Interface API. To build UI for B2B Commerce on Lightning, CMS managed content, Experience Cloud sites, or Chatter, use Connect REST API. If you have many records to process, consider using Bulk API, which is based on REST principles and optimized for large sets of data.

Bulk API

Use Bulk API 2.0 to query, queryAll, insert, update, upsert, or delete a large number of records asynchronously. Bulk API 2.0 is designed on the Salesforce REST framework.

Other Salesforce Platform APIs, such as SOAP API or REST API, are optimized for synchronous client applications that update a few records at a time. You can use SOAP API for processing many records, but when the data sets contain hundreds of thousands of records, synchronous operations are less practical. Bulk API 2.0 is designed to make it simple to process data from a few thousand to millions of records.