RPC vs REST API: Complete Comparison + When to Use Each

RPC and REST are the two dominant API architectural styles for building services. Understanding the tradeoffs helps HR Tech teams make better decisions about how to design their own APIs and what to expect from the HRIS and payroll APIs they integrate with.

What Is REST?

REST (Representational State Transfer) organizes APIs around resources. Each resource has a URL, and you interact with it using standard HTTP methods: GET to read, POST to create, PUT/PATCH to update, DELETE to remove. REST APIs are stateless and leverage HTTP caching.

Most HRIS APIs are REST-based. Workday, ADP, BambooHR, Rippling, and Gusto all expose REST APIs for employee, payroll, and HR data.

What Is RPC?

RPC (Remote Procedure Call) organizes APIs around actions rather than resources. Instead of GET /employees/123, you call getEmployee(123). gRPC is a modern RPC framework that uses Protocol Buffers for efficient binary serialization.

Key Differences

REST: Resource-oriented, uses HTTP verbs, widely supported, human-readable JSON, cacheable. Better for public APIs and integrations across team boundaries.

RPC/gRPC: Action-oriented, more efficient serialization, better for internal microservice communication, requires client library generation. Less common in public HR APIs.

What This Means for HR Tech Integrations

For HRIS and payroll integrations, REST is the practical standard. The systems your employer clients use expose REST APIs. Your integration layer needs to handle REST request/response patterns, pagination, rate limiting, and error codes.

Bindbee normalizes the REST APIs from 65+ HRIS, ATS, and payroll systems into a single consistent interface, so your team works with one clean API regardless of how each underlying system is designed.

Book a demo to see how Bindbee normalizes REST APIs across 65+ HR systems.