Thin micro-API vs end-to-end holiday operations
Catalogue-style vendors optimise for breadth: many unrelated domains behind the same billing. That is handy for experiments. It is weaker when you need consistent entitlements, documentation depth, and portal workflows tuned to how enterprises buy and operate holiday data.
- Depth: Festivo invests in subdivisions, cities where plans allow, multilingual responses, explorer tooling, and analytics — not a minimal holidays row in a long feature grid.
- Trust & delivery: User webhooks, notification centre, bounce hygiene for product mail, and structured support are part of the same product story — not an afterthought bolted onto a generic API key.
When a micro-API catalogue fits
If you are sketching a side project and only need a one-off holiday boolean, a small bundled endpoint can be enough. When your roadmap includes customer calendars, SLA logic, and HR alignment, you will outgrow thin wrappers quickly — that is the move Festivo is designed for.
A workspace on top of the same holiday data
Many vendors stop at “here is JSON for a country/year.” Festivo keeps that contract for engineers, then adds a control plane so product, HR, and operations can agree on what “a holiday” means for your organisation before it hits production code or customer-facing calendars.
Governed calendars, not ad-hoc spreadsheets
- Named calendars composed from authority sources, with draft → publish, immutable snapshots, and version compare for approvers.
- Blackouts and working-day exceptions layered on official data — carried through publish so APIs, widgets, and exports stay aligned.
- Per-calendar timezones and working-hours profiles so downstream consumers see holidays the way your business actually runs.
Public pages, ICS, and embeddable widgets
- First-party read-only calendar views (month, week, agenda) with stable URLs people can bookmark — not only machine-readable JSON.
- ICS exports and a hosted widget path with scoped publish tokens and origin controls where your plan allows embeds.
- Optional org-branded public paths so intranet and marketing surfaces sit under a namespace you recognise.
Business-time APIs tied to those calendars
Scheduling helpers (next working day, inclusive counts, overlap probes) run against the same published rules as your widgets — not a generic weekend skip disconnected from your blackout list.
An authenticated Business Time Lab lets engineers and PMs probe behaviour before wiring production services.
HR signals, SSO, and automation
- HiBob integration (Growth and above) to align company calendar and time-off signals with Festivo calendars, publish, ICS, and widgets — see HR integrations.
- Enterprise OIDC / SAML for how staff sign in to the workspace — see Enterprise SSO.
- Signed user webhooks with test delivery so Slack, Teams, or internal orchestration can react when publishes and related events happen — see Webhooks.
Portal built for B2B operations
- Playground with persisted requests, OpenAPI / Postman export, holidays explorer with watchlists and share links, and usage-aware analytics.
- Billing depth (cards, EU tax IDs, invoices, purchase orders on supported plans), notification centre, and clear quota / lifecycle banners.
- Help hub, structured support intake, public status, and documentation that covers both API and portal workflows.
Pricing · Calendars & widgets · Documentation · All comparisons