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title: Journey Builder API
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---
# Journey Builder API

Marketers use Journey Builder to create event-driven, responsive campaigns to distribute across any channel (online and offline), at any time, at any frequency. Journey Builder provides an interface for designing individualized customer communication plans on top of a robust marketing engine. Built on a secure extensibility framework that allows marketing developers, Journey Builder allows service providers, and third-party developers to customize journeys for specific business purposes. The API allows you to programmatically access and interact with Journey Builder functionality.

**note:** The Contact and Journey Builder APIs share some of the same functionality, but the Journey Builder API is the preferred API. Use the Contact API only if your business cases require you to use data encryption, account expansion, or batching.

## Extend the Capabilities of Journey Builder

When the out-of-box events and activities don't meet your business needs, you can extend the native capabilities of Journey Builder by developing custom events and activities. Marketers use these events and activities when creating journeys on the Journey Builder Canvas.

## See Also

- _Salesforce Help_: [Journeys and Automations in Marketing Cloud Engagement](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=mktg.mc_journeys_and_automations.htm)
- [Build Custom Activities and Events](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/mc-app-development/creating-activities.md)