Integrate tool to remove gaps and overlaps

[BenPearse]

I'm wondering if anyone knows if using the Integrate Tool has any potential of introducing errors to a layer. 

Here's my situation: I've been tasked with cleaning up a polygon layer that has 3000+ gaps and overlaps and would like to avoid doing it manually if possible. After some searching, I found and ran the Integrate Tool which seemed to do the job almost too perfectly and made me suspicious. 

I was just a bit surprised that the Tool is rarely mentioned on other forums for this purpose, which made me wonder if I was using it correctly or not.

Thanks for your help!

[JayantaPoddar · Accepted solution]

You are right. Usually to overcome any/multiple topological issues, topology is usually recommended. 

One should use Integrate rather than a topology in the following circumstances:

• You do not need to specify rules about how features are moved and you want all features to coalesce within a specified tolerance.
• You want lines to have vertices wherever they intersect.
• You are working with nongeodatabase features, such as shapefiles, or with features from different geodatabases (features in a topology must all come from the same feature dataset).

*It is recommended to make a copy of the Feature Class for the tools which modifies the input data.