3 top Paragon alternatives to consider in 2025

Paragon enables B2B SaaS companies to build, ship, and manage customer-facing integrations 7x faster with an embedded integration infrastructure platform.

Paragon supports multiple integration patterns—from real-time API actions to async workflows and large-scale data syncs, with 130+ pre-built connectors to fully managed authentication with white-labelled UI components.

To help you determine whether Paragon is the right solution for your product's integration needs, let’s compare it to its biggest competitors.

Paragon alternative in a nutshell

• Composio is purpose-built for building production-ready AI agents, with 500+ app integrations, an MCP-native architecture, and SDK-based flexibility.

• Merge provides unified APIs across business categories (HRIS, ATS, CRM) with standardised data models and no-code management for non-technical teams.

• Nango offers open-source OAuth infrastructure and continuous data syncing across 500+ APIs with self-hosting capabilities for data control.

Composio

Composio is an AI-first, MCP-native integration platform designed to build AI agents with tool-calling capabilities across 500+ pre-built tools.

Key Features:

• Optimised Tools: 500+ ready-to-use connectors with dedicated Python and TypeScript SDKs for AI agent workflows.

• Event-driven agent pipeline: Build event-driven AI pipelines using Composio triggers.

• MCP Support: Native Model Context Protocol integration for seamless LLM tool-calling and agent orchestration.

• Secure OAuth: Built-in authentication management for connecting AI agents to third-party services.

• Agent-First Architecture: Purpose-built for synchronous tool calls, not async data ingestion or bi-directional sync.

• Flexible deployment options: Use the cloud platform or deploy on your enterprise infrastructure.

When to choose Composio over Paragon:

• You're building AI-native products: Your primary use case is equipping LLM agents with access to external applications like Salesforce, Jira, GitHub, etc.

• You need rapid AI agent deployment; Composio makes it easy to access 500+ pre-optimised tools so that you can achieve faster time-to-market without building connectors from scratch.

• You care about security and observability: Composio offers comprehensive, secure OAuth lifecycle management across all apps and a dedicated dashboard for monitoring tool logs.

• MCP standardisation matters: You want a future-proof agent infrastructure that uses the Model Context Protocol as the integration standard.

• You want SDK-based development flexibility: Composio provides complete SDK-based flexibility, enabling developers to build, test, and customise tool calls directly in their preferred development environment.

Paragon, on the other hand, restricts developers to visual workflow testing via its drag-and-drop UI builder, limiting programmatic control and preventing engineers from implementing complex integration logic solely through code. If you’re a coder who wants absolute control over your agents, Composio is the better choice.

Merge

Merge is a unified API platform that normalizes integrations across specific software categories (HRIS, ATS, CRM, Accounting) through standardized data models.

Key Features:

• Unified API Approach: Single API built to access hundreds of integrations across core business categories like HR, payroll, CRM, and ATS

• Integration Observability: Fully searchable logs, automated issue detection, and dashboards for customer-facing teams to manage integrations without engineering support

• Field Mapping: Advanced features to access custom objects and fields through Field Mapping and Authenticated Passthrough Request capabilities

• Agent Handler (New): Recently launched AI agent tool-calling platform with MCP connectors, Tool Packs, and evaluation suite

When to choose Merge over Paragon:

• You need category-specific breadth: Your product requires comprehensive coverage across HRIS/ATS/CRM with every possible integration in those categories normalized through standard models.

• Non-technical team management: You want customer-facing teams to manage integrations via no-code UI rather than requiring continuous engineering involvement.

• Unified data models are sufficient: Merge standardized schemas across integrations meet your needs without requiring deep customization beyond field mapping.

• You're scaling integrations rapidly: Building once to access all category integrations is faster than building custom connectors one-by-one

Nango

Nango is a unified API platform focused on OAuth authentication management and data syncing across 500+ APIs, providing pre-built infrastructure for continuous data ingestion and transformations

Key Features:

• OAuth Infrastructure: Manages complex authentication flows (OAuth 2.0/2.1, API keys, Basic auth) with automatic token refresh and credential validation across 500+ APIs

• Continuous Data Syncs: Pre-built syncing framework with rate-limit handling, caching, change detection, and data validation built into every integration

• Open Source & Self-Hostable: Active GitHub community contributing new APIs weekly, with full self-hosting capabilities for data control and compliance requirements

• Code-First Approach: Developer-friendly SDK with full API access for building customized integrations, unified API specs, and data transformation logic

When to choose Nango over Paragon:

• Rapid integration catalog growth matters: When you need support for 500+ APIs with weekly additions from an active open-source community, versus Paragon's ~100 pre-built connectors.

• Authentication infrastructure is priority: Your primary challenge is managing OAuth flows, token refresh logic, and credential validation across multiple APIs without building auth from scratch.

• Continuous data syncing is core: You need pre-built data sync capabilities with change detection, rate limiting, and error handling across all APIs rather than building workflow logic for each integration

• Self-hosting and data control: Nango security/compliance requirements mandates self-hosted infrastructure with full control over integration data and no third-party cloud dependencies

Summary Table

Here's a quick comparison of how Composio, Merge, and Nango stack up against each other for ease of observability:

Final Thoughts

While the integration landscape includes numerous platforms, Composio, Merge, Nango, Arcade, and Pipedream have emerged as top competitors due to their specialized approaches. Each platform solves distinct integration challenges:

• Composio leads in AI-native development with MCP support for building LLM-powered agents

• Merge excels at rapid category-specific integration deployment with non-technical team management capabilities

• Nango stands out for developers needing authentication infrastructure and continuous data syncing with self-hosting flexibility

However, the ultimate decision rests with your business needs and development team's priorities. Evaluate your primary use case, technical requirements, team capabilities, and long-term integration strategy before committing to a platform.

FAQ’s

How does Paragon compare to Composio?

Composio is designed for AI-native applications. It supports 500+ integrations and is built around MCP (Model Context Protocol) for agent orchestration. If you’re building AI agents or tool-calling workflows, Composio offers more flexibility through SDKs and event-driven pipelines.

What’s the key difference between Paragon and its competitors?

Paragon simplifies integration and delivery for SaaS apps. Composio is built for AI-native products, Merge for unified data models and observability, and Nango for authentication and sync infrastructure.

Which platform is best for AI-driven integrations?

Composio is purpose-built for AI and agentic workflows with MCP support, making it the best choice for LLM-based integrations.

Which platform offers the most customisation?

Composio and Nango both provide SDK-based flexibility, allowing developers to build and manage integrations directly in code.