Composio vs Nango: Which integration platform wins for AI agents?

TL;DR:

• Composio and Nango solve different problems at the infrastructure level.

• Composio is an agent-native action infrastructure platform built to give AI agents direct access to 50,000+ pre-built, LLM-optimized tools, with execution, response formatting, and credential management handled automatically.

• Nango is a developer-controlled API sync layer where you write custom TypeScript integration logic and deploy it to your own runtime.

• If you want your AI agent connected to Gmail, Slack, or Salesforce in under 30 minutes without building execution infrastructure, Composio is the faster path. If you need raw, code-level control over custom database sync logic and want to self-host, Nango is worth evaluating.

Connecting an AI agent to real-world tools should take under 30 minutes, not a weekend of configuring redirect URIs and database syncs. The real cost isn't writing the integration. It's owning it indefinitely: handling token expiry, API deprecations, and payload formatting every time something breaks.

This comparison covers two platforms that both claim to solve the integration problem: Composio and Nango. The question worth answering is not just which has more integrations, but which is actually built for AI agents at runtime rather than for developers building traditional database sync pipelines.

Key differences for your AI stack

Composio and Nango solve different problems at the infrastructure level. Composio is an agent-native action infrastructure layer: it owns 50,000+ pre-built, LLM-optimized tools your agent can call immediately, processes responses before they reach the LLM to keep context windows clean, and handles 300M+ monthly tool calls across live agent workflows. When your agent calls a tool, Composio manages the execution, formats the API response into clean JSON that fits inside an LLM's context window, and returns structured output the agent can reason over immediately. Auth refresh, token storage, and credential management run as background infrastructure the builder doesn't think about. Nango is infrastructure-first: it manages the authentication lifecycle and gives you a runtime where you write custom TypeScript functions to define what happens with those credentials.

Composio's 1,000+ toolkits (as of August 2026) expose more than 50,000 individual callable actions, all formatted for LLM consumption. Nango's 900+ APIs come with 6,000+ templates, but you are responsible for writing the logic that turns an authenticated API connection into an agent action.

For a solo builder who wants their AI assistant to actually take actions (send emails, create GitHub issues, update CRM records) without writing backend code, that difference is the whole comparison.

Decision matrix: Composio vs Nango

Composio's core integration features

Composio's catalog covers Gmail (63 methods), GitHub (800+ methods), Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Google Drive, Shopify (361 tools), and hundreds more toolkits. Every toolkit returns structured, LLM-friendly JSON formatted for immediate agent consumption, so you don't write data-parsing scripts to clean up raw API payloads.

The Tool Router is what makes Composio genuinely agent-native:

• Automatic app selection: Routes "send an email" to Gmail or Outlook based on what the user connected, with no code changes on your end.

• Zero conditional logic: You write one instruction and Tool Router handles provider-specific branching.

• User control: Users switch email providers and your agent code stays identical.

The MCP Gateway exposes every tool through the Model Context Protocol, so any MCP-compatible client (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT) connects using a single URL.

How Nango handles integration execution

Nango manages the authentication lifecycle well, but once it hands your application a valid token, the execution layer is yours to build. There is no pre-built "send a Gmail" or "create a GitHub issue" tool on the other side. You write the TypeScript functions that turn authenticated credentials into agent actions. Nango's auth layer handles OAuth 2.0 and OAuth 1.0a flows end-to-end, including the redirect, token exchange, storage, and automatic refresh before credentials expire. Every API key and bearer token is encrypted at rest, and you retrieve credentials on demand through Nango's API. Nango holds SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, with a HIPAA BAA available as an Enterprise add-on.

Composio provides a single governed path to act across 50,000+ agent-ready tools: it routes the agent's intent to the correct tool, authorizes the request against the user's connected account, executes the action, and returns LLM-ready output the agent can reason over immediately. Credential refresh runs as background infrastructure within that execution path so the builder never thinks about it.

Time to first workflow: A setup speed test

For a builder who evaluates tools based on whether they can get something working in one sitting, setup speed is the most honest benchmark. Here is how the actual steps compare.

Setting up your first connection

With Composio's managed auth mode, the connection flow works through a Connect Link: a secure URL your agent generates and returns to the user. The user clicks it, authenticates with their app, and the connection is live. Composio handles token storage and refresh from that point forward, with credentials persisting across all future sessions.

The Vercel AI SDK integration and LangChain provider both expose this pattern through the same SDK.

Nango's setup requires more steps. You create a Nango project, configure OAuth credentials inside Nango's dashboard, set redirect URIs in the external provider's developer console (Google Cloud Console for Gmail, for example), and add Nango's frontend SDK to trigger the auth flow. The resulting token is stored by Nango and retrievable via API calls. This gives developers full visibility into integration logic, but adds meaningful friction before anything works end-to-end.

Time to first working integration

Composio vs Nango: Feature comparison

The catalog numbers (1,000+ vs. 900+) tell only part of the story. What matters for AI agent workflows is what your agent can actually do with those connections after authentication.

Comparing native app connector libraries

Composio's 1,000+ toolkits expose more than 50,000 individual callable tools, each formatted specifically for LLM context windows. The Gmail toolkit includes 63 distinct methods covering search, send, labels, and thread management, each returning structured JSON with field names optimized for agent reasoning rather than raw API payloads.

Nango's 900+ APIs with 6,000+ templates are pre-built integration patterns, but they require developer-written TypeScript functions to define exactly what data flows where. For teams building traditional SaaS pipelines who need to control every field mapping, that code-level control fits the use case. For agent builders who need a "create a GitHub issue" tool that works right now, Composio's pre-built toolkit is ready without writing any sync logic.

How each handles login security

Composio holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, with all data encrypted at rest and in transit. Zero Data Retention (ZDR), available on Pro and Enterprise plans, stops Composio from retaining request and response payloads, billed at $0.0001 per tool call. The KMS Proxy option (Enterprise) lets you hold your own encryption keys.

Nango holds SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, with a HIPAA BAA available as an Enterprise add-on, and offers secure token storage with retrieval on demand. Its self-hosted option gives you database-level control over credential storage. If a HIPAA BAA is a hard requirement, Nango's Enterprise plan covers it, and Composio's Enterprise VPC deployment addresses the same need for teams that prefer cloud-managed infrastructure.

How agents execute actions

This is the infrastructure difference that determines whether your agent can act immediately or requires custom backend code. Composio builds its own tools rather than proxying third-party implementations. When your agent calls "send a Slack message," Composio owns how that action is implemented, how the API request is structured, and how the response is formatted back to the LLM. The SDKs documentation shows how Composio wraps these tools as native function definitions for OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, CrewAI, and others with no glue code.

Nango syncs credentials and lets you query APIs through authenticated connections, but writing the code that makes your agent take an action is your responsibility. You deploy TypeScript functions to Nango's runtime. That's powerful for custom business logic, but it means you are writing and maintaining the execution layer yourself indefinitely.

Composio's advantages for agent automation

Optimized for autonomous agent tasks

Raw API responses from apps like Gmail or Salesforce return dense JSON with deeply nested fields, redundant metadata, and response sizes that push thousands of tokens into an agent's context window. Composio's 50,000+ agent-ready tools filter and structure these responses before they reach the LLM, returning only the fields the agent needs to make a decision. This prevents context window blowout and keeps token costs manageable at scale, as the Composio agentic LLM gateway series demonstrates with live examples. The platform handles 300M+ monthly tool calls across live agent workflows, with skills that make repeat tasks 30% more accurate on 2x fewer tokens.

How Composio keeps agent workflows running

Multi-step agent tasks fail in ways that are hard to trace: the wrong tool gets called, a request reaches the right API but returns unusable output, or an action completes with no record of what changed. Composio functions as action infrastructure across the full execution cycle. It routes the agent's intent to the correct tool, authorizes the request against the user's connected account, executes the action, formats the response into LLM-ready JSON, and surfaces recoverable errors so the agent can retry rather than stall. Every tool call is traceable, who triggered it, what action ran, why it was selected, and what the outcome was. Credential refresh runs as background infrastructure within that same execution path: when an OAuth token expires mid-task, Composio refreshes it automatically so the workflow continues without interruption.

What Nango does well

Developer-centric integration design

Nango gives developers raw, auditable access to integration logic through TypeScript functions you write, version-control, and deploy through your own CI pipeline. This matters when you need to customize exactly which fields sync, how data is transformed, or how errors are handled for a proprietary internal API. Composio's pre-built tools are maintained by Composio rather than open for forking.

How Nango handles custom API requirements

Nango's AI builder generates TypeScript integration functions from natural language, producing readable code that works with 18+ AI coding agents including Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. This is genuinely useful for teams building against internal or undocumented APIs.

Self-hosted deployment options

Nango is open-source and self-hostable, but the free Docker Compose edition covers auth and proxy only. Full runtime execution and sync require Enterprise deployment via Helm charts. For regulated industries where credential data must stay within your own perimeter, that distinction matters: the free self-hosted path gives you control over token storage, but not over the full execution layer. Self-hosting introduces ongoing server maintenance, patching, and security auditing that your team owns indefinitely. Composio's cloud-managed infrastructure, which holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, eliminates that operational overhead. Enterprise plans include VPC and on-premises deployment for teams where data residency is contractual.

Analyzing monthly costs for AI integrations

Predicting your monthly Composio bill

Composio's free tier includes 100,000 tool calls per month and 50,000 triggers per month with no credit card required and hard spending caps so there are no surprise bills. Pro costs $29/month plus a $29 monthly usage credit, with overages at $0.0003 per tool call. Enterprise pricing is custom and includes dedicated SLAs, VPC deployment, SSO, and SCIM.

Nango costs for solo builders

Nango's free tier includes access to 900+ APIs and MCPs, 6,000+ pre-built tools, triggers, and syncs, and a built-in MCP server, capped at 10 connections and 10 compute hours per month. The Pay-as-you-go plan includes $50 in monthly credits and bills usage beyond that at $0.29 per connection per month, with additional metered charges on proxy requests, function compute time, sync storage, and webhooks. Enterprise pricing is custom and covers HIPAA compliance, OpenTelemetry log export, and dedicated support options.

Constraints on the zero-cost plans

Composio's free tier includes hard caps at 100,000 tool calls and 50,000 triggers per month, so you cannot accidentally exceed your budget during a prototyping sprint. Nango's free tier includes fixed limits on connections and resources rather than usage-based billing, which provides predictable costs during initial development.

Choosing between Composio and Nango

Use Composio for agent workflows

Composio is the right choice when your goal is connecting AI agents to business apps quickly, with no auth infrastructure to build or execution code to write:

Speed matters: Connect AI agents to Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, or HubSpot in under 30 minutes with no auth infrastructure to build.

Pre-built tools win: The 1,000+ toolkits work immediately with any major AI framework through the supported frameworks documentation, including LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI SDK, Anthropic, and Vercel AI SDK.

Risk-free testing: The free tier lets you validate your entire workflow with real tool calls before committing to a paid plan, with no credit card and no surprise bills.

Switching platforms later

Composio's SDK integrates directly into agent framework code. Switching later means replacing the tool integration layer, not refactoring the entire agent framework. Starting with Composio cuts the build time on auth and execution infrastructure, and if requirements shift toward deep custom sync logic, Composio's custom tool support bridges the gap without a full migration.

Nango is a better fit if you are building a traditional SaaS product that requires custom TypeScript sync logic, deep field-level control over data models, and the ability to audit every line of integration code in your own repository. For agent-specific tasks within that same stack, Composio's pre-built toolkits eliminate the need to write custom execution functions for common apps, so the two approaches can coexist depending on the use case.

Compatibility with your existing stack

Composio works with LangChain, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, Mastra, OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, Vercel AI SDK, and Google AI SDK in Python and TypeScript. Any MCP-compatible client connects through Composio's MCP Gateway using a single URL. If your existing agent code is already built on LangChain or CrewAI, Composio plugs in without framework changes, as the Composio skills-as-a-service breakdown demonstrates across each supported framework.

Start building with Composio today

Get your first agent integration running at Composio with no credit card required and 100,000 tool calls on the free tier.

FAQs

Does Composio have a free tier?

Yes, Composio's free tier includes 100,000 tool calls per month and 50,000 triggers per month with no credit card required and hard spending caps, so there are no surprise bills at month end.

How many integrations does Nango support compared to Composio?

Nango supports 900+ APIs focused on raw API syncing with developer-written integration logic. Composio supports 1,000+ toolkits exposing more than 50,000 individual pre-built, AI-optimized tools designed for direct agent action execution.

Can I self-host both platforms?

Nango is open-source and fully self-hostable for complete data control. Composio is cloud-managed to eliminate server maintenance overhead, with secure VPC and on-premises deployment available on Enterprise plans.

Can Composio start my agent automatically when something happens?

Yes, Composio triggers fire when events occur in connected apps (new GitHub commits, incoming Slack messages, calendar updates), with 50,000 trigger events per month on the free tier. Nango focuses primarily on on-demand integrations and scheduled syncs rather than native runtime triggers, which makes triggers a meaningful differentiator for event-driven agent workflows.

What AI frameworks does Composio work with?

Composio integrates with LangChain, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, Mastra, OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, Vercel AI SDK, and Google AI SDK in Python and TypeScript, plus any MCP-compatible client through its MCP Gateway URL.

Is Composio secure enough for production workloads?

Composio holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications with all data encrypted at rest and in transit. Zero Data Retention (ZDR) is available on Pro and Enterprise plans. KMS Proxy, which lets you hold your own encryption keys, is Enterprise-only.

Key terms glossary

Tool Router: A Composio system that automatically directs agent requests to the correct connected application (Gmail vs. Outlook, for example) without requiring conditional logic in your agent code.

Connect Link: A secure URL generated by Composio that allows users to authenticate their applications mid-conversation in one sitting, with Composio managing token storage and refresh from that point forward.

API sync layer: A platform design (like Nango) where you write custom code to copy data between APIs and your database on a schedule or trigger.

Token custody: The credential management layer within Composio's action infrastructure. It stores and refreshes OAuth tokens automatically so agent actions don't fail mid-task when credentials expire. Background infrastructure the builder doesn't interact with directly.

ZDR (Zero Data Retention): A Composio Pro and above add-on that stops Composio from retaining your agent's request and response payloads, available at $0.0001 per tool call.