Paragon vs Nango: Which One Is Right for Your Product?

There are two questions hiding inside this comparison. Most teams only look at one of them.

The first one is about your code. Who writes the integrations, and where do they live?

The second one is about money. Each platform charges you for a different thing. That means you cannot put the two prices side by side until you do a small bit of math first.

This guide answers both, with real numbers. It also covers the parts teams usually find out about later: how often you sync data changes your bill a lot, and what it costs to move off the platform once you are on it.

All the details here were checked against both vendors' docs in September 2026. Both products change fast, so use this as a starting point and confirm what matters to you.

Paragon is an embedded iPaaS. You build integrations as workflows. You put them together from blocks that Paragon gives you, either by dragging them around in a visual editor or by writing TypeScript with their Paragraph framework. They run on Paragon's servers.

Nango is a code-first integration runtime. You write integrations as TypeScript functions. They live in your own repo, written by your engineers or by a coding agent. They run on Nango's servers.

This sounds like a choice about tools. It is not. It decides three real things.

Who can change an integration. On Paragon, a solutions engineer or a technical PM can edit a workflow without waiting for an engineering sprint. On Nango, every change is a pull request.

What happens when the catalog runs out. A customer will eventually ask for something the platform did not plan for. On Paragon, you work around it inside the workflow builder. On Nango, it is just code, so you write whatever you want.

What you keep if you leave. Workflows belong to Paragon's format. Functions belong to you. This turns out to matter a lot, and we cover it below.

Two things that table does not show.

Paragon sells three separate products under one subscription: Workflows, Managed Sync and ActionKit. A full integration usually needs more than one of them. Nango does all of it with one thing, a function, on one system.

Paragon puts more work into the tools around integrations. There is a dashboard your support team can use to see why one customer's connection broke. There is a permissions graph for RAG. There are standard schemas per category. Nango puts more work into the tools for building. Because integrations are just code, your normal review, testing and deploy process works on them with no changes.

Paragon charges per Connected User. Their docs define a Connected User as one user ID that is connected to at least one integration. Usually that is one customer company, though you can set it up per person instead. Your plan comes with a limit. Paragon emails your admins at 70%, 85% and 100% of it. After you pass it, new Connected Users cannot connect anything, but the ones you already have keep working.

Nango charges per connection. One connection is one login. Nango's own example: if three people connect Gmail, that is three connections. On top of that, Nango charges for compute time and for data sent out.

So Paragon counts people or companies. Nango counts logins. The gap between those two numbers depends on your product, and you need it before either price means anything.

connection ratio = (how many app accounts your customers connect)
                 / (how many users or companies you would register with Paragon)

The point is not that one is cheaper. The point is this: adding more integrations per customer is free on Paragon's meter, and costs more every time on Nango's.

So if your plan is "give each customer more integrations," Paragon's pricing gets better as you do it. If your plan is "get more customers, each connecting one app," the two meters move together and you should decide on something else.

If every person connects their own account, it is expensive on both. That is the setup teams most often forget to check.

Nango publishes its prices: $0.29 per connection per month, $0.72 per compute hour, and $0.50 per GB of data sent out. The pay-as-you-go plan has a $50 monthly minimum that includes $50 of credit. There is also a free plan: 10 connections, 10 compute hours and 10 GB per month. Enterprise is negotiated, and Nango says connections can go as low as $0.01 at high volume.

Here is an example. 200 customers. Five connections each, at the company level. Each one syncs once an hour, and each sync takes about three seconds.

Connections:  1,000 × $0.29                      = $290
Compute:      3s × 24 × 30 = 2,160s = 0.6h each
              1,000 × 0.6h = 600h × $0.72        = $432
Data out:     50 GB × $0.50                      =  $25
                                            Total ≈ $747 / month

Three seconds per sync is a guess, not a measurement, so test yours on the free plan before trusting the total.

The useful part is this: you can work out Nango's price exactly, and you cannot do that with Paragon. So use Nango's number as your floor when you negotiate with Paragon.

Change one thing in that example. Sync every minute instead of every hour, which is what most AI features want.

1,440 runs a day × 3s = 4,320s a day = 36h a month, per connection
36h × $0.72 = $25.92 per connection per month

The connection itself costs $0.29. The compute now costs about ninety times that. Across 1,000 connections, the same customers go from around $750 a month to around $26,000 a month.

Two things to take from that.

On Nango, fresher data costs more money, directly. Every time you decide how often to sync, you are deciding your bill. Compute is rounded up to the nearest second on every run, so lots of short runs cost extra. This is a good reason to use webhooks instead of polling wherever the app supports it, which is how Nango wants you to build anyway.

On Paragon, usage is bundled into your Connected User plan. Syncing more often does not obviously change your bill. That is good for products that need fresh data. It also means you need to ask one specific question on the sales call, because a bundle has a size.

Paragon does not publish prices. So bring the number you worked out for Nango and ask for the rest.

1. What is the price per Connected User at our size, and where do the tiers change?

2. How much usage is included per Connected User, and what happens if we go over? Do we pay extra, or do we have to move up a tier?

3. Is ActionKit included in the subscription or billed separately?

4. Does our field mapping need the per-customer version, and does that alone push us to Enterprise?

5. How does the annual commitment work, and how are extra Connected Users billed?

6. If we set up Connected Users per person instead of per company, does the rate change?

Question two is the one that decides whether you can compare their quote to Nango's at all.

If your product has an agent that does things inside your customer's apps, this section probably matters more than pricing.

Paragon has ActionKit. It gives you about 1,000 ready-made actions across their connectors, through one API and a hosted MCP server. Each request is tied to a specific user by a signed token. It is the fastest way to get broad coverage.

You cannot add your own action to that catalog. But you can still build custom tools on Paragon. Their Proxy API lets you send any request to any supported app using the login Paragon already manages, and their MCP server can load custom actions from an OpenAPI file. The difference is where the tool is defined, not whether you can build it. On Paragon, your custom tool lives in your code and their catalog stays theirs.

Nango lets you write your own tool calls as functions, with fixed input and output formats, served through its MCP server. They run on the same system as your logins and syncs.

Here is where it shows up in practice. Say you want one tool called onboard_customer that creates a Slack channel, invites three people and posts a message. On Nango, that is one function you deploy. On Paragon, you write the steps yourself, either as a workflow or as a few Proxy API calls from your own server.

This matters more than it sounds. Agents get less reliable the more tools you make them chain together. Every extra step means more text in the prompt, more chances to pick the wrong tool, and more ways to fail. One tool that does the whole job works better than six that each do a piece.

Both platforms give you a login screen you can brand as your own. The difference is everything that comes after login.

Your customer needs to choose which Salesforce field maps to which field in your product. Which record types to sync. Which records to skip.

Paragon gives you that screen in the Connect Portal, though the per-customer version is Enterprise only. On Nango, you build it.

How much that costs you depends on a question about your product that has nothing to do with integrations. Do your customers need to configure how the integration behaves, or do they just need to log in?

If every customer maps their own custom CRM fields into your product, that is a much bigger build on Nango. If connecting Gmail is the whole setup, it is not.

Be honest in that estimate, and include the upkeep. Settings screens collect edge cases faster than anything else, because every customer's Salesforce is set up a little differently.

Paragon's Managed Sync polls for changes. You can set it to run as often as every minute. Nango's syncs save their place, so a failed run picks up where it stopped instead of starting over, and they can be triggered by real-time webhooks when the app supports it.

Before you weigh this, go and check the apps you actually need. Plenty of SaaS APIs have no webhooks at all. Some only offer them on higher-priced plans. Some send an event with no data in it, so you have to go and fetch the record anyway.

What matters is what the app gives your customer, on the plan your customer actually pays for. Test it with a real account before you decide. This one check has changed more platform decisions than any feature list.

1. Who changes an integration on a Tuesday afternoon?

An engineer with repo access, or someone in support helping a customer? If it is the second, you need Paragon's visual builder. Nango has nothing like it.

2. What is your connection ratio?

Above 3.0, Paragon's pricing works in your favor as you add integrations. Near 1.0, the two are similar, so decide on something else.

3. How fresh does the data need to be, and can the app even do it?

Check webhook support for your top five apps, on real customer plans. Mostly webhooks means Nango is cheaper and fresher. Mostly polling means work out Nango's compute cost at your real sync frequency first.

4. Do your customers set up their integrations, or just connect them?

Real per-customer setup is a ready-made screen on Paragon and a build on Nango.

5. Does anyone need this running on your own servers?

Some buyers have rules about where data lives, or a security review that will not allow a third party to hold customer logins. Nango is open under Elastic License 2.0 and has a free self-hosted version, so you can test it for nothing. Paragon's self-hosting means an Enterprise contract.

If you leave Paragon, you keep the idea and lose the work. Your workflows are built from Paragon's blocks. Managed Sync gives you Paragon's schema, and your own code has been written to expect it. ActionKit names belong to Paragon. You can rebuild all of it. You cannot carry any of it.

If you leave Nango, you keep more. The code is TypeScript in your repo and the logic inside it is yours. What you lose is everything underneath: logins and token refresh, the proxy, retries, scheduling, where synced data is stored, and your logs. That is still a big rebuild, but you are replacing the plumbing under code you already own.

The cost nobody talks about is asking your customers to log in again. Access tokens live inside the platform. If you move, every customer has to reconnect their apps through a new login flow.

For a self-serve product, that is a churn event. For an enterprise product, it is a conversation with every customer's IT team. It usually costs more than the engineering work, and you should think about it now rather than in two years.

This is the best practical reason to like Nango's self-hosting option even if you never use it. If the worst happens, you move the software instead of asking every customer to log in again.

Paragon and Nango both assume the same thing. They assume integrations are something your engineering team owns, builds carefully, and keeps improving.

That is true for a RAG product pulling in Drive and Notion. It is true for an agent writing to a customer's CRM. In those products, the integration is the product.

It is not true for a lot of teams who end up reading this comparison.

If what you need is coverage, so customers stop asking "does this work with my stack," then picking between Paragon and Nango means picking between two ways of hand-building deep integrations when your real problem is how many apps you support. At 130 connectors or 900 APIs, every single one is still something your engineers set up, ship and maintain. That is a slow and expensive way to answer a churn survey.

Picking the wrong type costs more than picking the wrong vendor inside the right type.

The change is simple. Your customers build the integrations, not your engineers, using a catalog nobody on your team has to maintain.

viaSocket embed does this in three ways, and most products use more than one.

A workflow builder inside your product. Your customers connect their own apps and build automations without leaving your app. It is styled to match your brand. You add a script instead of a connector roadmap.

Actions over webhooks, server to server. Your backend sends an event, and things happen in the customer's connected apps. No screen involved. This is the closest match to what you would build on Paragon or Nango, without the work per connector.

Multi-app flows your AI agent can call as one MCP tool. This is the part worth a close look if you are building an agent. Instead of your agent making six tool calls across four apps and handling errors at each step, it makes one call that runs the whole flow. It works better for the same reason one big tool beats six small ones, except here you do not write the steps. Neither ActionKit's ready-made catalog nor a per-function runtime gives you a whole multi-app flow as one tool without building it yourself.

Two more things matter when you are comparing. The catalog is 2,100+ apps, which is many times more than either platform above. And the price is fixed and public: $500 to set up, three months free, then $499 a month. No Connected User tiers. No per-connection charge. No compute bill that jumps when you sync more often. If you read the pricing section above, you can probably see why that is appealing.

Where this is the wrong answer. You do not get standard schemas per category. You do not get a ready-made permissions graph for RAG. You do not get engineer-level control over how one specific sync runs. If what makes your product special is a deep two-way Salesforce sync with custom objects, or reading a customer's Drive with permissions checked at the moment of retrieval, build that on a platform made for it. Paragon and Nango both are.

Most products need one or two deep integrations and wide coverage for everything else. Those are two different problems. Trying to solve both with one platform is usually why integration roadmaps stall. Build the two or three that really matter in-house or on something like Nango, and cover the long tail with an embedded automation layer. It costs less and ships sooner than adding connectors forever.