A Developer's Guide to the Paragon API: The Embedded Integration Game-Changer

Building integrations with third-party apps is a critical part of modern software, but it's also a major headache for developers. From managing inconsistent APIs to handling complex OAuth flows and dealing with constant maintenance, the process can quickly drain valuable time and resources away from your core product.

This is the problem the Paragon API was built to solve. It's not a single API in the traditional sense, but an embedded integration platform designed to help SaaS companies ship native, customer-facing integrations faster and with less effort.

What is the Paragon Platform?

Think of Paragon as a powerful layer between your application and the vast ecosystem of other software. Instead of you having to build and maintain every single integration, Paragon provides the tools to handle the heavy lifting. The platform consists of several key components that work together to streamline the entire integration lifecycle.

Here’s a breakdown of the core features you’ll interact with as a developer.

1. The Connect SDK: Seamless User Authentication

The first step in any integration is allowing your users to connect their accounts. Paragon's Connect SDK makes this process incredibly simple and secure.

• White-Labeled Connect Portal: You can embed a customizable, in-app UI directly into your product. Your customers use this portal to authenticate their accounts with services like Google Workspace, Salesforce, or Slack.

• Managed Authentication: The SDK handles the entire OAuth 2.0 flow, including token generation, refresh, and secure storage. This means you never have to touch your customers' sensitive API keys or credentials, significantly reducing your security and compliance burden.

The result is a native, "one-click" experience for your users that feels like a natural part of your application.

2. Workflows: Defining Your Business Logic

Paragon's workflow engine is where the magic happens. You can define what an integration does using either a low-code visual builder or a code-based framework (called "Paragraph") that uses TypeScript.

For example, imagine you want to create a Google Sheet every time a user creates a report in your application. Instead of writing all the API logic yourself, you would create a workflow in Paragon that looks something like this:

When "New Report Created" in My App → Use Google Sheets Action "Create Spreadsheet" → Use Google Sheets Action "Write Row"

These workflows are executed on Paragon's serverless infrastructure, which handles things like concurrency, rate limiting, and automatic retries in case of temporary API failures.

3. The Universal API (ActionKit): Real-Time Requests

Paragon's Universal API allows your application to make real-time, authenticated requests to any third-party API endpoint through Paragon's managed infrastructure.

This is a powerful feature because it means you can make a single, consistent API call to Paragon, which then securely proxies that request to the target service on behalf of your user. You don’t need to worry about managing individual access tokens or understanding the unique API structure of every service.

4. Managed Sync: The Data Ingestion Engine

For use cases that require syncing large volumes of data, Paragon offers Managed Sync. This feature is designed to handle the complexities of ingesting data from third-party apps, such as a user's Google Drive or CRM, and keeping it synchronized with your application.

Managed Sync takes care of initial backfills, incremental updates, and managing permissions, allowing your engineering team to focus on how to use the data, not on the complex "plumbing" of moving it.

5. Observability and Monitoring

With integrations, things inevitably break. Paragon provides a robust set of tools for monitoring and debugging. You get access to detailed event logs and task history, and you can even stream these logs to your own observability platforms like Sentry or DataDog. This gives you end-to-end visibility into every step of a workflow, making it easy to identify and fix issues.

A Practical Example: Creating Google Docs/Sheets with Your Tool

Let’s put it all together. Here’s how you would use the Paragon API to enable a user to create a Google Sheet from your application:

1. Embed the Connect Portal: In your application's settings, you add a button that uses the Paragon SDK to launch the Connect Portal for Google Sheets.

2. User Authentication: Your user clicks the button, logs into their Google account via the portal, and grants the necessary permissions. Paragon securely handles the OAuth token exchange and storage.

3. Define the Workflow: In your Paragon dashboard, you build a workflow. The trigger for this workflow is an event from your app, such as report.generated. The action is a pre-built Paragon step for Google Sheets: Create Spreadsheet with Data.

4. Execute the Integration: When a user creates a new report in your tool, your application makes a single, simple API call to Paragon to trigger the report.generated event. Paragon then executes the workflow, creating a new Google Sheet on the user’s behalf and populating it with the report data.

Why Choose the Paragon API?

Ultimately, Paragon is a strategic choice that can save your engineering team countless hours. By offloading the complexities of building and maintaining integrations, you can:

• Accelerate Your Roadmap: Ship integrations in days or weeks instead of months.

• Reduce Technical Debt: Avoid building and maintaining custom, fragile integration logic.

• Improve Security: Rely on a platform that specializes in secure OAuth and credential management.

• Focus on Your Core Product: Free up your developers to build the features that truly differentiate your application.