How Paragon Fits into your Product Tech Stack

Paragon enables engineering teams at SaaS companies to build integrations their customers care about quickly and reliably, but how exactly does Paragon streamline integration development? And how does Paragon fit into your existing tech stack? That’s what this article will dive into!

Paragon at a high level

Paragon provides embedded integration infrastructure for AI & SaaS products, meaning:

1. Paragon is embedded natively in your application, where your users can use our connectors to connect to their 3rd-party platforms (their Salesforce, Slack, Google Drive, etc.) within your application

2. Paragon’s integration infrastructure then takes care of integration-specific details and scaling challenges to make working with 3rd-party APIs and data easy

Putting it simply, Paragon is an intermediary service (with both cloud and on-premise hosting options) that sits between your SaaS application and your users’ 3rd-party platforms.

Across our platform, Paragon will handle:

• integration authentication and token management across all of your different tenants

• multi-tenant infrastructure that keeps all your tenant's data and configurations isolated

• infrastructure for all integration-relation jobs like scaling webhook listeners and high volume data ingestion

• simplifying 3rd-party API calls with abstracted functionality (like getting the contents of a Notion page which typically require multiple GET block content requests)

• built-in monitoring and event logs

• integration-specific nuances with 3rd-party APIs like rate-limits

Paragon handles all of these complexities, so that your team can quickly start building integration features for AI, automation, and other popular integration use cases.

The embedded experience

As Paragon is an embedded platform, your users get a fully native experience enabling & configuring the integrations in your SaaS application. They won’t even know Paragon was used in your SaaS application.

When a user is in your product, they can authenticate their 3rd-party providers directly in your application, whether it’s through Paragon’s pre-built Connect Portal UI or through your headless UI.

This is what the pre-built UI component looks like. The Connect Portal pops up directly in your application, and brings up the OAuth window when “Connect” is clicked.

After going through the OAuth process, that’s it!

Behind the scenes, your developers team can use Paragon’s node.js SDK to easily embed the Connect Portal with a few lines of code:

<Button onClick={() => paragon.connect(integration.type, {})}>
  {integrationEnabled ? "Manage" : "Enable"}
</Button>

Or use our headless implementation to authenticate your users’ - bringing up the integration authentication window directly - using your own UI components:

<Button onClick={() => paragon.installIntegration(integrationType)}>
  Connect
</Button>

From there your team can use Paragon Workflows or API products that use your users' authentication to interact with their 3rd-party platforms.

How Paragon simplifies integration logic

After authentication is complete on your frontend, Paragon can now act as the integration infrastructure that simplifies integration development across different 3rd-party APIs. Your team can work on the actual integration logic in your backend services and Paragon will manage the infrastructure and provide tools that simplifies working with 3rd-party data.

(Here’s a high-level example on how Paragon simplifies an action like pulling all your users’ Hubspot data)

As integration use cases can vary greatly, we built 3 separate products optimized for different integration use case types:

• Managed Sync: High-volume data ingestion and access control on 3rd-party data

• ActionKit: Low-latency, one-off 3rd-party actions

• Workflows: Flexible, asynchronous jobs that can be triggered anywhere

Pick and choose which product to use based off what integration features you’re building. We’ll go over each briefly, starting with Managed Sync.

Managed Sync

Managed Sync is a set of 2 APIs that makes it easy to ship production-ready integrations for data ingestion AND provides up-to-date, native permissions on that ingested data. Here’s how the Sync API - the first of the two - works:

Syncs are fully managed data pipelines for an integration (i.e. Google Drive, Box, Sharepoint for file storage) that allows you to pull all of your users’ data.

What’s important to note here is that your application can:

• initiate syncs to any supported integration with a single API call

• receive webhooks with data updates (according to a configured polling frequency)

• easily scale with normalized schemas across an integration category, meaning the data format across all file storage providers or all CRMs will be the same - build logic for one CRM integration, and you can re-use across all CRMs

Once your users’ data is ingested, Paragon will also separately manage a permissions graph of your users’ data. This allows you to use the Permissions API to easily check permissions with just a single API call.

curl --request POST https://managed-sync.useparagon.com/permissions/check \\
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' \\
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \\
  --data '{
  "object": "file_a",
  "user": "bowie@useparagon.com",
  "role": "reader"
}'
=> {"has_access": true}

ActionKit

ActionKit is a one API that expose thousands of actions for low-latency, one-off actions, perfect for actions like creating a CRM contact with a button click or getting a Jira ticket with an agent tool call. Think of them as “Paragon-wrapped” API calls directly to the 3rd-party API with the following benefits:

1. Paragon’s actions provide abstractions on top of the 3rd-party API - whereas before getting a notion page’s contents may require a chain of Notion API calls, it’s just one action call with ActionKit

1. With one GET request, ActionKit provides the normalized schema - with AI agent and human readable descriptions - across actions that can be surfaced to AI agents as tools or workflow actions in your workflow builder application

   1. Calling the action is a simple POST request to ActionKit with the action name and properties

{
    "type": "function",
    "function": {
        "name": "GMAIL_SEND_EMAIL",
        "description": "Send a email in Gmail",
        "parameters": {
            "type": "object",
            "properties": {
                "toRecipients": {
                    "type": "array",
                    "description": "To : Specify the recipients as either a single string or a JSON array. (example: \\"[\\n  \\"recipient1@domain.com\\",\\n  \\"recipient2@domain.com\\"\\n]\\")",
                    "items": {
                        "type": "string"
                    }
                },
                ...
            },
            "required": [
                "toRecipients",
                "from",
                "subject",
                "messageContent"
            ],
            "additionalProperties": false

Paragon Workflows

For use cases that Managed Sync and ActionKit don’t cover, Workflows are a way to flexibly create integration logic, either in Typescript or low-code. These Workflows are asynchronous jobs that’s perfect for automations that you want to occur across all of your users while respecting their unique credentials, settings, and configurations.

Paragon workflows can be triggered in a variety of ways - scheduled CRON triggers, an API request from your application, or even by events in the 3rd-party provider

• A new batch of contacts has been created in your application, bulk upload the contacts to your users’ Salesforce account

• A new channel was created in your users’ Slack, notify your application backend with the channel data

These workflows can all be version controlled and they execute on a serverless runtime.

Wrapping up

Paragon is not only designed to enable our customers to build integrations much faster, but also designed to easily integrate with modern SaaS tech stacks.

Across Paragon’s platform is managed authentication, abstracted 3rd-party actions, scaling infrastructure, monitoring, and logs. For different categories of integration use cases, we have different purpose-built products to optimize for that use case type:

• Managed Sync for high-volume data ingestion with native permissions

• ActionKit for low-latency, one-off actions with machine and human readable schemas

• Workflows for flexible, asynchronous jobs that can be triggered from anywhere

Leave the difficult integration-specific work to be handled by Paragon, so your SaaS application can build seamless, rich integrations for your users. If you’re interested in learning more about Paragon, sign up for a free trial or book a demo with our team.