Appsmith ships new integrations in 1 day with Paragon

About Appsmith

Appsmith is the leading open-source platform for building internal applications. It is used by over 108,000 developers to create dashboards, admin panels, workflow automations, and AI agents for internal teams. With over 300,000 end-users across 54,000 self-hosted instances and 34,000 GitHub stars, the platform lets teams connect to any data source and ship custom tools – fast.

Integrations are core to everything Appsmith builds. Whether developers are creating dashboard widgets that visualize Salesforce data, building workflow automations that sync between Slack and Jira, or deploying AI agents that can dynamically interact with all of their tools—every use case depends on seamless, reliable data connectivity. For Appsmith's customers, integrations aren't just a feature; they're the foundation that makes internal tool development possible.

The problem

Appsmith's enterprise customers increasingly demanded native integrations with business-critical platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, and Jira. These native integrations help reduce onboarding friction, improve reliability over custom APIs, and make it easier for their customers to build the tools they need, faster. However, the reality of building these integrations in-house presented significant obstacles.

Each SaaS platform they wanted to support presented:

• Unique authentication schemes and API-specific complexities

• Rate limiting and scaling challenges

• 60-70% engineering effort spent on boilerplate code rather than core logic

• 3-6 months of dedicated engineering effort per integration

This created an unsustainable development timeline that couldn't match customer demand or competitive requirements while also diverting resources from their core product roadmap, which had high priority products such as the AI agent builder. Appsmith knew they needed a more scalable approach to solving the integration problem, otherwise their roadmap would come to a halt.

“This approach was unsustainable as requests for new integrations grew exponentially. We needed a paradigm shift that would accelerate delivery, reduce maintenance overhead, maintain security, and support rapid enterprise onboarding.” - Nilansh Bansal, Sr. Platform Engineer, Appsmith

Search for a solution

Appsmith evaluated multiple integration vendors using rigorous criteria across four key areas:

• Performance & Scalability: Load benchmarks, auto-scaling capabilities, latency metrics, and SLA guarantees

• Developer Experience: SDK quality, documentation completeness, custom integration builders, and webhook support

• Integration Catalog: Breadth of connectors, custom API compatibility, update frequency, and enterprise-grade support

• Security & Compliance: SOC2, GDPR, self-hosting support, data residency controls, and encryption standards

After running deep, technical POCs against multiple vendors, Appsmith realized Paragon was the clear winner, particularly with the ActionKit product. Beyond the requirements above, they realized throughout the evaluation that Paragon’s SDK and APIs would enable them to completely re-architect their entire integrations service in a much more scalable way. They saw an opportunity to build something fundamentally different—a platform-wide integration infrastructure that could scale across all their products. This insight came from a few key components:

1. Extensible foundation
   Paragon provided the core foundation and the majority of connectors and actions Appsmith needed out-of-the-box, but Paragon’s extensible core meant Appsmith could handle any integration requirement—even the one-off, niche APIs that weren't supported out-of-the-box, with Paragon’s auth and connector infrastructure. This flexibility was essential for serving enterprise customers with unique integration requirements.

2. Uniform interface
   Instead of re-inventing the wheel, researching, and writing a lot of code for every integration, Appsmith could dynamically compose integration actions and reuse that pattern hundreds of times across their dashboard widget components, workflow automation nodes, and AI agent tools, thanks to Paragon’s uniform API interface across all integrations. This allowed Appsmith's engineers to focus on the end-user experience they needed to deliver, not the plumbing behind each integration.

3. Reliability

   Beyond the product features, it was critical for Appsmith that Paragon is extremely reliable, as so much of their product and customer experience would be dependent on Paragon.

   "Paragon has about 100% uptime - [they are] the most stable integration platform provider among all the others that we evaluated." - Nilansh Bansal, Sr. Platform Engineer, Appsmith

4. Support
   The cherry on top was the support they received, across the onboarding experience, delivering on SLA features, and even helping with implementation edge cases.

   "Paragon has provided very good support throughout the entire process — from setup to ongoing maintenance. Their team is very responsive and proactive whenever issues arise or when we have questions. They’ve also helped us handle edge cases and improve our integration flows efficiently." -  Carina, Sr. Product Manager - Integrations, Appsmith

Re-architecting for scale with Paragon

Appsmith re-architected their entire integrations service around Paragon. The key to the re-architecture was Appsmith Cloud Services - a centralized layer that sits between millions of self/cloud-hosted Appsmith instances and Paragon's integration infrastructure. This re-architecture enabled something unprecedented: shipping new integrations to every Appsmith instance worldwide without requiring version updates, while making every integration instantly available across their whole suite of products including dashboard widgets, workflow automations, and AI agents.

The outcome

Since their complete re-architecture around Paragon, Appsmith has fundamentally transformed how they deliver integrations platform-wide, with efficiency gains immediately apparent across multiple dimensions - to share a few highlights, they have been able to:

• Respond to enterprise RFPs 3× faster

• Reduce customer onboarding time by 80%

• Free up 2.5 FTE engineers to focus on core product innovation

• Drive upsells - integrations are now one of their biggest revenue drivers

• Ship new integrations in a single day

"We had a Jira use case we enabled in our product within less than an hour—minutes, even." — Nuno Borges, Head of Engineering, Appsmith

Appsmith's engineers now focus on core product features while customers get the connector coverage that they need for their businesses.

A showcase of the integrations

They’ve already shipped 15 integrations, all of which work seamlessly across Appsmith's entire platform. Below are some key examples.

Dashboard widgets with integration data

Users drag-and-drop data from integrations into tables and charts.

End-result of a Sales dashboard built with Appsmith.

Behind-the-scenes view on how a developer can build a report with Salesforce data in Appsmith.

Workflow automation integrations

Users can author workflow automations and leverage the connectors and actions in those automations.

Example of a workflow that is triggered as soon as a ticket is assigned to a Zendesk bot. A Slack message will be sent, and subsequent actions will be performed on Zendesk.

AI agent tool calling

Integration actions automatically become "tools" for LLM function calling via dynamic schema generation

Example of an support AI agent built with Appsmith that can check Zendesk for updates on tickets.

Behind-the-scenes on how developers can configure an AI agent like the one above in Appsmith, and give it integration tools.

Looking Forward

Appsmith's success with Paragon has established a foundation for continued expansion. The company plans to leverage this infrastructure advantage to continue expanding their product's native integration coverage across additional 3rd-party tools, and make them available in every Appsmith product.