Nango and Composio: Integrating Enterprise Agents into Each Company's Application Ecosystem
A technical comparison based on official documentation consulted on October 9, 2026.
One company works with Salesforce, Microsoft 365, and Teams. Another manages sales in HubSpot, uses Google Workspace, and coordinates operations in Slack. A third combines SaaS applications with a proprietary ERP, internal databases, and processes that have been adapted to its needs over many years.
All three may need a sales agent that prepares meetings, updates opportunities, and follows up with customers. The business objective is similar, but the systems the agent must act on, their data models, and their permissions differ.
For teams building enterprise agents, this diversity creates a central challenge: an agent’s ability to adapt to an organization depends, to a large extent, on how it connects to the organization’s applications and what authorization it has to use them.
An agent may interpret a request correctly and develop a sound plan. To execute it, the agent needs to locate information, query systems, and perform specific operations. It must also do so under the appropriate identity, respect each company’s boundaries, and leave evidence of its actions.
Building that integration capability from scratch introduces a substantial amount of work.
Every provider has its own authentication mechanisms, permissions, pagination, usage limits, error formats, and update policies. OAuth adds token exchanges, refreshes, revocations, consent screens, and applications that must be registered with the provider. Then come the less visible cases: an account loses permissions, an administrator restricts an application, an API changes a field, or an operation fails after it has already produced some of its effects.
The effort continues throughout the product’s lifetime. As more customers and applications are added, more combinations must be tested, observed, and maintained.
This is where Nango and Composio fit. Both provide an integration layer that lets teams reuse connectivity, authentication, and execution capabilities across external applications. Their value lies in reducing the repetitive infrastructure that each team would otherwise have to build to make its agents operational.
It is worth being precise about catalog sizes. Currently, Nango advertises support for more than 1,000 APIs and more than 7,000 templates for tools, syncs, and triggers. Composio presents a catalog of more than 1,600 applications or toolkits. These are vendor-published figures, and they measure different units: one application can contain many actions, and having authentication support for an API does not mean covering every business process built on it. Nango’s catalog and platform, Composio documentation.
For an enterprise evaluation, catalog size is a starting point. The decisive question is whether each integration covers the operations, custom fields, permissions, and volumes the product requires.
The two platforms share much of their technical foundation. They manage connections to external services, provide mechanisms for working without placing provider credentials in the model’s context, and allow applications and agents to use their capabilities. Nango organizes its platform around authentication and integration functions; Composio organizes the agent experience around sessions, connected accounts, and tools. Introduction to Nango, Composio sessions.
The most useful distinction for comparing them lies in their respective starting points:
| Dimension | Nango | Composio |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Building and operating integrations whose code the team controls | Providing agents with tool discovery, authentication, and execution |
| Custom logic | TypeScript functions deployed to its execution infrastructure | Custom tools inside the application and extensions to existing tools |
| Working with data | Recurring syncs, a records cache, and incremental processing | Queries and actions through tools; additional processing in a sandbox |
| Agent access | Functions exposed as tools and scoped MCP sessions | Sessions with search, connection, and execution tools; SDK and MCP access |
| Per-customer adaptation | Metadata, filters, mappings, and function behavior | Session, account, authentication, and custom-tool configuration |
| Deployment | Cloud, enterprise BYOC and Self-Managed; a limited free edition | Cloud and private or self-hosted options through Enterprise agreements |
This comparison describes architectural emphases. The capabilities overlap and continue to evolve.
In Nango, an integration can become a software component of the product itself: the team defines its inputs, transforms the provider’s response, and maintains a stable interface for the agent. The same implementation can also adapt to different customers through connection metadata: field mappings, filters, account identifiers, or synchronization criteria. This is particularly useful when two organizations use the same CRM with different schemas. Per-customer customization in Nango.
Composio pays particular attention to how the agent finds and uses capabilities during a task. Its sessions can provide a small set of coordination tools for discovering actions, connecting an account, and executing operations. They also allow a known set of tools to be loaded directly for specialized agents. This avoids putting the entire catalog into the model’s context. Composio tools and toolkits.
Nango also includes dynamic discovery. Its agent sessions define the available connections, authorized tools, and how those tools are discovered, with tools either pinned in advance or searched for when needed. Choosing between the two therefore requires evaluating the complete integration experience, beyond simply checking whether they offer MCP. Nango agent sessions.
In an enterprise architecture, connecting an account solves only part of the authorization problem. Three decisions should be distinguished:
- Identity: which user, company, or service account is requesting the operation.
- Provider permissions: which operations the credential allows in Salesforce, Microsoft 365, or another application.
- Product policy: what that agent may do, for that user, on that resource, at that moment.
A credential may allow sending emails while the product authorizes the agent only to prepare drafts. That restriction must be enforced on the server before the action executes. An instruction written in the prompt does not replace that control.
Ownership must also be represented correctly. An email account connected by an employee should not automatically become available to everyone in the company. A shared connection needs an explicit owner and scope, together with rules that determine who may use it.
Composio documents separate models for member-owned and workspace-owned connections. For the latter, it recommends an integration identity independent of any particular person, while leaving the application responsible for checking which members may act through it. Composio’s B2B architecture.
Nango allows connections to be associated with users, organizations, or projects, but the application must retain that relationship and determine ownership. The platform provides connection mechanisms; the product’s membership model remains the developer’s responsibility. Nango authentication guide.
There is also an important subtlety in general-purpose access tools. Nango warns that enabling nango_proxy allows access to integration endpoints that are not restricted by the tool allowlists or denylists. In Composio, Proxy Execute can likewise reach operations that are not represented by predefined tools. Permission to make arbitrary requests must be reviewed separately from the catalog shown to the agent. Nango proxy scope, Composio execution boundaries.
Customization includes both logic and the customer experience. In a product intended for businesses, users should be able to connect their CRM, understand the access they are granting, and resolve a disconnected account without needing to understand the underlying infrastructure.
Nango offers Connect UI, with API-specific forms and guidance, as well as visual customization. It also supports building a custom interface through headless authentication. In that case, the product takes responsibility for the forms, messages, and provider-specific inputs, while Nango continues to manage credentials and connections. Some branding options require commercial add-ons. Customizing Connect UI.
Composio distinguishes several branding surfaces: the connection page, the OAuth consent screen, the callback domain, and the page shown after authorization. It supports customizing its hosted page and using your own OAuth applications. Its documentation also notes that each project has one brand identity and theme, a relevant detail for products that require different branding for each customer. White-labeling in Composio.
In both cases, your own OAuth application gives you control over the identity shown to the user and the permissions requested. Vendor-managed applications simplify getting started when their conditions fit. In production, provider quotas, provider requirements, and each customer’s needs must also be evaluated. OAuth applications in Nango, production authentication in Composio.
White-labeling should simplify the experience while keeping the information needed for consent visible: which account is being connected, who will be able to use it, which operations are authorized, and how access can be revoked.
Internal applications require additional evaluation. A broad catalog does not replace integration with a proprietary ERP or an API accessible only from the corporate network.
Nango allows operations to be implemented through integration functions. Composio offers custom tools that execute within the application’s process, including standalone functions and extensions that delegate authenticated calls to its platform. The latter capability is documented as experimental. Nango functions, Composio custom tools.
The location of execution matters. In Composio, local tools and SDK hooks do not automatically carry over to the hosted MCP endpoint. If a business validation lives in a local hook, switching to remote execution through MCP can leave that validation outside the call’s execution path. SDK and MCP differences in Composio.
Composio also allows custom MCP servers to be registered through an experimental capability. The documented route requires a public HTTPS endpoint; for systems that are exclusively internal, connectivity must be designed or a suitable private deployment agreed upon. Composio Custom MCP.
This suggests a useful design practice: expose stable business operations, such as create_proposal_draft or check_order_status, and keep each provider’s specifics behind them. The agent can reuse the operation even when a company’s CRM, fields, or rules change.
Deployment requires distinguishing who owns the infrastructure from who operates it. Nango documents three main options for its complete platform:
- Cloud: infrastructure managed by Nango.
- BYOC: Nango deploys and operates the instance inside the customer’s cloud account.
- Self-Managed: the customer deploys and operates the platform on its own infrastructure.
BYOC and Self-Managed require an Enterprise agreement. The free self-hosted edition has a narrower scope, focused on authentication and proxy access, without the full capabilities for synchronization, tools, triggers, and MCP. Nango deployment options.
Self-Managed also means taking responsibility for upgrades, scaling, incident response, and storage and encryption configuration. Operational control carries a cost that must be included in the decision. Responsibilities in Nango Self-Managed.
Composio offers its Cloud service and documents Enterprise options for private VPC deployments and self-hosting, with Helm deployment support. It also describes a customer-managed key architecture in which a proxy in the customer’s cloud handles credentials while Composio retains the control plane. These arrangements must be specified with the provider. Deployment and credential custody in Composio.
Comparing them requires identifying where tokens are stored, where calls execute, who can administer each component, and where results, files, logs, and backups end up. Using your own OAuth application, by itself, does not change the location of credential storage.
Code availability also calls for precision. The main license in Nango’s repository is Elastic License 2.0, which restricts certain uses as a hosted service. Composio’s public repository uses MIT, but that license does not by itself grant free access to the service or its Enterprise deployments. Rights to the code, contracted features, and the conditions for commercializing a solution must be evaluated separately. Nango license, Composio repository license.
Asynchronous execution is another dimension where terms should be made explicit. Enterprise systems have at least four distinct needs:
| Need | Example |
|---|---|
| Concurrency | Querying several independent systems at the same time |
| Background work | Starting a bulk update and checking its result later |
| Event processing | Activating an agent when a request arrives |
| Durable workflow | Waiting for approval and continuing the following day while preserving state |
Nango offers queued asynchronous actions, with results available through polling or webhook notification. Its documentation identifies a relevant limitation: actions are currently processed sequentially per environment, with no guarantee of execution timing. This must be considered when sizing workloads and preventing long operations from delaying others. Nango asynchronous actions.
For synchronization, Nango provides checkpoints that preserve progress and allow processing to resume. They are useful for large ingestions and incremental updates, provided the function correctly implements saving and restoring checkpoints. Nango checkpoints.
Composio documents parallel execution of up to 50 independent tools through COMPOSIO_MULTI_EXECUTE_TOOL. Its sandbox allows programmatic data processing and operations, but the Remote Workbench reference sets a three-minute limit per cell. These capabilities should be distinguished from a durable queue for enterprise jobs. Parallel execution, Remote Workbench.
Its triggers deliver events to the application through signed webhooks. Some receive events from the provider, while others poll periodically, so latency depends on the integration. The application remains responsible for implementing the processing that starts when an event is received. Composio triggers.
For a process that spans several systems, waits for human decisions, and must recover after failures, I would propose keeping business state in a separate orchestration layer controlled by the product. That layer can use either platform to execute specific steps while retaining identifiers, approvals, results, and retry decisions.
Idempotency is essential: repeating an operation should not duplicate an order or send the same email twice. Nango warns that its asynchronous retries require idempotent functions. Composio specifies that its SDKs retry certain reads but do not automatically retry executions, precisely to avoid duplicate effects. Retries in Nango, execution and recovery in Composio.
For agents that need enterprise knowledge, synchronization and on-demand queries serve different purposes. A one-off query can be handled against the provider’s API. Searching large document collections or analyzing trends may require an indexed, up-to-date copy.
Nango offers periodic sync functions and a records cache from which the application consumes changes. This is a useful foundation for ingestion, indexing, and RAG. The product must still design the index, propagate deletions, and enforce the appropriate permissions when retrieving information. Nango syncs.
Composio makes it easier to retrieve information through tools and process large results in a sandbox. That capability can serve an agent’s analytical tasks, but a permanent knowledge base needs an explicit strategy for storage, updates, and access. Composio remote sandbox.
Observability also requires reviewing what information is retained. Nango distinguishes operational logs from control-plane auditing. For proxy requests and API calls made from functions, it documents recording metadata without request or response bodies; the application must also control what it writes to its custom logs. Nango security and logging.
Composio stores tool arguments and results in its logs by default, with retention of up to one year. It offers Zero Data Retention to prevent payload storage for covered calls while retaining metadata. This control has a specific scope: temporary files and processing during execution have their own lifecycles and conditions. Composio data retention.
Both publish information about SOC 2 Type II. For an enterprise deployment, those reports should be accompanied by a review of the contracted deployment, administrative permissions, retention, subprocessors, and access controls. SSO for platform operators and authorization of agent actions address different problems. Nango security, Composio security.
Cost should be calculated using real workloads. Nango publishes a model based on connections, execution time, and data transfer. Composio meters tool calls and events, with differences depending on the use of customer-owned or managed OAuth applications and add-ons for certain capabilities. Nango pricing, Composio pricing.
A representative simulation should include active users, connected accounts, operations per task, sync frequency, events, data volume, and support. An agent that synchronizes millions of records has a different cost profile from one that performs only a few actions per conversation.
An exit strategy should also be designed. Nango supports retrieving credentials through its API and ties certain portability options to the use of customer-owned OAuth applications. Composio documents token redaction in responses and clarifies that retrieving a connected account is not a credential-export mechanism. A migration may require new authorizations. Portability in Nango, Composio token custody.
Based on these characteristics, my selection criteria would be:
- I would evaluate Nango first when the product depends on deep integrations, continuous synchronization, proprietary data models, and detailed adaptation for each customer.
- I would evaluate Composio first when the priority is building agents that discover and use a broad variety of tools, with integrated authentication and processing during the task.
- For specialized agents, I would test both with a small set of business operations, explicit permissions, and verifiable results.
- For regulated or private environments, I would base the choice on the specific architecture and Enterprise terms.
These are architectural conclusions, not results from a performance benchmark between the two products. A practical evaluation should put both platforms through the same process: connect real accounts, execute representative operations, lose and recover permissions, receive events, simulate failures, and verify isolation between customers.
Nango and Composio allow teams to spend less effort on repetitive integration infrastructure. That time can be invested in what makes an enterprise agent useful: understanding the company’s process, acting within its authorization, and producing results that people can verify.