Bring your own credentials (BYOC) for connections in Zoho Creator

Bring your own credentials (BYOC) for connections in Zoho Creator

Hello everyone,

We're excited to announce an important step forward in how integrations and authentications work in Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator is a versatile platform for integrations, enabling you to connect with thousands of third-party services using built-in connectors through the connections framework.

Until now, all such connections established using built-in connectors were authenticated using Zoho-managed OAuth applications for authentication. While this simplifies setup, it also means that API limits and quotas are enforced at the OAuth-app level by the third-party provider, resulting in a shared rate-limit pool across customers.

We are now introducing bring your own credentials (BYOC) for built-in connections to overcome the aforementioned limitations and provide greater control. This allows you to authenticate connections using OAuth credentials that you generate and manage in your own third-party accounts.

What's new?

When creating a new connection using built-in connectors, you will now have an additional option to choose between two modes. They are:
  1. Quick connect (default): Uses Zoho-managed credentials
  2. Custom (BYOC): Uses OAuth credentials that you create and own in a third-party service

How it works 

  1. When creating a new connection for a built-in connector, selecting Custom will prompt you to enter the required authentication parameters, such as the Client ID, Client Secret, and other service-specific details obtained from your third-party OAuth app. 
  2. As with all OAuth-based connections, you must authorize access to your account as the next step during the connection setup.
Note: 
  1. The required authentication parameters may vary across services.
  2. You can store multiple credentials per connector, which allows you to reuse the same credential across different connections if required. 
  3. The credentials can be later managed in the Connection details page of the specific connection. Please be aware that updating credentials will impact all connections that use them and may require re-authorization.
  4. The custom BYOC option will be applicable for both Admin and Logged-In User authorizations.
  5. This enhancement does not affect any existing connections.

Why this matters

BYOC provides greater control and flexibility in how integrations are configured and managed in Zoho Creator. It brings several practical advantages:
  1. Independent API limits: Your integrations will use your own OAuth app's rate limits and quotas instead of a shared pool. This eliminates throttling or failures caused by shared usage.
  2. Stronger security control: Creator now provides complete control over OAuth credentials and their lifecycle.
  3. Improved compliance: This helps align with organizational and regulatory requirements.
  4. Better scalability: Reuse the same credentials across multiple connections.

BYOC vs custom connectors 

Custom BYOC applies to built-in connectors that are preconfigured by Zoho Creator and typically use the OAuth 2.0 protocol for authorization. Here, you bring your own authentication credentials to establish the connection.

On the other hand, custom connectors are used to integrate with third-party services that are not available as built-in connectors. You provide the required authentication details and have the flexibility to pick from basic authentication, API key, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0, bearer token, and AWS signature authentication methods.

Availability  

Currently, BYOC will be applicable to:
  1. All built-in connectors in Zoho Creator (C6)
  2. All built-in connectors on the Zoho Creator Developer platform
  3. In C5, only connectors that have Datasources support
BYOC for connections was rolled out on March 23, 2026 to users in all data centers.

This update does not affect existing connections, which will continue to work using the Quick Connect model, with platform-managed credentials.

Before we sign off, we're pleased to inform you that we plan to extend the BYOC capability to custom connectors in the next phase.

We hope you find this enhancement useful. Please start using it and let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

And if you have any questions or need clarification, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team; we're here to help.

Our team is working on many fascinating new features, and we'll be back soon with more updates!

Regards,
The Zoho Creator Team

    • Sticky Posts

    • Introducing Zoho Creator's 2025 Release Projection 2

      Hello Creators! I'm Prakash, from the Creator product management team, and today I'm delighted to unveil our next set of features as part of Release Projection 2 for 2025. With thoughtful analysis and planning, we've curated powerful new capabilities

    • Zoho Creator - 2023 Release Projection 1

      Hello everyone! A very Happy New Year to you and your family. Hope you're all good and having a great time using Zoho Creator to make your lives easier and your businesses prosper. 2022 was an action-packed year for us at Creator, and we hope to continue

    • Zoho Creator User Group meetups in a city near you! - Oct - Nov, 2023

      Greetings from the Zoho Creator team! We're hosting a series of Zoho Creator meetups in various cities across the globe, and we'd love to meet you there! Our meetups are a great opportunity to network with industry peers, exchange ideas and best practices,

    • Zoho Creator - 2023 Release Projection 2

      Hello everyone! Time truly flies when you're having an incredible journey, and today we mark the completion of an eventful and action-packed six months. It feels like just yesterday when we embarked on this adventure together with the launch of our new

    • Upcoming Updates - August 2022

      Hi all, Greetings from the Zoho Creator team! Today we've got news for you on some exciting updates. And rest assured— there’s more to come! In this post, we'll be going over the upcoming features and improvements for this month as mentioned below. A

      • Recent Topics

      • Client and Vendor portal at the same time

        We have companies that serve both as clients and vendors and they are linked. However, we have a problem giving them access to the vendor/client portal. If they accept the invitation from the client portal, when we try to invite them to the vendor portal

      • Integrate Multiple ZohoBooks organization with zoho projects

        We have successfully connected our Zoho Books with Zoho Projects for synronizing timesheet data. Our Business specialty is, that the staff of the Main company (A) is working on several projects, but the Clients are sometimes contracted and paying to a

      • Ways to calculate the difference form two years or months

        Hi to everyone I have this request: I need to show the difference or variation from two periods (years or months) whether using a Pivot View or a graph, in this is case is better in a Pivot view. In the pivot view I will have the amount or results from

      • Career site URL - Suggestion to modify URL of non-english job posting

        Hi, I would like to suggest making a few modification to career sites that are not in english. Currently, the URL are a mix of different languages and are very long. It makes for very unprofessional looking URLs... Here is an example of one of our URL

      • Cliq iOS can't see shared screen

        Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? Regards

      • Introducing Contract Settings & Backdated Contracts in Zoho Contracts

        We are rolling out updates that give you more control over how contracts are created and managed in Zoho Contracts. From defining default workflows with Contract Settings to aligning agreements with real timelines using Backdated Contracts, these enhancements

      • Celebrating our customers on International Client's Day

        Hi everyone, Every customer is part of our Zoho Desk family, and we wouldn’t want to miss celebrating you on this special day. This International Client's Day, we’d like to take a moment to appreciate every customer who has helped us grow and build meaningful

      • Zoho Books | Product updates | February 2026

        Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From Advanced Reporting Tags to the ability to mark projects as completed, explore the latest updates designed to improve your bookkeeping experience. Introducing Advanced Reporting

      • Faster Ticket Response with use of Snippets in comments

        Hello everyone, Responding to tickets often involves repeating the same messages, whether it is sharing updates with customers or leaving notes for internal collaboration. To make this easier and more consistent, we are allowing agents to use snippets

      • Improving Zoho Creator's email deliverability

        Hi all, We're pleased to announce updates to email handling in Zoho Creator to improve the deliverability of the emails sent from the Creator platform. These updates have been designed keeping in mind the fact that emails from domains with strong sender

      • What's New in Zoho Billing | February 2026

        February brings a powerful set of updates to Zoho Billing, from smarter subscription management and flexible payment options to better reporting and more control over your hosted pages. Here's everything that's new this February. Create Subscriptions

      • Reassign Partially Saved Entries

        Hi, I would like to be able to go to Partially Saved Entries and like the option to delete them I would like the option to multi-select and be able to reassign them to another user to complete (Such as when a user has left the company). Thanks Dan

      • Can we rely on order of returned ids when inserting multiple records?

        Hello! API https://www.zoho.com/crm/developer/docs/api/v8/insert-records.html does not mention that the response array will match the input array*, keeping this important information implicit and someone might have doubts to rely on it. (*the response

      • Displaying only unread tickets in ticket view

        Hello, I was wondering if someone might be able to help me with this one. We use filters to display our ticket list, typically using a saved filter which displays the tickets which are overdue or due today. What I'd really like is another filter that

      • What is a realistic turnaround time for account review for ZeptoMail?

        On signing up it said 2-3 business days. I am on business-day 6 and have had zero contact of any kind. No follow-up questions, no approval or decline. Attempts to "leave a message" or use the "Contact Us" form have just vanished without a trace. It still

      • Zoho Books: tax is not automatically pulled from product-data anymore - why?

        Hi, until a short time ago, you could set a default taxrate for each product/item. This taxrate automatically appeared each time the item was chosen in an invoice or quote. Why does this not work anymore? The field is still there at the product record,

      • Issue creating a YTD report with last years numbers

        I am looking to create a widget to compare the YTD leads we have in 2023 to the YTD leads we had in 2022. I'm having issues with the aggregate formula creation to gain access to the 2022 Leads YTD data point. Feeling like this is a common view of data

      • Brand Studio Projects in Analytics

        Hi All, Currently pulling my hair out over trying to link together some social media posts for a reporting dashboard in Analytics, so I thought I'd see if anyone on here had a solution. Our Marketing Team created a LinkedIn campaign in Zoho Brand Studio,

      • Manage Testing Process in Zoho Sprints

        Agile framework supports a robust quality assurance system that incorporates continuous testing throughout the development lifecycle of the product. The agile testing team focuses on planning the testing around the development, identifying defects early

      • Announcing the Zohotshots of the ZDC Hackathon 2025

        Hey everyone, The wait is finally over! After weeks of building, experimenting, and pushing creative boundaries, we’re excited to announce the winners of the second edition of the ZDC Hackathon. This edition brought together an incredible community of

      • ZOHO CRM Button Integration

        Hi Team, I’m currently working with Zoho CRM along with a custom application where I fetch deal details from the CRM and use them based on my requirements for each deal. Now, I want to enhance this setup. I plan to create a button on the Deal Detail page

      • Major journey crash and not loading. Zoho Marketing Automation

        Hi all. Last night (19MAR, 2026) Marketing Automation for a specific journey completely crashed, and since the crash the specific journey has failed to load at all (blank journey canvas, no journey appears, no menu accessible) but other separate journey's

      • Candidate Assessments, no workflows.

        I have an issue where I would like to trigger a workflow based on a candidate assessment being completed. Sometimes a returning candidate will complete a second assessment, on completion the status of the candidate will be updated to "Unqualified" if

      • Mail Merge in Zoho Desk

        Hello Team, Do we have an option of mail merge within Zoho Desk like we have in Zoho CRM? We have a requirement to generate some pdf file in the form of mail merge doc from the ticket.

      • Workdrive backup and default storage selection

        Hi community, I have been informed by Zoho that workdrive will be the default storage mechanism for crm and projects. These 2 Apps seem to have different design on how they interact with workdrive for storage. 1. Crm: seems to have files saves at the

      • Zoho vault filling in a form it's not supposed to fill in

        Hey there, I have a problem with ZOHO Vault autofill. In a software package, we have these options: For some reason zoho vault always replaces what's in the top option and fills a 2fa password in there, and then saves that value.. Meaning whatever was

      • Zoho Booking Integration with Desk

        Just wanting to share something in case it helps someone else who may run into a similar use case as we did. Issue: Currently, the Zoho Booking integration with desk will drop a comment into the ticket when a customer books a time, however it won't change

      • Let us view and export the full price books data from CRM

        I quote out of CRM, some of my clients have specialised pricing for specific products - therefore we use Price Books to manage these special prices. I can only see the breakdown of the products listed in the price book and the specialised pricing for

      • Syncing calendar with Google Calendar doesn't work when events are sent to auto repeat

        Hi... The ZOHO CRM -- GOOGLE CALENDAR sync is broken. If I create a single event on either side, sync works, but if I create an event with auto repeat on either side it doesn't work. Furthermore, events created before the sync don't show up in the calendar.

      • Organization wide Account and Contacts Visibility/Sharing Capabilities?

        Has anyone figured out a way to make visibility or sharing of Accounts and Contacts to be available across the entire organization without having to have every individual user edit their Sharing permissions? For our sales folks they need to be able to

      • Notification of Interaction Assignment

        If a user is assigned an interaction, they should be notified via email. These are almost useless because if I assign an interaction for someone to respond to, they dont know that I assigned it to them without me telling them or them logging in and discovering

      • Countries List Global Set- Complete with Phone Country Code and Continent.

        Dear Zoho Team I saw your recent addition to the Global Sets regarding the Countries list and states. While working on it, why didn't you also add things like Continent and Phone Country Code? Also, some ISO codes from some Countries/regions are mis

      • Custom Display Field for Lookup Dropdowns in Zoho CRM

        Could Zoho CRM support changing the display field in lookup dropdowns, like Zoho Creator does? This would make it much easier to select the right record by showing a more useful field instead of only the default one. It would improve speed, clarity, and

      • Message as bot

        I would like to be able to send a Cliq message truly as a bot. the current implementation of this function, while it sends the message as a bot it sends that message inside a chat from the user how authenticated the flow cliq connection instead of directly

      • Books <-> CRM synchronisation with custom Fields

        Hello, We are synchronising Books Customers with CRM Accounts. In CRM Accounts I set up last year a "segments" multiselect field shown below In Books, I set up a custom multi-select field with the same value as in the CRM And set up the synchronisation inside Books. Want to synchronise the Books Segments with the CRM Segments, but the later doesn't exist, and another non-existing is there ?! First, I don't understand where the field Segmentation is coming from. Second, I set CRM Segmentation to sync

      • Trouble with using Apostrophe in Name of Customers and Vendors

        We have had an ongoing issue with how the system recognizes an apostrophe in the name of customers and vendors. The search will not return any results for a name that includes the mark; ie one of our vendors names is "L'Heritage" and when entering the

      • Recording overpayment?

        So a customer just overpaid me and how do I record this? I can't enter an amount that is higher than the invoice amount. Eg. Invoice is $195 and he sent $200. He's a reccuring customer so is there a way to record so that he has a $5 advance for future invoice?

      • Introducing the New Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin

        We are thrilled to announce the new Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin, the upgraded and enhanced version of the Zoho Assist Customer Plugin. This new plugin allows organizations and IT administrators to deploy it directly onto their customers’ devices,

      • Automate your signing workflows with Zoho Sign + n8n

        Hello! We're excited to announce that Zoho Sign is now available as a community node on n8n, a popular open-source workflow automation platform used by tens of thousands of teams worldwide. n8n lets you connect apps, APIs, and services through a visual

      • Ask the Experts 27: Onboarding and managing support reps

        Hello everyone, We are back with our Ask the Experts (ATE) series for 2026. This year, we bring experts to help you address customer support challenges using Zoho Desk. For our first ATE, we are getting into the human side of customer support. "Every

      • Next Page