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