Month: August 2022

Integrations help you build usability and scalability in your SaaS product. Building connections to other platforms allows you to be a part of your users stack.

However, identifying the platforms you want your SaaS to be connected to can be a long process.

Since Pathfix allows SaaS platform builders to connect to multiple providers, we wanted to share the top 5 productivity tools builders connect to.

What is a Productivity Software?

Productivity softwares help you work more efficiently by managing parts of your daily activities and handle daily tasks effectively.

Here are the top 5 productivity software’s you should integrate with in 2020:

Slack

Slack had around ten million daily active users and 85,000 paid organization users as of January 2019.

Slack brings team communication and collaboration into one place so you can get more work done. The first choice for team collaboration and communication, Slack is the top choice to build integrations.

G-Suite

G Suite had 4 million paying businesses, and 70 million G Suite for Education users as of January 2017.

G Suite is a suite of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed by Google Cloud. With 4 million+ businesses, G Suite is one of the most commonly used productivity tools which include Docs, Sheets, Forms and Slides.

Trello

Trello has 50 million registered users as of October 2019

Trello is a very popular visual list making application that focuses on team collaboration with its boards, lists, and cards. Trello boards are used anywhere from managing daily activities to product roadmap.

Google Calendar

Google calendar has over 500 million installs as of February 2017

Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. Google calendar is the default calendar option for most users globally as it is available for free with every Gmail account (personal) and G Suite account (business). This makes it the top choice for any calendar related integration.

Intercom

As of February 2017, Intercom has 100,000 monthly active users. As of October 2018, Intercom has 30,000 paying customers.

Intercom is a message-based communication platform that allows businesses to communicate with customers/users within their website, application, social media or email.

Integrate with Pathfix

Pathfix allows you to connect to these productivity apps and more in less than 5 minutes without managing any servers or SDK’s. Check it out here.

We have been receiving a few requests to support providers that are largely mobile/native apps and offer their authentication process using the OAuth PKCE flow.

We’re happy to announce that Pathfix now support OAuth with PKCE 🙂

Let’s break down what is OAuth with PKCE and why is this important to you.

What is PKCE and how is it different from OAuth flow?

PKCE stands for Proof Key for Code Exchange. The OAuth 2 and 1.0 flow authorizes an app using ClientID and Client Secret, exchanging the Secret for tokens that it uses to validate a user connection.

A PKCE flow is an authorization flow that offers a code challenge and code verifier method to authenticate in addition to the ClientSecret.

This authorization method is adopted by some SaaS platforms (providers) that choose to offer PKCE as their preferred approach.

How does it work?

The application would need to create a code verifier that it would hash and encode as a challenge at the initial authorization stage. Once the authorization is initiated, the challenge is exchanged for an access token along with the unhashed code verifier.

What does this mean?

Pathfix can now support providers that offer only OAuth PKCE method of authentication. This opens up a whole category of providers that you can add integrations to.

As our first provider, we now offer support for Twitter OAuth 2.0 with PKCE (Twitter’s 1.0 is still available using the OAuth method and is currently supported by Pathfix).

Here is a look at the Twitter OAuth 2.0 PKCE flow that Pathfix handles:

Image source: Twitter

If you are looking to add integrations to a provider that offer the PKCE flow, drop us a line and let us know!