Nylas: Email, Calendar and Agent Accounts APIs, Explained
Nylas is an API company that lets software read and send email, manage calendars and record meetings across every major provider. Instead of building separate integrations for Gmail, Microsoft 365, Exchange and IMAP, a developer connects once to Nylas and gets one consistent API for all of them. More recently it added Agent Accounts, which give an AI agent its own inbox and calendar rather than borrowing a person’s. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, it’s one of the longest-running companies in this space.
The quick answer: Nylas is the established choice when your product needs to work inside your users’ existing email and calendars, and it brings mature compliance (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and 27701). Agent Accounts extend that to agents with their own identity, calendar included. The main thing to plan for is Google: reading Gmail data requires Google’s verification process, and Nylas’s shortcut for it sits on higher plans. A disclosure: we make Carly, which works across people’s Gmail and Outlook accounts, and CarlyEmail, which gives agents inboxes. Both overlap with parts of Nylas, so we’ve stuck to facts from Nylas’s own pages.
Nylas at a glance
Checked against Nylas’s site, pricing and product pages on November 12, 2026.
| Nylas | |
|---|---|
| What it is | Unified APIs for email, contacts, calendars, scheduling and meeting recording, plus inboxes for AI agents |
| Providers | Gmail and Google Workspace, Microsoft Graph, Exchange and any IMAP server |
| Founded | 2013, San Francisco |
| Funding | $120 million Series C in 2021, led by Tiger Global, for $175 million in total |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 |
| Plans | Free, Essentials, Pro and Enterprise, each including every product |
| Developer access | REST API, SDKs including Node.js, Python, Ruby and Kotlin, an MCP server |
| Best for | SaaS products that sync with their users’ email and calendars, and agents that need email plus a calendar |
What Nylas does
Nylas sells four products, and every plan includes all of them.
Email and Contacts API. Send, receive, thread and parse email “across Gmail, Microsoft Graph, Exchange, and any IMAP server,” in Nylas’s words, with “one normalized JSON schema, zero provider-specific branches.” This is the product most companies know Nylas for. A CRM uses it to log a salesperson’s email, or an applicant-tracking system to send interview emails from a recruiter’s own inbox.
Calendar API and Scheduler. Read and write events across providers, check real-time availability and embed a white-label booking page in your own product.
Notetaker API. A meeting bot that joins calls, transcribes them and extracts structured data. Plans meter it in “bot hours.”
Agent Accounts. The newest product, now generally available, and the one most relevant to anyone building AI agents. It gets its own section below.
Nylas sells into sales and CRM, recruiting, healthcare, financial services, legal, real estate, education and field services. On its homepage it describes itself as “the data layer behind every communication workflow, human or AI.”
How connecting users works
The core idea is a “grant.” When one of your users connects their mailbox, through Google or Microsoft sign-in, Nylas creates a grant, and your code uses that grant’s ID to read and send on their behalf. The same code works whether the user is on Gmail, Outlook or a company IMAP server, which is the whole point. Nylas’s homepage example sends an email in a few lines, and its docs promise a “first send in five minutes.”
Nylas’s API v3, launched in February 2024, is the current version. Nylas also recently added identity and access controls that limit what each API key can do and where.
Agent Accounts: an inbox and calendar for an AI agent
Most AI agents that handle email today act through a person’s inbox. Nylas’s Agent Accounts take a different approach: “Your AI Agent’s own mailbox. Not a borrowed one.” Each agent gets an address on your own domain, such as sales@yourco.com, plus a calendar, created with one API call and hosted by Nylas.
For teams already on Nylas, the appeal is continuity: “Same Nylas API your team already uses. Same grant_id. Zero new endpoints.” An Agent Account works with every other Nylas endpoint, so an agent can send email, read replies, check availability and book a meeting from one identity.
The feature list:
- Email and calendar together. Read calendars, propose times, send invitations and handle RSVPs from the same account that sends the email.
- Folders, labels and search, so the agent can file and find mail like a person would.
- IMAP access, so any tool that speaks IMAP can connect.
- Guardrails: rate limits, allowlists and send quotas to “keep a misbehaving agent from torching your domain reputation,” plus inbound spam filtering so junk doesn’t fill the agent’s context window.
- Your own domain, with Nylas writing the MX records and setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- Python and TypeScript SDKs and an MCP server that Nylas says works with Claude Code, Cursor and more than 40 coding agents.
- Organizations, so you can run dozens of agent identities under one set of policies.
Agent Accounts inherit Nylas’s compliance certifications, which matters for teams in healthcare or finance who need an agent’s inbox to meet the same standards as the rest of their stack.
Plans
Nylas’s pricing page bundles everything into four plans.
| Plan | Price | Connected user accounts | Agent Accounts | Agent emails a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5 | 3 | 3,000 |
| Essentials | $15/month | 10, plus 10 calendar-only | 10 | 10,000 |
| Pro | $49/month, or $43 a month billed annually | 25, plus 35 calendar-only | 50 | 50,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Each plan also includes Notetaker bot hours, storage and custom sending domains, and usage above the included amounts is billed per account, hour or thousand emails. Essentials includes one custom sending domain, and Pro includes 10 on monthly billing or 20 on annual.
The Google question
If your users connect Gmail, there’s a step to plan for. Google requires apps that access email, calendar and other sensitive or restricted data through its APIs to complete OAuth verification, and Nylas has written about the annual security assessment that comes with it.
Nylas offers two ways through. You can register and verify your own Google app, which Nylas helps with through its Express Security Review. Or you can use Nylas’s shared Google OAuth app, which comes with its Accelerator Package. That add-on is available only on Pro Annual plans or included in Enterprise contracts. It isn’t offered on Free, Essentials or Pro Monthly.
That catches some teams off guard. One Trustpilot reviewer wrote in May 2026: “Thought you could use this for Google Auth connection. Turns out you need the enterprise plan for that.” If Gmail users matter to your product, decide early which route you’ll take, because Google’s verification takes time to complete.
Agent Accounts are separate: they live on Nylas’s own mail infrastructure under your domain, so they don’t depend on Google sign-in.
Company background
Nylas was founded in 2013 by Gleb Polyakov, Christine Spang and Michael Grinich. In June 2021, it raised a $120 million Series C led by Tiger Global Management, according to Built In, with 8VC, Citi Ventures, Slack Fund and others joining. Angel investors included Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Nest founder Tony Fadell. At the time, Nylas had 154 employees and offices in San Francisco, Denver, Toronto, New York, London and Amsterdam.
Nylas also publishes research on agents, including a 2026 report it promotes with the finding that “54% of teams report an AI agent error in the past 90 days.”
How Nylas compares
Nylas competes in two different races, and it’s worth separating them.
For connecting users’ existing mailboxes and calendars, Nylas is one of the most established options. The main alternative is building directly on the Gmail and Microsoft Graph APIs yourself, which means two integrations, two sets of edge cases and Google’s verification either way.
For agent inboxes, Agent Accounts compete with services built only for that job. AgentMail, OpenMail, AgentEmail and our own CarlyEmail all give agents addresses through an API, and Inkbox adds phone numbers and iMessage. Nylas’s advantages there are the built-in calendar, the compliance certifications and the fact that agent and human mailboxes share one API.
CarlyEmail, which we make, is narrower and more focused. It’s built only around agent inboxes: an MCP server with 33 tools that people can add as a connector in Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity or Grok, an agent that can sign itself up, signed webhooks and WebSockets for new mail, and no daily send cap on paid plans. If your agent needs a calendar and enterprise certifications, Nylas covers more. If it mostly needs a dependable inbox it can set up itself, CarlyEmail is the simpler fit.
Who Nylas suits
Nylas is a strong fit if:
- You’re building a product, such as a CRM, recruiting tool or scheduling app, that needs to work inside your users’ Gmail, Outlook or Exchange accounts.
- Your agents need email and a calendar under one identity.
- You need SOC 2, HIPAA or ISO certifications from your email provider.
Look elsewhere if:
- You only need inboxes for agents, and a calendar and enterprise features would go unused.
- Your users are on Gmail and you can’t take on Google’s verification or a higher plan for the shared app.
- You’re not building software at all. If you want an assistant that works across your own Gmail and Outlook accounts, Carly does that directly, from inside ChatGPT or Claude, without an API.
FAQ
What is Nylas used for?
Developers use Nylas to add email, calendar, contacts, scheduling and meeting recording to their products through one API that works across Gmail, Microsoft 365, Exchange and IMAP. It also offers Agent Accounts, which give AI agents their own inbox and calendar.
Does Nylas have a free plan?
Yes. The free plan includes 5 connected email and calendar accounts, 5 Notetaker bot hours and 3 Agent Accounts with 3,000 agent emails a month.
What are Nylas Agent Accounts?
Agent Accounts give an AI agent its own email address and calendar, hosted by Nylas on your domain and created with one API call. They use the same API and grant ID as the rest of Nylas.
Is Nylas SOC 2 compliant?
Nylas says its platform is SOC 2 Type II certified and supports HIPAA, ISO 27001 and ISO 27701, and that Agent Accounts inherit those certifications.
Do I need Google verification to use Nylas with Gmail?
If you use your own Google app, yes. Google requires verification and a security assessment for apps that access Gmail data. Nylas’s shared Google OAuth app, which avoids running your own, is available through its Accelerator Package on Pro Annual or Enterprise plans.
Who founded Nylas?
Nylas was founded in 2013 by Gleb Polyakov, Christine Spang and Michael Grinich, and is based in San Francisco.
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