Real-time syncing

Some integrations require fast syncing—whether it's reflecting changes from an external system into your app instantly. This can be challenging from an infrastructure perspective, requiring complex and robust bespoke solutions.

With Nango, you get a suite of tools and infrastructure to support real-time and near real-time syncing out of the box, without the need to build and maintain complex infrastructure yourself.

Webhooks vs. fast polling

Real-time syncing requires webhooks, where external systems push updates to your app as they happen. Fast polling only allows near real-time syncing, fetching changes at high frequency while minimizing unnecessary data transfer.

Real-time: webhooks

Nango supports external API webhooks, which can be used in two ways:

1. Webhook forwarding: Directly listen to webhooks from external APIs to react to events
2. Webhooks with polling: Since webhooks can be unreliable or incomplete, they can be paired with occasional polling to correct any inconsistencies. Nango natively supports these webhook + polling syncing processes with merge strategies to ensure data consistency.

Near real-time: fast polling

For use cases where webhooks aren’t available or reliable, Nango provides high-frequency polling with optimizations:

• Fast polling down to 30-second intervals, ensuring timely updates.
• Incremental syncing, so only new or changed data is fetched.
• Sync partitioning, breaking large datasets into smaller segments for faster and independent processing.

How to use real-time syncing

Setting up real-time syncing with Nango is straightforward. Check out our documentation:

• Real-time syncing with webhooks: Guide

Other resources

• Overview of syncing data with Nango: Guide
• Sync large datasets: Guide
• Sync partitioning: Guide

Real-time syncing is essential for many modern applications, and with Nango, you can implement it reliably and efficiently without the usual complexity. Let us know how you’re using it—we’d love to hear your feedback!