# Nylas Is the API Layer. Cotera Is the Agent on Top of It.

> Nylas connects agents to email and calendar through one API. Cotera is the agent itself, with 144 tool integrations and email as a trigger. Compare both.

Source: https://cotera.co/nylas-vs-cotera

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Nylas normalizes email and calendar across providers so developers can build on one integration. Cotera is what you would have built on top: an agent you create once and reuse across Slack, schedules, and webhooks, with email as simply another way to interact with it.

## Cotera vs Nylas
| | Cotera | Nylas |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Agents get their own email address | Yes | Yes |
| Inbound email starts a run | Yes | Webhook, you write the handler |
| The agent itself is included | Yes | No |
| Built-in tool integrations | 144 | Email, calendar, contacts |
| Multi-step reasoning and tool chaining | Yes | No |
| Durable execution that survives restarts | Yes | No |
| Build it without writing code | Yes | No |
| Schedule and webhook triggers too | Yes | No |
| Runs against your data warehouse | Yes | No |
| Connects to a human’s existing Gmail or Outlook | Yes | Yes |
| Calendar, scheduling, and RSVP handling | Via connected tools | Yes |
| Stored mailbox with folders and search | No | Yes |
| IMAP access | No | Yes |
| Custom sending domains with DKIM, SPF, DMARC | No | Yes |
| HIPAA and ISO 27001 certified | No | Yes |

## FAQ
### Is Cotera a Nylas alternative?

They solve adjacent problems. Nylas is a unified API for communication data: one integration that reaches Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Exchange, and IMAP for email, calendar, and contacts, and more recently Agent Accounts that give an agent its own email and calendar identity. It is infrastructure for developers building an application. Cotera is the application. The agent, its reasoning, and its 144 tool integrations are what you buy, and you build that agent once and reuse it across Slack, schedules, and webhooks, with email as another way to interact with it. If you are building a product that needs to read a user’s mailbox, Nylas is the right layer. If you want agents doing work, Cotera is.

### Can Cotera read my team’s Gmail or Outlook?

Yes, through the Gmail and Microsoft Outlook integrations, which is roughly the job Nylas does with its unified API — with the difference that Cotera consumes those connections itself rather than exposing them to you as an API. Cotera also has a second path Nylas does not: an email trigger that mints a dedicated address, so mail forwarded to it starts a workflow run without touching anyone’s personal inbox.

### What does Nylas do that Cotera does not?

Quite a lot at the infrastructure layer. Nylas normalizes email, calendar, and contacts across six providers behind one API, which is a genuinely hard problem you would not want to solve twice. Agent Accounts provision a full mailbox with folders, search, IMAP, and a calendar that handles scheduling and RSVPs, on a custom domain with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC configured. It also carries HIPAA, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701 certifications on top of SOC 2. Cotera mints a trigger address rather than a mailbox, handles calendars through connected tools rather than natively, and does not resell an email API.

### Which one do I need if I am not building a product?

Cotera, most likely. Nylas is priced and shaped for engineering teams embedding communication features into software they ship. If the goal is that forwarded leads get enriched and written to the CRM, or that a bug report becomes a triaged Linear issue, you do not need a unified communications API for that — you need the agent, and an address to send things to.

### Can I use both together?

Yes. Nylas is a sensible choice for the parts of your own product that need deep mailbox and calendar access across providers, while Cotera handles the internal automations that just need an agent and a trigger. They sit at different layers, so the overlap is smaller than the category name suggests.