Organising Tools Into Branded Connector Groups

Macha's tool groups fix this by letting you organise custom API tools under named connectors — each with its own custom icon and brand colour — that sit on your connectors page right alongside native integrations like Zendesk, Shopify, and Stripe. Instead of a flat heap of endpoints, you get tidy, recognisable connectors: "Returns Service" in your brand teal, "Loyalty API" with the loyalty logo, "Internal Orders" in your company purple. This post walks through how it works, when the AI builder does the grouping for you, and where the feature has rough edges worth knowing about.

A quick framing note: Macha is the AI agent layer that sits on top of the helpdesk you already run (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front). Custom API tools and connector groups are how you extend those agents to reach systems Macha doesn't have a native integration for — your own backend, a niche SaaS, an internal microservice.

What a connector group actually is

In Macha, a connector is the unit you see on the connectors page. Native integrations — Zendesk, Stripe, Notion, Shopify, Google Workspace and the rest — each show up as one connector tile, and clicking in reveals the individual tools (search tickets, create a charge, read a page) that integration provides.

A tool group makes your custom API tools behave exactly the same way. Rather than every endpoint floating loose, you bundle related tools under one named connector with:

• a name (e.g. "Returns Service")
• a custom icon (an emoji or uploaded logo)
• a brand colour

That connector then renders on the connectors page next to the native ones, and the tools inside it are assignable to agents identically to native tools. The grouping is purely organisational — it doesn't change what a tool does or how it authenticates — but at any real scale, organisation is the difference between a tool library you can reason about and one you're afraid to touch.

This shipped in the April 9, 2026 release, alongside the broader Custom API Tools and AI Tool Builder work: "Tool groups — Organize tools under named connectors with custom icons and brand colors. Groups appear on the connectors page."

Why grouping matters more than it sounds

Grouping looks cosmetic until you're the third person to inherit an agent configuration. Here's what the named-connector model buys you in practice:

• Findability. When you're assigning tools to an agent, you scan by connector ("everything under Loyalty API") instead of hunting individual endpoint names. Branded icons and colours make a connector recognisable at a glance — the same reason your IDE colour-codes file types.
• Mental model = source system. Tools are most useful when they map to the system they call. Grouping them under "Internal Orders" tells the next engineer (and the next agent-builder) exactly which backend a tool touches, without reading the URL.
• Cleaner agent configs. An agent that needs your returns flow gets the "Returns Service" tools as a coherent set. Reviewing what an agent can do becomes a connector-level question, not a forensic audit of twenty tool names.
• It scales. Twenty loose tools is unreadable. Twenty tools across four branded connectors is four things you can hold in your head.

This is the same problem the wider integration-platform market is trying to solve — Composio, StackOne, Paragon and Nango all organise their hundreds of pre-built connectors into browsable catalogs. Macha's angle is narrower and more practical for a support team: the connector you build lives inside the same connectors page as your real integrations, not in a separate developer catalog. Your custom "Returns Service" sits next to Zendesk, and an agent treats both the same way.

Creating a group: the manual path

You can build a connector group by hand when you want full control. The flow, end to end:

1. Define the tool. In the custom tools area, create a tool by pointing it at a REST endpoint — pick the HTTP method (GET/POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE), set URL parameters and a body template, and choose authentication: API key, bearer token, or basic auth. Credentials are encrypted at rest.
2. Assign it to a connector group. Give the group a name, an icon, and a brand colour — or drop the tool into a group you already created. New tools for the same system go into the same connector.
3. Test before you ship. Macha has built-in testing: fire a real request at the endpoint from the tool editor and confirm the auth and response shape before any agent touches it.
4. Assign to agents. The grouped tools now appear in the agent tool picker under their connector, ready to attach.

One safety default worth calling out: write methods are flagged automatically. Any POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE tool is marked as a write operation requiring confirmation, so an agent can't silently mutate your system on a whim. That behaviour is independent of grouping — but it means a connector full of write tools is governed the same careful way whether you grouped it or not.

Creating a group: let the AI Tool Builder do it

The faster path is to not draw the boxes yourself. The AI Tool Builder (shipped March 30, refined April 9) takes a description of the API you want to connect, you paste credentials, and it discovers endpoints, tests them, and creates the tools automatically. Critically, it auto-groups them: "Tools are automatically grouped under a named connector with emoji icon and brand color."

So when you describe, say, your shipping provider's API, Macha doesn't dump six loose tools into your list — it stands up a single named connector with a sensible emoji and colour and files the tools underneath. Auth captured from a successful test request gets applied to every tool in the session, and write-method endpoints are auto-marked for confirmation. You arrive at an organised, branded connector without manually setting up the group at all.

In practice the AI builder gets you 90% of the way and you tidy the last 10% — rename the connector to match your internal vocabulary, swap the auto-chosen emoji for your real logo, nudge the colour. That edit-after model is the right one: let the machine do the discovery grind, keep human judgement on the labels people will actually read.

Assigning grouped tools to agents

Grouping pays off most at assignment time. When you open an agent's tool picker, custom connectors appear alongside native ones, and you pick tools by connector. An agent that handles returns gets the Returns Service connector's tools as a set; a WISMO ("where is my order") agent gets your Internal Orders tools. The agent then calls them exactly as it calls a native Zendesk or Shopify tool — the grouping is invisible at runtime and purely about how you manage the surface area.

Because grouped custom tools are first-class, everything else in Macha treats them normally: they stream as tool cards in autonomous conversations (with success/error results), they show in the "Tools Used" popup on saved messages, and they respect the same write-confirmation guardrails. A branded connector isn't a second-class citizen — it's a native integration you happened to build yourself. If you're new to wiring agents to systems, the custom tools docs cover the full setup.

Watch-outs and when not to bother

Connector groups are low-risk, but a few honest caveats:

• Grouping is organisation, not isolation. Putting tools in a connector doesn't sandbox their permissions or credentials — it's a label and a visual bucket. Security still lives at the tool level (the auth you configured) and the agent level (which tools you assigned, and the write-confirmation gate). Don't treat a connector boundary as a permission boundary.
• The AI builder's naming is a starting point. Auto-chosen emojis and colours are fine defaults, but they're guesses. If three connectors all land on a generic gear emoji, the visual benefit evaporates — take the ten seconds to differentiate them.
• Custom tools are a paid-plan feature, with limits. Custom API tools and the AI Tool Builder live on Macha's Professional and Enterprise plans, and there's a cap on how many custom tools you can create per plan (more on Enterprise). If your whole workflow runs on native integrations, you may never need a custom connector at all — see the pricing page for current limits.
• Don't over-group. If you have three custom tools total, one connector is plenty; four connectors of one tool each is just clutter with extra clicks. Grouping earns its keep once a system genuinely owns several endpoints.

The honest summary: this is a quality-of-life feature, not a capability unlock. It doesn't make your agents able to do anything new — it makes the things they can do legible to the humans maintaining them. For a one-person setup that's a nicety; for a team that inherits each other's agents, it's the difference between a maintainable system and a write-only one.

Where it fits in the bigger picture

Connector groups are the tidy front end of a deeper capability: turning any REST API into agent tools without writing an integration from scratch. The native integrations cover the common commerce, knowledge, and comms systems; custom API tools cover everything else; and branded connector groups make your custom work indistinguishable — visually and operationally — from the native stuff. The result is a single connectors page that honestly represents your whole agent surface area, native and bespoke alike.

If you've been putting off connecting an internal system because you dreaded the resulting tool sprawl, this is the feature that removes the excuse.

FAQ

What is a tool group in Macha? A tool group is a named connector that bundles your custom API tools under one tile — with a custom icon and brand colour — on the connectors page, so they're organised exactly like native integrations.

Do I have to create groups manually? No. The AI Tool Builder auto-groups tools it creates under a named connector with an emoji icon and brand colour. You can rename, re-icon, and recolour afterwards, or build groups by hand for full control.

Does grouping change what a tool can do or how it's secured? No. Grouping is organisational. Authentication is configured per tool (API key, bearer token, or basic auth, encrypted at rest), and write operations (POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE) still require confirmation regardless of which connector they sit in.

Can agents use grouped custom tools the same as native ones? Yes. Grouped custom tools appear in the agent tool picker alongside native integration tools and are called identically at runtime.

Which plans include custom API tools and connector groups? Custom API tools and the AI Tool Builder are on Macha's Professional and Enterprise plans, with a per-plan cap on the number of custom tools. See the pricing page for current limits.

Try it

If your agents need to reach a system Macha doesn't natively integrate, build the tools, group them under a branded connector, and they'll sit right next to Zendesk and Shopify on your connectors page. Start a 7-day free trial, no credit card required, or read more on the custom API tools page and the blog for related deep-dives.

Written by Abbas (Customer Support & AI, Macha) · Reviewed by Ankeet Guha (Co-founder & CTO) · Published 2026-06-24 · Last updated 2026-06-24.