Zoho Catalyst

Zoho Catalyst is a full-stack cloud development platform from Zoho Corporation that bundles frontend hosting, backend services, AI/ML tools, serverless compute and DevOps tooling. Zoho positions it as "agent-ready", with agent skills, MCP connectors and plugins meant to help AI coding agents provision infrastructure and deploy apps on the platform. Catalyst was launched in 2021 as a serverless platform and, per Zoho's company timeline, evolved into Catalyst 2.0 in 2023.

What It Is

Catalyst is a pro-code cloud platform for building apps, microservices, integration layers, dashboards and AI-powered applications in one place. Developers can write functions, use managed data and file storage, host web clients, and add authentication, mail and push notifications through SDKs, a CLI and a REST API. Supported languages shown include Java, Python, Node.js, JavaScript, Swift and Kotlin.

Services in the Platform

The homepage and features pages describe services across several layers:

• Frontend: Slate for deploying front-ends and vibe-coded apps (Lovable, Bolt and Claude apps are named).
• Backend: CloudScale (BaaS), Stratus object storage, Signals event bus, NoSQL, AppSail (managed PaaS with custom runtimes), and Functions (basic I/O, advanced I/O, event, cron and integration functions) plus Circuits for workflow orchestration.
• AI/ML: QuickML no-code ML platform (prediction models, RAG pipelines, LLM serving), ConvoKraft chatbot builder, and Zia Services such as OCR, object detection, face analytics, image moderation, barcode scanning and text analytics.
• Automation: SmartBrowz headless Chrome for browser automation, testing, scraping and bulk PDF generation.
• DevOps: logs, metrics, APM, automation testing and CI/CD Pipelines.

Agent-Ready Workflow

Catalyst offers Agent Skills, MCP connectors, and Claude and Codex plugins. The site lists compatibility with Claude, Cursor, Antigravity, Codex and GitHub Copilot. Zoho states that agents log in with their own configurable permission set, destructive commands are disabled in non-interactive mode, and application logs, platform logs and MCP tool-call logs form an audit trail. Changes after launch are described as versioned and reversible.

Developer Tooling

Tooling includes the Catalyst CLI, SDKs for Java, Node.js, Python, Web, Android, iOS and Flutter, a VS Code extension, Maven tools, a REST API and an OpenAI integration.