Zoho Creator has shipped more in the last four months than many platforms ship in a year: a fourth solution type for RPA, passkey and mobile-OTP sign-in for portals, a rebuilt portal page builder, forecasting in AutoML, and a fast-growing set of MCP actions that let AI tools build apps for you.
If you built your Creator apps a year ago and haven't looked at the release notes since, you're probably leaving value on the table. This is our plain-English roundup of the most important Zoho Creator updates from June to September 2026, and what each one means for a real business in the UAE or India.
The headline: Creator is no longer just a low-code app builder. It is becoming a platform for apps, analytics, integrations, RPA and AI agents in one place.
1. RPA Flows: The Fourth Solution Type (July 2026)
Creator now has four solution types: Applications, BI & Analytics, Integration Flows, and the new RPA Flows. RPA (robotic process automation) is designed to automate legacy systems that have no API, such as an old desktop accounting package or a government portal your team keeps re-typing data into.
✅ Why it matters
Until now, "no API" usually meant "no automation". With RPA sitting alongside your apps and integrations, even the stubborn legacy system in the corner of your business can join the workflow.
2. AI Gets More Flexible: Bring Your Own Key (July 2026)
Zia AI configuration in Creator now lets you assign a different LLM provider to each AI feature and add up to 5 API keys per provider (bring-your-own-key). Alongside this, Creator's query suggestions in BI & Analytics ("Ask Zia") now run on Zoho's own hosted LLM, keeping that processing inside the Zoho environment.
- Use one model for summarisation and another for data extraction, depending on cost and quality.
- Spread usage across multiple keys to avoid hitting a single key's limits.
- Keep sensitive analytics processing on Zoho-hosted infrastructure.
We cover this in more depth in our companion article, Building AI-Powered Business Apps in Zoho Creator.
3. MCP Actions: Let AI Tools Build and Manage Your Apps (July and September 2026)
Creator's MCP (Model Context Protocol) support keeps expanding. In July, additional actions arrived for app lifecycle management, usage monitoring and chat-agent interaction. On September 23, support widened again so that generative-AI tools can build and manage app structures directly, with actions such as createApp, createForm, createField and createButton.
In June, BI & Analytics was also made discoverable in Zoho MCP, and a native Claude connector was added so you can query your analytics workspaces and pull insights from inside Claude.
✅ What this means in practice
Describe an internal tool in plain language, let an AI assistant scaffold the forms and fields, and then have a Creator specialist review, secure and refine it. Prototyping time drops from days to hours.
4. Portals: Passkeys, Mobile OTP, Social Sign-In and a New Page Builder
Customer, vendor and partner portals are one of Creator's most popular use cases, and they received a lot of attention this quarter:
- New Portal Page Builder (June): templates, AI-assisted customisation through Zia, responsive stack containers and support for pre-login pages.
- Passkey support (July): portal users can sign in with fingerprint or face recognition through their device or browser password manager, across Android, iOS, macOS and Windows.
- White-label social sign-in (August): Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft sign-in for white-label portals via a new Sign-in Methods tab.
- Mobile-number sign-in with OTP (September): portal users can register and sign in with a mobile number and one-time password. SMS templates are supported for Indian (+91) numbers.
For businesses that give customers or suppliers a login, this means fewer forgotten passwords, faster onboarding and a more modern, branded experience.
5. Smarter Analytics: Forecasting, Backup and Staged Deployments
- Time-series forecasting in AutoML (July): predict demand, sales and revenue patterns without writing code.
- Forecasting in pivot views and PMML model import (July): see history and projections side by side, and reuse models trained elsewhere.
- Workspace backup and restore (June): scheduled backups with a 15-day undo window.
- PDF import (June): pull tabular data straight from PDF files into analytics.
- Deployment management (August): Dev, Test and Production stages for analytics workspaces, promoting metadata only so live data stays untouched.
- Advanced Metrics (June): feature-level usage insights showing how people actually use your forms, reports and pages.
6. Developer and Admin Improvements
Deluge scripting
- throw statement (Aug) for raising custom errors
- toWords() now supports Arabic (Aug)
- Bulk Insert APIs (Jul) for large record volumes
Forms, fields and data
- Formula field type property (Jul)
- File-type restrictions on upload fields (Jul)
- Better lookup search ranking (Aug)
Administration
- Granular data-source permissions for custom roles (Aug)
- Multilevel workspace subfolders (Aug)
- Bulk transfer/delete of connections (Jul)
Communication and languages
- Email channels: Creator built-in, ZeptoMail, Outlook, Gmail, custom SMTP (Jun)
- 17 admin languages, now including Hebrew, Russian and Turkish (Sep)
- Calendar report default-date URL parameters (Sep)
What Should You Do With All This?
You don't need to adopt every feature. A sensible order for most businesses:
- Review your portals. Turn on passkeys or mobile OTP where they fit. It is a quick win for adoption and security.
- Tighten permissions and backups. Use the new custom-role data-source permissions and analytics backups.
- Pick one AI use case. Document summarisation, data extraction or a forecast is enough to start.
- List your "no-API" systems. These are the candidates for RPA Flows.
- Try MCP-assisted prototyping on your next internal tool, with a human review before go-live.
How Nurture Spark Can Help
As a Zoho Premium Partner in the UAE, Nurture Spark audits existing Creator apps against the latest release, enables the features that pay off for your business, and builds new solutions that take advantage of them, from secure customer portals to AI-assisted workflows and forecasting dashboards.
Not sure which new Creator features are relevant to your business? We'll run a free release-readiness review of your current setup.
Source: Zoho Creator official release notes (zoho.com/creator/release-notes), June to September 2026. Features and availability can vary by plan and data centre, so always confirm in your own Creator account.