Scalar

How PAR Technology Corporation Enhanced Its Developer Experience With Scalar: a Modern, Open Standards API Management Platform

Overview

PAR Technology Corporation (“PAR”), partech.com, a global provider of software and solutions for restaurant and retail brands, maintains a unified developer experience through its public-facing PAR Developer Portal, where developers and partners can access documentation and related technical resources for various PAR APIs.

In 2025, PAR set out to modernize the foundation of this portal to ensure long-term reliability, improve the developer journey, and align with open, future-proof API standards. As part of this initiative, the PAR Product Operations organization evaluated a range of modern documentation and API-forward platforms.

Ultimately, PAR selected Scalar, scalar.com, as the best aligned partner with its long-term developer experience strategy.

A PAR point-of-sale terminal displaying the PAR logo and a partner symbol on its screen

Why PAR Pursued a Platform Update

The PAR Developer Portal serves as the main hub for partners integrating with the PAR Punchh Loyalty platform, including Online Ordering, POS, Mobile APIs, and Webhooks. Ensuring that the portal remains intuitive, publicly accessible, and easy to navigate is essential for customers building integrations across the PAR ecosystem.

As part of a broader modernization effort, PAR sought a platform that could:

  • Strengthen support for open standards, especially the OpenAPI family
  • Preserve and enhance its docs-as-code workflow tied to GitHub
  • Offer a modern, interactive developer-facing UI
  • Provide flexibility for incremental upgrades to API specifications and supporting documentation
  • Improve discoverability and reduce friction within the documentation experience
  • Provide a structural framework to enable additional PAR business units to onboard their content

A streamlined, stable long-term foundation was critical to support the organization’s priorities, tight migration timeline, and the need to maintain continuity for external developers during the migration to Scalar.

Why Scalar Was the Right Fit

Scalar is a modern API platform built around the OpenAPI standard, offering interactive documentation, SDK/code sample generation, and an open-source API client — all within a contemporary interface designed to make API exploration easier and more intuitive for developers.

"When we first spoke with the team at PAR, their long-term vision for their developer portal resonated immediately: a portal built on open standards, delivering a modern developer experience, with a foundation that could grow with them as they onboard more teams and content,” said Marc Laventure, CEO and Co-Founder of Scalar. “It was clear that what they were looking for aligned perfectly with what Scalar was built to do. Working through the migration and seeing the portal come together has been incredibly rewarding, and we're proud to be part of PAR's developer experience going forward."

Several aspects of Scalar aligned especially well with PAR’s requirements:

Open-Standards Foundation

Scalar supports Swagger 2.0 and OpenAPI 3.x specifications out of the box. This compatibility enables PAR to maintain its existing API specifications while gradually modernizing to newer formats when ready — without forcing a disruptive wholesale conversion.

Seamless Documentation Workflow

Scalar’s documentation system allows PAR to maintain source content in GitHub repositories and publish to Scalar using an automated process. This keeps content creation within PAR’s established docs-as-code workflow; developers can author content in the same tools they already use, and Scalar generates the polished UI using a build/publish operation triggered by GitHub commits. This enables developers to use pull requests for their content reviews. Scalar provides a tool that enables developers to fully preview changes in real time while editing their code in the GitHub repositories, so they can see how their content will appear in the developer portal before it gets published. After merging the code changes, the updates are automatically published to the developer portal.

Modern, Developer-Friendly UI

Scalar provides a responsive API reference interface with multi-language code samples and a robust search experience. These qualities directly support PAR’s goal of shortening developers’ time to first call and reducing friction for partners learning the APIs. Scalar also enables a flexible information architecture by layering multiple sub-projects into the root developer portal project. Each project can be associated with a unique GitHub repository.

Future-Proof Ecosystem Support

When evaluating options for hosting the PAR Developer Portal platform, a key consideration was platform extensibility. PAR wanted flexibility when incorporating ancillary educational and training materials into the overall developer portal experience, such as Postman collections, interactive sample applications, and generative AI chatbots. The Scalar UI can accommodate and embed customized elements for a more unified experience, reducing the need to jump to external tools.

White-Glove Support

As an Enterprise-level customer, PAR has access to hands-on, priority support with direct access to Scalar’s engineering talent. Reduced friction and decreased response time have helped boost productivity, enabling quicker roll-out of new features and enhancements and resolution of issues. Scalar’s team took an active role in facilitating the migration from PAR’s legacy developer portal platform to the Scalar platform. This included help with setting up the project framework in GitHub as well as adding redirect rules to ensure existing links would still work.

"When migrating to Scalar from PAR's legacy developer portal platform, we needed to move quickly as our renewal deadline was approaching," said Brendan McInerney, Sr. Manager of Product Operations and Documentation at PAR Technology. "After weighing the costs and time required to complete the migration, Scalar's team was able to jump in on short notice and handle the migration logistics for us. This was a huge relief as we couldn't dedicate sufficient in-house resources to meet our tight timeframe. Scalar's flexibility and expertise not only enabled us to complete the cut-over to the new platform on time, but we also had time for post-migration testing. This continued collaboration with Scalar has positioned us well to drive new features and enhancements into the PAR Developer Portal."

“Working closely with the PAR team throughout the migration was a great experience,” said Bruno Silva, Founding Engineer at Scalar. “They came in with clear goals and a deep understanding of what their developers needed, which made the collaboration seamless. Their high standards mirror our own commitment to delivering a top-of-the-line developer experience. When both sides hold themselves to that bar, it shows in the final product, and I think the PAR Developer Portal is a great example of that.”

Enhancements to PAR Developer Portal

With Scalar now powering key parts of the experience, PAR’s public developer portal benefits in several ways.

A More Consistent and Accessible Developer Journey

The portal maintains its base URL — developers.partech.com — while offering clearer navigation and removing unnecessary login friction for publicly accessible content. This ensures that developers can reach API documentation quickly and reliably.

Modernized API Reference Experience

Scalar’s interactive API reference brings a more intuitive way for developers to explore PAR APIs. A cleaner layout and richer code generation capabilities help users understand endpoints faster and experiment more confidently.

Stronger Integration With PAR’s Developer Ecosystem

The updated developer portal is tightly connected with other developer-facing resources like:

  • PAR Postman collections, enabling hands-on API exploration
  • PAR sample applications offering payload generators, validators, and other utilities for Punchh integrations
  • PAR generative AI assistant/chatbot that enables users to ask questions and receive an answer based on PAR’s proprietary developer portal content

This creates a smoother experience for developers transitioning between API documentation, code examples, Postman collections, and tool-assisted workflows.

Long-Term Stability and Future Readiness

Because Scalar supports multiple versions of the OpenAPI spec simultaneously, PAR can evolve its APIs incrementally. There’s no rush to migrate legacy specs — teams can modernize on their own timeline with zero disruption to external developers.

"As we migrated from PAR's legacy developer portal to Scalar, our objective extended beyond productivity gains and modernization," said Josh Schoonmaker, SVP of Product at PAR Technology. "We were equally focused on moving to a more cost-effective, scalable, and extensible platform. Scalar's flexibility—particularly its strong support for OpenAPI standards—positioned us to move faster and innovate with greater confidence. As we continue to integrate AI-driven tools and capabilities, Scalar enables our developer ecosystem to evolve rapidly and consistently deliver meaningful value."

Results

By adopting Scalar, PAR aims to achieve measurable improvements in the developer experience:

  • A more interactive, intuitive, and modern API reference
  • A leaner workflow for content authors, fully aligned with GitHub
  • Greater discoverability, with simplified navigation and public access
  • Stronger integration with the PAR developer ecosystem
  • A flexible foundation ready to support future iterations of OpenAPI, new API surface areas, and additional PAR business units

Overall, PAR’s goal with Scalar is to deliver a more polished, developer-friendly, and resilient developer portal that better supports development partners.

Conclusion

PAR’s shift to Scalar reflects a strategic investment in open standards, developer productivity, and long-term platform stability. By adopting a technology that fits its existing workflows while enabling modern interaction patterns, PAR has positioned developers.partech.com as a future-ready hub for API innovation across the organization.