AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Armour – A secure stdio MCP proxy, written in Go
At my last company, we connected Claude Code and Cursor to almost all our internal services via MCP. It made the team incredibly fast, but we hit a wall: permissions. If you give an agent "Read Only" access, it can’t actually fix anything. If you give it "Write" access, it’s only a matter of time before a hallucination or a bad prompt results in a deleted database or a nuked production bucket. We had a few "close calls" that convinced us that simply reducing IAM permissions makes agents useless. I built Armour (https://github.com/fuushyn/armour) to solve this. It’s a…
Armour is a secure proxy for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers written in Go that sits between AI coding tools and internal services. It addresses the permission problem where agents either lack write access to be… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 4 we have checked on their own sites, 4 of them free or with a free tier.
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CoreSpeedfree tier, from $20/mo▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
29d ago · corespeed.io · its alternatives →
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Kastrafree tier, from $19.99/mo▲332Hi HN, Fernando and I built Kastra. Kastra intercepts AI agent tool calls and evaluates them against deterministic policies before they execute. We built this product to control pre- and post-inference workloads. This is aimed at developers using coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and OpenClaw. Kastra pushes an allow, hold, and deny decision before the action runs. You can build these policies in plain English from the web app. The interception engine evaluates the tools, targets, and parameters of every action at sub 1ms at a scale of billions of interceptions per day. We also…
Jul 2026 · kastra.ai · its alternatives →
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Harness by Autonomousfree tier, from $149/mo▲294Every coding agent, every machine, one command center.
8d ago · autonomous.ai · its alternatives →
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Skip migration and launch MCP with built-in Auth
Nov 2025 · arcade.dev · its alternatives →
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Context Gateway▲220We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Give AI agents access to real-time data across 200+ apps
May 2026 · apideck.com · its alternatives →
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Hi! I’m Nathan: an ML Engineer at Mozilla.ai: I built agent-of-empires (aoe): a CLI application to help you manage all of your running Claude Code/Opencode sessions and know when they are waiting for you. - Written in rust and relies on tmux for security and reliability - Monitors state of cli sessions to tell you when an agent is running vs idle vs waiting for your input - Manage sessions by naming them, grouping them, configuring profiles for various settings I'm passionate about getting self-hosted open-weight LLMs to be valid options to compete with proprietary closed models. One…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I’m Austin, founder of Salestrics (salestrics.com). The Problem: > Most AI agents today are trapped in chat windows. While models are smart enough to run complex multi-step workflows, giving them production access to business context (CRM, support, billing) usually means managing unsafe local API keys or hacking together fragile point-solution scripts. What We Built: We built Salestrics to serve as both an all-in-one revenue workspace (CRM, service desk, billing, docs, email) and a production-grade Model Context Protocol (MCP) execution proxy. How It Works: Unified Context: Instead…
Aug 2026 · salestrics.com · its alternatives →
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MCP Defender▲152Hi HN, MCP Defender is an open source desktop app that automatically proxies your MCP traffic in AI apps like Cursor, Claude, Windsurf and VSCode. It then scans all requests and responses between the apps and the MCP tools they call. If it detects anything malicious, it alerts you and lets you allow or block the tool call. While the threat landscape of MCP is still being actively researched, there are dangerous things that MCP Defender can block today. For example, a developer asks Cursor to fix a Github issue with an attached crash log. However, the Github issue was created by an attacker…
2025 · mcpdefender.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, Gabriel, Co-Founder at Permit.io. We're releasing Permit MCP Gateway today, an authorization proxy for MCP servers. TL;DR - we built an MCP Gateway that developers love and CISOs trust. Watch more[0] Now, after your little hate on using fancy copy on HN, to the real thing: MCP is in a strange place. Developers are debating whether it's overcomplicated compared to CLIs or skills files. Meanwhile, enterprises are adopting it by default because every agentic system that acts on your behalf, Cursor, Claude, Copilot, internal agents, needs a stable infrastructure for connecting to tools.…
Mar 2026 · permit.io · its alternatives →
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We needed something like --dangerously-skip-permissions that doesn’t nuke your untracked files, exfiltrate your keys, or install malware. Claude Code's permission system is allow-or-deny per tool, but that doesn’t really scale. Deleting some files is fine sometimes. And git checkout is sometimes not fine. Even when you curate permissions, 200 IQ Opus can find a way around it. Maintaining a deny list is a fool's errand. nah is a PreToolUse hook that classifies every tool call by what it actually does, using a deterministic classifier that runs in milliseconds. It maps commands to action types…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Preloop▲121Hey HN, I’m Yannis, co-founder of Preloop. We’ve built a proxy for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets you add human approval gates to your AI agents without changing your agent code. We’re building agents that use tools (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.), but we were terrified to give them write-access to sensitive systems (Stripe, Prod DBs, AWS). We didn't want to rewrite our agents to wrap every tool call in complex "ask_user" logic, especially since we use different agent runtimes. We built Preloop as a middleware layer. It acts as a standard MCP server proxy.You point your agent to…
Jan 2026 · preloop.ai · its alternatives →
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LockIn MCP▲116I was tired of how bad distraction blockers are so I built my own. LockIn lets AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.) block websites by editing the system hosts file directly via MCP tools (via a secure cloudflare bridge). Why? Because chrome extensions don't work. Blocking it natively makes it unbypassable, and having your agent gatekeep your focus is the ultimate cheat code. Since everyone is using AI agents nowadays, but most people start scrolling or Reddit while waiting for Claude Code to finish, giving them control over your focus solves that. The MCP server exposes four tools:…
Jun 2026 · lockinmcp.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, i am Dimitris, I have been using Claude Code and Codex agents, for some time now from the beggining i had been using them from inside my terminal mainly for coding. For the past 3 years i kept building so i have a homelab and a business server, which already has a lot of vms, so a lot of things to manage. So i decided to start building my own ideal version of using claude code, and codex flexibly and connect them easily with all my vms and infra but at the same time keep using them for coding, and as a personal assistant for daily use. So for the past months I built OtoDock. Its a…
Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The only way to go fast is full YOLO mode in your coding agent. I've got the local sandbox figured out (pro tip: Incus VMs work great) but I wanted to keep my agents from doing things like inadvertently blowing up my cloud services or chasing a prompt to POST to some random website. I struggle most with this on my side projects where my permission model isn't quite as robust as it is at the office. I started with a firewall on the Incus container but every time the agent needed access to something new, I was poking more holes in it - and it didn't differentiate between HTTP verbs. I've been…
Jul 2026 · trollbridge.dev · its alternatives →
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ContextGuard▲12I built ContextGuard after discovering that 43% of MCP servers have critical security vulnerabilities. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the new standard that lets Claude Clients(Desktop, Windsurf, Cursor, etc.) access external tools and data sources - think of it as a plugin system for AI assistants. The problem: When you give those clients access to your filesystem, databases, or APIs through MCP servers, you're opening up serious attack vectors. Prompt injection, data leakage, and path traversal attacks are all possible. Most developers building MCP servers don't have security expertise,…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Claude Code is amazing for individuals but terrible for teams. I spent the last six months building my perfect mix of MCP servers, subagents, commands and skills. Claude Code writes 100% of the code now, but sharing this with my team? Painful. 1. Blog posts and workshops don't work (and don't scale) 2. Committing tools to N repos means N PRs. A tool changes? N more PRs. 3. Same tools, different files or folders for each AI assistant; not everyone uses Claude Code It is like 1999 all over again; FTPing files up to prod and versioning with ".bak" suffixes. So I built sx. It is your team's…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, We’re building security tooling around agentic AI systems. Today, we're releasing our public MCP catalog with detailed risk analysis for every MCP server we've found on the internet: https://mcp.armor1.ai/mcp-directory We all love agents and the power that MCPs unlock: suddenly your AI assistant can query databases, manage files, call APIs, and interact with the real world. But when we started adopting MCPs ourselves, we kept running into the same nagging questions: Is this MCP safe? Where is my data actually going? Could it execute destructive actions? Is it…
Feb 2026 · mcp.armor1.ai · its alternatives →
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Matrix OSfree tier▲26Matrix OS is an AI-native operating system: self-creating, self-healing, and self-expanding. The Claude Agent SDK is the literal kernel: CPU => Claude Opus 4.6 RAM => Context window (1M tokens) Kernel => Main agent + 26 IPC tools Processes => 5 sub-agents Disk => ~/apps, ~/data, ~/system Syscalls => Read, Write, Edit, Bash Drivers => MCP servers IPC => File coordination Break something, the healer agent repairs it. Need a new capability, the OS writes its own agents and skills. Describe an app, it appears as a file you own. The bigger vision is Web 4: OS + messaging + social +…
Sep 2026 · matrix-os.com · its alternatives →
- 20FL
Hi HN! We just launched Codacy Guardrails, an IDE extension with a CLI for code analysis and MCP server that enforces security & quality rules on AI-generated code in real-time. It hooks into AI coding assistants (like VS Code Agent Mode, Cursor, Windsurf), silently scanning and fixing AI-suggested code that has vulnerabilities or violates your coding standards, while the code it’s being generated. We built this because coding agents can be a double-edged sword. They do boost productivity, but can easily introduce insecure or non-compliant code. One recent research team at NYU found that 40%…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! We’re Theodore and Louis, founders of Armature (YC P26). We reconstruct the entire session behind the MCP tool calls you receive, including what the user asked their agent to do and what the agent thought. You wrap your MCP in 3 lines of code (our SDK is available in Typescript, Python and Go) and start seeing in your dashboard: - All sessions reconstructed: it’s like reading the real conversation the user had inside Claude or ChatGPT! - A ranking of your MCP most popular use cases, built from sessions clustering - The most frequent issues your users’ agents encounter so you can fix…
Aug 2026 · armature.tech · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I wrote a book on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – the open standard from Anthropic that lets AI agents connect to external tools and data sources. I'm an RPA/automation practitioner (CEO of Niuexa, LinkedIn Learning instructor) and I noticed there was no comprehensive resource covering MCP architecture, security patterns, and enterprise deployment strategy. So I wrote one. The book covers: - MCP architecture deep dive (servers, clients, hosts, transport layers) - 20-point security checklist for MCP deployments - EU AI Act compliance for agentic systems - Real-world breach…
Nov 2025 · blueprint-mcp.railsblueprint.com · its alternatives →
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I was tired of asking my claude code to reference my codex chats to get references to what decisions it made and why ; so I built Reference MCP It, whenever prompted establishes sessions to get direct access - been using it on my system for a bit and was super helpful so I made a repo :) Would love feedback!
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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MCP Guardian▲12You can read more about EQTY Lab's enterprise-focused usage of this tooling here: https://www.eqtylab.io/blog/securing-model-context-protocol
Dec 2025 · guardianmcp.dev · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →