AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Permit MCP Gateway
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.…
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 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1
Permit.io▲677The new Permit.io CLI brings developer-first workflows to access control. Define, test, deploy, and enforce fine-grained authorization using AI, CI/CD, GitOps, and OpenAPI — all from your terminal
2023 · permit.io · its alternatives →
- 2
mcp-usefree tier, from $25/mo▲581Hi HN, Luigi here. We maintain mcp-use an open-source TypeScript framework for building MCP servers and MCP Apps: https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use MCP is now (finally) stateless so we rewrote mcp-use v2 from scratch for the 2026-07-28 MCP spec revision: https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2026-07-28/ Thanks to the rebuild: - Throughput: +27% → from 8,615 to 10,982 median ops/sec - Cold launch: 2.2x faster → from 151.6 ms to 68.1 ms - Clean install: 82% smaller → from 404.6 MiB to 74.4 MiB Benchmark with methodology here:…
2025 · manufact.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Skip migration and launch MCP with built-in Auth
Nov 2025 · arcade.dev · its alternatives →
- 4
MCP-Builder.aifree tier, from $29/mo▲174The fastest way to connect your data with your AI Tools.
Aug 2026 · mcp-builder.ai · its alternatives →
- 5
MCP360▲61Hey HN Community, I built MCP360 after spending weeks integrating APIs for an AI agent project. Each tool needed its own setup, auth, billing, and maintenance. When any APIs changed, my integrations broke. I got tired of it. MCP360 is a single gateway giving AI agents access to 100+ tools through one config block. Search engines, web scraping, SEO, e-commerce data, maps, domain tools, and more. Real example: Instead of managing Google Search, web scraping, SERP tracking, and keyword research as 4 separate subscriptions (4 bills, 4 auth systems, 4 points of failure), you connect once. Works…
2025 · mcp360.ai · its alternatives →
- 6
API to MCP▲195Turn any API into an MCP server for AI agents
Jun 2026 · apitomcp.ai · its alternatives →
- 7
Many teams connecting LLMs to external tools eventually encounter the same architectural issue: as more tools and agents are added, the integration pattern becomes an N×M mesh of direct connections. Each agent implements its own auth, retries, rate limiting, and logging; each tool needs credentials distributed to multiple places and observability becomes fragmented. We built LLM gateway with this goal to provide a single place to manage authentication, authorization, routing, and observability for MCP servers, with a path toward a more general agent-gateway architecture in the future. The…
Dec 2025 · truefoundry.com · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9
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 →
- 10
MCPCore▲80MCPCore is a complete MCP hosting and MCP cloud platform. Create, build, and deploy MCP servers in minutes, then manage auth, secrets, and analytics from a single dashboard.
Mar 2026 · mcpcore.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Give AI agents access to real-time data across 200+ apps
May 2026 · apideck.com · its alternatives →
- 12
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 →
- 13
Free MCP for security AI: live BGP, DNS, threat graph
May 2026 · whisper.security · its alternatives →
- 14
Global APIs as MCP powered by AI Gateway
2025 · mcp.higress.ai · its alternatives →
- 15
shutup-mcp▲71Zero-config MCP proxy that hides 99% of tools
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN, my name is Philip, I’m the co-founder of Glasskube and one of the creators of HyprMCP. This project started when we did what everyone was doing — building a remote MCP server and launching it. Building the first local MCP server for testing was quite simple, and we had our first tools ready within a day. The next step was turning that into a production-ready remote MCP server. As we exposed the MCP server to our users, we wanted to authenticate them with our existing authentication methods. We dove deep into authentication. Our approach was to build an auth proxy and plug it in front…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hey HN! A few months ago we shared mcp-agent (https://github.com/lastmile-ai/mcp-agent) [1][2], a lightweight framework that implements every agent pattern from Anthropic’s Building Effective Agents blog [3] and handles MCP server/client management seamlessly. Our core bet is that connecting LLMs to tools, resources, and external systems will soon be MCP-native by default. Today we're launching a significant update: Agents as MCP servers. Currently "agentic" behavior exists only on the MCP client side – clients like Claude or Cursor use MCP servers to solve tasks.…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
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 →
- 19
Hello HN, we're Andrew and Stephen from Keyboard (https://www.keyboard.dev/). After building AI tools for the past year, we recently made a YouTube video on building MCP servers and realized MCP is a total game-changer. It essentially lets AI do anything by connecting to your apps. But the deeper we dove, the clearer it became that security and privacy were complete afterthoughts. Coming from backgrounds at Okta and Stripe, this made us pretty uncomfortable. We kept seeing the same pattern: every app needs its own MCP server, each storing sensitive tokens, with minimal…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
We built a Rust MCP server, which wraps the excellent headless terminal (HT)[1] to makes it available for agentic coding tools. Most agentic coding tools struggle with blocking, interactive terminal tools (all the boilerplate generator, infra CLI tools etc). This is because many existing CLI dev tools are built for humans and require interactive input. We built this so agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Memex, etc) can “see” and “interact” with terminals exactly like humans do. In our demo video [2], you'll see it operating vim/emacs just as a human would - selecting options,…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
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 →
- 22
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 →
- 23
Hey HN! I’m Gui from deco (decocms.com). We’ve been using this tool internally as the foundation for a few customer AI platforms, and today we’re open-sourcing it as MCP Mesh. MCP is quickly becoming the standard for agentic systems, but… once you go past a couple servers it turns into the same problems for every team: - M×N config sprawl (every client wired to every server, each with its own JSON + ports + retries) - Token + tool bloat (dumping tool definitions into every prompt doesn’t scale) - Credentials + blast radius (tokens scattered across clients, hard to audit, hard to revoke) - No…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
cMCP: Confidential MCP Gateway. Hardware-attested policy enforcement for MCP tool calls. - agentrust-io/cmcp
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →