AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Preloop
Hey 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…
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.
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Browser MCP connects AI applications to your browser so you can automate tasks using AI. Supported by Claude, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, and more.
2025 · browsermcp.io · its alternatives →
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CoreSpeedfree tier, from $20/mo▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
27d 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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MartinLoop▲79Control AI coding agents with limits, proof, + run receipts
Jun 2026 · martinloop.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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Continual learning for every coding agent on your team.
2025 · deeplake.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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Cronloop AI▲121Cronloop lets you automate your recurring work with unattended AI agents that run on a schedule. Just describe the job and connect the tools it needs. Every agent keeps a memory and self-improves between runs.
Aug 2026 · cronloop.ai · its alternatives →
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While building my startup i kept running into the issue where ai agents in cursor create endpoints or code that shouldn't exist, hallucinates strings, or just don't understand the code. ask-human-mcp pauses your agent whenever it’s stuck, logs a question into ask_human.md in your root directory with answer: PENDING, and then resumes as soon as you fill in the correct answer. the pain: your agent screams out an endpoint that never existed it makes confident assumptions and you spend hours debugging false leads the fix: ask-human-mcp gives your agent an escape hatch. when it’s unsure, it calls…
2025 · masonyarbrough.com · its alternatives →
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Miniloop▲80Turn natural language into AI agents and automations
Feb 2026 · miniloop.ai · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! We’ve been building an MCP server to help AI-assisted web app developers by using browser agents to test whether changes made by an AI inside an editor actually work. We've been testing it on scenarios like verifying new flows in a UI, or checking that sending a chat request triggers a response. The idea is to let your coding agent both code and evaluate if what it did was correct. Here’s a short demo with Cursor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AoQK-bwR0w When building apps, we found the hardest part of AI-assisted coding isn’t the coding—it’s tedious point-and-click…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Hey HN, I spent my xmas break building an agent framework called mcp-agent [1](https://github.com/lastmile-ai/mcp-agent) for Model Context Protocol [2]. It makes it easy to build AI apps with MCP servers, and implements every pattern from the popular Building Effective Agents blog [3] as well as OpenAI’s Swarm [4]. I’m sharing it early to get community feedback on where to take it from here, and to ask for contributions. For those who aren’t familiar with MCP, I think of it as a standardized interface to let AI communicate with software via tool calls, resources and…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’m Hiroki, founder of Epismo. Every day, people share “must-use” prompts, but copying a single prompt rarely reproduces real outcomes. The missing piece is the workflow: task decomposition, step order, intermediate artifacts, and quality checks. So I built Workflow Hub, an open library of human-AI workflows you can clone and run. Each workflow includes step definitions, inputs, expected artifacts/outputs, and verification checks, so you can copy the whole process, not just a prompt. You can clone a workflow, customize it, then execute it in Epismo with the best agent for each…
Apr 2026 · epismo.ai · its alternatives →
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Give your agent tools to create beautiful, codebase-aware UI
Apr 2026 · aidesigner.ai · its alternatives →
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Open-source Computer Use MCP for AI agents
May 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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I made this for myself, and it seemed like it might be useful to others. I'd love some feedback, both on the threat model and the tool itself. I hope you find it useful! Backstory: I've been using many agents in parallel as I work on a somewhat ambitious financial analysis tool. I was juggling agents working on epics for the linear solver, the persistence layer, the front-end, and planning for the second-generation solver. I was losing my mind playing whack-a-mole with the permission prompts. YOLO mode felt so tempting. And yet. Then it occurred to me: what if YOLO mode isn't so bad?…
Jan 2026 · github.com · 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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We’ve been building visual rule engines (clear spreadsheet interfaces -> API endpoints that map incoming data to a large number of potential outcomes), and had the fun idea lately to see what happens when we use our decision table UI with Claude’s PreToolUse hook. The result is a surprisingly useful policy/gating layer– these tables let your team: - Write conditional, exception-friendly policies beyond globs/prefixes (e.g. allow rm -rf only in */node_modules/*, deny / or $HOME, ask if --force or network call; gate kubectl delete / SQL DROP with a clear reason) -…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hello, HN. I've created fast-agent to make building my own products easier - and remove the friction between defining Prompts, MCP Servers and their composition. It uses a simple, declarative style that's easy to work with and source control - with inbuilt support for the patterns in the Building Effective Agents paper. Because you can "warm-up" and interact with Agents before, during or after the workflows, it's easy to diagnose and tune Agent prompts and behaviour for later runs. Being able to set these workflows up makes LLM Context Management and Tool Selection a lot easier and can…
2025 · github.com · 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 →