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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Spanly

Hi HN, I'm Tim, solo founder of Spanly (https://spanly.com). I spent the last year working on MCP gateways, and debugging them with nothing better than HTTP-level APM was painful. Spanly runs its own MCP server and monitors it with itself, so I've been the first user of everything below. Spanly is observability for MCP servers, the protocol that lets agents like Claude and Cursor call your product's tools. It's a sidecar proxy, so it works with any language and requires zero code changes. Live demo (no signup): https://app.spanly.com/share/demo Sidecar source…

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. 1
    mcp-usefree tier, from $25/mo▲581

    Hi 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 →

  2. 2

    OpenTelemetry-native observability for agents and LLMs

    Aug 2026 · openobserve.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    superlog▲497

    Hey HN, we’re Nico and Arseniy, co-founders of Superlog (https://superlog.sh). We're building a self-installing, self healing observability tool meant not to be opened. It has a wizard that daily sets up proper logging and an agent that investigates errors and opens PRs. Super short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFhU9Mk247M. In our earlier startups, we tried Sentry, Datadog, Grafana, Dash0, and nothing was good enough. Proper telemetry and alerting still requires a ton of manual setup. We struggled with adding good logs, so debugging was tough, especially as…

    Jun 2026 · superlog.sh · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Agent 37▲401

    Hey HN, I noticed there are 1,000+ MCP skills on GitHub with zero way for creators to charge for them. So I built Agent37. Selling Claude skills today means asking customers to download your skill, set up Claude Code on their laptops, configure MCP servers, and pray it works. No trial, no updates, often you're just handing over the source. Agent37 lets creators upload a skill, share a link, and anyone can try it instantly (no Claude account needed). Built-in Stripe, creators keep 80%. Looking for feedback on the approach. Would you use something like this?

    Mar 2026 · agent37.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey HN, Nir, Gal and Tomer here. We’re open-sourcing a set of extensions we’ve built on top of OpenTelemetry that provide visibility into LLM applications - whether it be prompts, vector DBs and more. Here’s the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry. There’s already a decent number of tools for LLM observability, some open-source and some not. But what we found was missing for all of them is that they were closed-protocol by design, vendor-locking you to use their observability platform or their proprietary framework for running your LLMs. It’s still early in the…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hi HN! We’re the team behind Fiddler, and we recently built an Agent Cache feature. It works by capturing an LLM request/response pair and, once caching is enabled, serving subsequent matching calls locally so duplicate requests never hit the provider. It’s meant to reduce three pains that show up together in agent development: token cost, feedback-loop latency, and output non-determinism. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

    Aug 2026 · telerik.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    If you've built any web-based app in the last 15 years, you probably used something like Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc. to monitor and trace your app, right? Why should it be different when the app you're building happens to be using LLMs? So today we're open-sourcing OpenLLMetry-JS. It's an open protocol and SDK, based on OpenTelemetry, that provides traces and metrics for LLM JS/TS applications and can be connected to any of the 15+ tools that already support OpenTelemetry. Here's the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry-js A few months ago we launched…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Yavy▲110

    Turn any website into an MCP server for AI

    Feb 2026 · yavy.dev · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Over the past few months, we've been building Prism; a fast, developer-first observability UI that's deeply integrated with our open-source database, Parseable. Prism is designed for engineers who debug distributed systems, sometimes at odd hours, and need answers right now, without having to deal with five different tools. Backstory: We spoke to dozens of observability practitioners in large enterprises. Across the board, we heard two things: (1)The RoI on observability tools is hard to justify. (2)OSS leads to tool sprawl, metrics in Grafana, logs in ELK, traces… somewhere. We wanted a…

    2022 · parseable.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    We just released an MCP server that lets Claude (or any MCP client) pull real-time and historical financial data: equities, options chains, crypto, FX, commodities, fundamentals, economic indicators, and 50+ technical signals. You can ask things like: “Plot NVDA’s RSI vs AMD’s over the past year.” “Show the yield curve shift since 2020.” “What are Apple’s recent earnings surprise trends? “Make a 3-statement model for ORCL.” Claude runs the requests, does the math, and returns the data or generates charts/models all inside the chat. Setup takes about a minute. You’ll need Claude Pro…

    Nov 2025 · mcp.alphavantage.co · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Read this article by Cloudflare this morning https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ the main argument being that LLMs are much better at writing typescript code than tool calls because they've seen typescript code many more times. HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45386248 Deno provides a great sandbox environment for Typescript code execution because of its permissions system which made it easy to spin up code that only has access to fetch and network calls. Stick an MCP proxy…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    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 →

  13. 13

    Hey HN, Gal, Nir and Doron here. Over the past 2 years, we've helped teams debug everything from prompt issues to production outages. We kept running into the same problem: Jumping between our IDEs and our observability dashboards. So, we built an open-source MCP server that connects any OpenTelemetry backend (Grafana, Jaeger, Datadog, Dynatrace, Traceloop) to our dev environment using an MCP. While there are many MCP servers built for specific providers (like Datadog’s - https://docs.datadoghq.com/bits_ai/mcp_server), they’re closed source (so we can’t easily extend…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    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 →

  15. 15

    Open Source Observability Platform for MCP Servers & Apps

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    LLM observability is an absolute must-have for anyone running something in prod (or prod-like). While all the observability startups are great, you're essentially sending all your OpenAI usage history - prompts, generations, chats - to a random third party. So this script deploys a basic proxy in your Azure account, catches all incoming OpenAI requests, stores logs in your own resource group, and comes with visualizations premade (charts, timelines, chat history, cost estimation, etc). Thanks for any thoughts and feedback!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    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 →

  18. 18

    Open-source LLM observability in one line of code

    Jun 2026 · spanlens.io · its alternatives →

  19. 19NO

    Morning HN - - I have a quick story about building a startup and misreading the market, and an ask. (The ask: Try out our product>> https://app.datable.io/auth/sandbox) My name is Julian Giuca and I was an early employee at New Relic, where I led their Logging product until 2022. It’s safe to say I have opinions about logs. Sometimes I think they are great. Too often I think we can do much better. When people talk to me about logs, they reliably complain about observability costs. Engineering leaders have said it feels “like a protection racket”, where you're forced to…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    One MCP▲13

    Hey HN, I’ve been experimenting with how LLMs can dynamically use large sets of tools without needing to preload them all into context - and built one-mcp to explore that idea. one-mcp is an open source MCP server built with FastAPI that acts as a semantic index + dynamic loader for API tools. Instead of hardcoding or embedding every tool spec in an LLM session (which quickly blows up context size and costs), one-mcp lets the model search, load, and execute tools on demand — using embeddings and natural language queries. What it does: - Semantic Search for Tools: Query your API catalog with…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    HasMCPfree tier▲6

    No-code GUI MCP Server Framework with built-in Auth & Logs

    Jan 2026 · hasmcp.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Admittedly I work on this, but I anthropic's decision to finally embrace http, auth (at least a little), and other RFCs that are coming out is just great. With OpenAI behind it too, this ecosystem will be built around projects like this. Not saying it's MCP or not, but it'll be one of them

    2025 · twitter.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23LF

    We built a no/low-code tool that lets you spin up MCPs from a single prompt. MCPs give LLMs access to tools, data, and actions—but they’re hard to build and deploy. Our tool abstracts that: describe what you want, and it auto-generates and hosts the necessary components. No UI flows, no manual chaining—just prompt and go. Examples: • Pull email, parse a DocSend, check Reddit, draft reply • Extract data from a niche site + send a Slack alert • Combine tools without writing glue code Live demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCiaQrgfoE Built over a weekend after getting…

    2025 · generatemcp.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I 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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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 →