Top 5 MCP gateways for AI agents in your product in 2026
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools. As MCP adoption has grown, MCP gateways have emerged to manage and govern traffic between agents and MCP servers. There are two main use cases for MCP gateways: Internal and enterprise governance: Organizations use MCP gateways to govern how employees’ AI agents access MCP servers. Examples include…
1. Arcade.dev: Arcade.dev is an MCP gateway and runtime designed for AI agents, featuring built-in end-user authentication. It boasts over 8,000 agent-optimized tools and enables developers to create and deploy their own MCP tools. Arcade MCP Gateways can integrate its hosted tools with custom or third-party MCP servers through a unified endpoint.
This option is ideal for teams developing customer-facing agents that require per-user authentication and controlled tool execution. Pros: Arcade offers end-user OAuth as the default authentication method, ensuring secure per-user access. Its extensive catalog of ready-made tools simplifies integration and streamlines the development process.
2. Composio: Composio is a managed MCP gateway that provides access to more than 1,500 pre-built toolkits and the ability to deploy custom MCP servers behind a single endpoint. The platform supports end-user authentication and offers governance features for controlling tool usage per tenant. In May 2026, Composio experienced a security incident affecting approximately 0.3% of its active connections, impacting over 5,000 GitHub connections.
Pros: Composio's extensive catalog of managed toolkits simplifies the integration process for SaaS companies. The managed authentication feature ensures secure user credential handling and isolation between tenants. However, the 2026 security incident is a notable concern.
3. Pipedream MCP: Pipedream MCP is a hosted integration layer that offers access to more than 10,000 tools across 3,000+ APIs. It provides managed authentication for connecting end-user accounts and simplifies the process of connecting SaaS APIs to AI agents. Pros: Pipedream MCP's extensive range of tools and APIs allows for seamless integration with various services.
The managed authentication feature ensures secure handling of end-user credentials. However, the platform may not be suitable for product-embedded agents requiring granular control over tool execution and tenant-specific policies.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
