Open source MCP gateways compared

Which open source gateways did we score?

Obot, Docker MCP Gateway, Lasso and Microsoft MCP Gateway are under MIT. IBM ContextForge and agentgateway are under Apache 2.0. agentgateway is a Linux Foundation project started by Solo.io.

Where are they strong?

Deployment is the obvious strength. Every one scores 8 or 9 on our deployment criterion, because the code is free and self-hosting is documented.

Registry is another. Obot keeps a catalog of approved servers with a CLI for discovery. ContextForge offers a tool catalog with federation across gateways. Docker uses catalogs and profiles.

Standards vary. agentgateway documents JWT, OAuth, OAuth metadata and DCR endpoints. Microsoft relies on Entra ID JWT validation. Docker handles remote OAuth through DCR.

Where are the gaps?

None of the open source gateways describes a human approval step on the pages we read. Our evidence rule scores each of them at 2 on human approval.

Per-call authorization is also limited. Several offer RBAC or a CEL policy engine, but none documents the person an agent acts for as a policy input.

Credential brokering is partial. Docker keeps secrets in the gateway and injects them into containers, which keeps them out of clients. Short-lived per-task tokens were not described.

Operations differ as well. Docker runs each MCP server in its own container. Microsoft targets Kubernetes. ContextForge and Obot ship container images, and agentgateway ships a single binary.

Choose the one that fits how your platform team already runs services. The gateway will sit on the path of every tool call.

Which one leads for self-hosting?

Our self-hosted and open source page reweights scores with 40 percent on deployment. The ranking there is computed, not chosen, and is shown on that page.

Can you combine one with a governance layer?

Yes. Several commercial products say they work alongside an existing gateway. NewCore, for example, says it works alongside an existing AI gateway.

A common pattern is an open source gateway for routing and a separate layer for identity, brokering and approval.

Audit is the last gap. Most open source gateways emit OpenTelemetry or logs, but few tie each call to the person behind the agent. You may need to add that context yourself.

What should a team starting out do?

Pick a gateway you can run today, put every MCP server behind it and move credentials out of client configs. That alone closes the most common leak.

Then add approval and identity-bound checks as agents move from experiments to production. Our rollout plan sets this out over 30 days.