Arcade AI
MCP runtime for production AI agents — auth, tools, and governance in one layer.
Arcade is the right call when your agents must act in real user accounts across multiple enterprise systems and you need audit trails. It's overkill for single-user bots or public-API-only prototypes. If you're comparing with Composio, Arcade's MCP spec leadership and step-up auth give it an edge for security-sensitive deployments.
Verified 21h ago · liveness 78/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/arcade-ai
- Engineering teams building production AI agents that act in real user accounts
- Enterprises needing SOC 2, audit trails, and RBAC for agent actions
- Developers who want to skip building custom auth for multi-tool agents
- Teams using MCP that need secure auth and governance
- Quick prototypes or single-user agents using only public APIs
- Teams with existing auth infra that just need tool orchestration
- Very small projects where a runtime is overkill
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Skip Arcade if you only need a single-user bot with no multi-system integrations, or if you already have enterprise auth infrastructure and just want tool orchestration.
Auth events cost $0.10 each beyond the Team platform fee, so agents that frequently connect to new user accounts can rack up charges quickly.
Arcade's pricing is consumption-based with a free tier for prototyping. For low-volume teams, the free tier is sufficient. At scale, the Team plan's per-event costs can exceed $100/month for moderate usage, making it pricier than Nango or Zapier for simple integrations. Enterprises with high volume should negotiate annual bundles.
In short
Arcade AI — MCP runtime for production AI agents — auth, tools, and governance in one layer. Best for Engineering teams building production AI agents that act in real user accounts, Enterprises needing SOC 2, audit trails, and RBAC for agent actions, Developers who want to skip building custom auth for multi-tool agents. Free to start; paid plans from $25/mo.
What's new in Arcade AI
Checked 6 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 1 feature update, 3 changelog entries and 1 news mention.
New Toolkit Round-Up: Power BI, Postman, Fireflies & More
Arcade ships agent-optimized toolkits for Power BI, Postman, Fireflies, Insightly, plus upgrades to Gmail, Excel, Outlook, Linear.
Session IDs Are Going Away. Here's What Breaks & What You Can Finally Build
MCP moves from stateful to stateless; session IDs deprecated. Arcade allows migration on your schedule.
MCP Extensions Are Now Official. So Is Fragmentation.
MCP gives extensions official track with own versioning. Arcade's gateway helps manage support matrix.
Best AI Agent Integration Platforms in 2026 (Auth, Tool Calling, and Observability)
Production comparison of Arcade, Composio, Nango, Merge, Workato, n8n, Zapier, Make across auth, tool calling, observability, pricing.
MCP Is Going Stateless
MCP specification transitions to stateless protocol, affecting session handling.
What people actually say about Arcade AI — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
54 mentions across 4 sources (YouTube, Product Hunt, App Store, Lemmy) · researched Jul 31, 2026.
- +AI quickly generates product demo scripts, saving hours of work.
- +Product Hunt community rates it 4.94★ from 62 reviews.
- +Enables storytelling for teams who struggle with demo creation.
- +Huge time-saver for creating interactive demos and UGC ads.
- +High-quality AI video generation for ads, per YouTube reviewers.
- −Output is often glitchy and unusable straight out of the box.
- −UI has bugs, including white text on white background during signup.
- −Lacks a basic text-only slide feature, frustrating for simple demos.
- −Recent update broke core features for some users, making app unusable.
- −Connectivity issues prevent reliable peer-to-peer interactions.
- • Credits per AI generation may run out quickly
- • Pro features like advanced toolkits may cost extra
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Arcade AI? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: August 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Agent authorization with dynamic user permissions
- Plug into identity providers: Okta, Google, Microsoft Entra ID
- Credentials never leave the runtime
- Agent-optimized MCP tools mapping intent to API call
- Thousands of MCP tools for enterprise systems
- Central control plane for audit and policy
- Full audit logs per action per user
- SOC 2 compliant
- SSO and RBAC out of the box
- Deployment options: cloud, on-prem, air-gapped, hybrid
- Works with any LLM, any framework, any MCP client
- LangChain integration
- Cisco Duo step-up authorization for sensitive tool calls
- Warp Pipes for private tools
- New toolkits: Power BI, Postman, Fireflies, Insightly
About Arcade AI
Arcade is the runtime layer between AI agents and the systems they need to reach — it solves the three blockers that keep agents from shipping: authorization, reliability, and governance. Instead of building custom auth infrastructure, engineering teams plug Arcade into their existing identity providers (like Okta, Google, Microsoft Entra ID) and let agents act on behalf of real users with dynamic permissions. Credentials never leave the runtime, so security review is less painful and data stays protected. Arcade provides agent-optimized MCP tools that map user intent to the correct API call the first time, cutting down on hallucinated parameters and expensive retries. The catalog spans thousands of MCP tools for enterprise systems, and recent additions include toolkits for Power BI, Postman, Fireflies, Insightly, plus upgrades to Gmail, Excel, Outlook, and Linear. A central control plane gives you a full audit trail — you can answer "what did this agent do, on behalf of which user, in which system?" for every action, without slowing down your teams. The platform is compliant-ready: SOC 2 compliant, with SSO, RBAC, and audit logs out of the box. Deployment is flexible — cloud, on-prem, air-gapped, or hybrid — so you control where data lives. Arcade works with any LLM, any framework, and any MCP client, integrating with what your team already uses to avoid lock-in. Unlike general-purpose auth libraries or tool orchestrators, Arcade is purpose-built for agentic AI — it was built by people from Okta, Snowflake, Redis, and MongoDB, and the team authored the MCP tool authorization specification and sits on MCP security and governance steering committees. If you're shipping agents that touch multiple enterprise systems in production, Arcade is the runtime that gets you past security review.
Behind the Verdict
The moment your agent needs to do something on behalf of a user — send an email, update a CRM, post to Slack — you suddenly own an auth problem. Arcade exists to take that off your plate. We'd reach for it when you're moving past the demo and into production, where the security review is real and the audit trail matters. That's not to say it's always the answer. If your agent only hits public APIs or you're prototyping a single-user bot, the overhead of a runtime like this isn't justified. You can write a simple script with a hardcoded token. Arcade is built for the messy, multi-system reality of enterprise work. The closest alternative we see is Composio. Both give you tool catalogs and auth. But Arcade's team literally wrote the MCP tool authorization spec — that's not marketing, that's a structural advantage. They also offer Cisco Duo step-up authorization, which is rare and valuable for sensitive actions. Where Arcade might lose you is pricing: $25/month plus usage for Team, and you're paying per auth event and tool call. If you're running heavy workloads, that adds up — but the free tier with 2,000 auth events and 2,000 tool calls per month is generous for getting started. One thing to watch: the MCP ecosystem is changing fast. Session IDs are going away, MCP is going stateless, and extensions are official. Arcade's gateway helps manage that transition, but it means you're depending on their roadmap to keep up. That said, being on the steering committees means you're not a bystander — you're riding the wave. In practice, where it bites is if you need deep customization of the auth flow that's not covered by the standard IDP connectors. Arcade supports Okta, Google, Microsoft Entra, and more, but if you have a niche provider, you might hit a wall. Also, if
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Arcade AI actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Deploy an AI sales agent that reads Slack conversations and writes Salesforce opportunities on behalf of each rep, with per-user OAuth tokens managed by Arcade.
Outcome: The agent securely updates CRM records without storing credentials, passes security review, and sales team adopts it immediately.
Build a teacher assistant that fetches Google Classroom data and sends personalized emails via Gmail, using Arcade to handle auth per teacher.
Outcome: Rolled out to 500 teachers in a week; no token refresh issues, and full audit trail for compliance.
Launch an internal agent that queries Jira, Slack, and Salesforce to generate weekly reports, with RBAC limiting data access by team.
Outcome: Agent passed security review in one day; audit logs provides full traceability for every data access.
Use Cases
- Automate CRM updates by letting an AI agent read and write Salesforce records on behalf of sales reps.
- Enable an AI assistant to send emails via Gmail with user-specific authorization without storing tokens.
- Build a support agent that queries Slack history and creates tickets in Jira with per-user permissions.
- Deploy an onboarding agent that reads Google Calendar and sends personalized welcome messages via Slack.
- Create a data analysis agent that accesses Google Sheets and generates reports with user-specific view permissions.
- Power an AI sales agent that analyzes calls, emails, and CRM data and takes secure actions on behalf of a rep.
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-07-30
Limitations
- The free tier limits you to 2,000 auth events and 2,000 tool calls per month.
- On the Team plan, auth events cost $0.10 each and tool calls $0.01 each beyond the platform fee.
- Enterprise features like SSO, RBAC, and audit logs require custom pricing.
as of 2026-07-25
Verification history
We have re-verified Arcade AI 14 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and updates only what actually changed.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 14 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Arcade AI tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/mo
Ideal for
Solo developers prototyping AI agents with light usage (up to 2,000 auth events and tool calls per month).
What this tier adds
Free entry point with no platform fee, limited to 2,000 auth events and 2,000 tool calls per month.
Team
$25/mo + usage
Ideal for
Small teams moving agents from prototype to production with moderate usage, needing email support.
What this tier adds
$25/month platform fee plus usage-based pricing ($0.10/auth event, $0.01/tool call) instead of free caps.
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Large organizations requiring SSO, RBAC, audit logs, dedicated support, and flexible deployment (cloud, VPC, air-gapped).
What this tier adds
Custom pricing with annual bundles, discounted rates at scale, SSO/RBAC/audit logs, and 24/7 SLA-backed support.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Arcade AI's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Arcade's pricing is consumption-based with a free tier for prototyping. For low-volume teams, the free tier is sufficient. At scale, the Team plan's per-event costs can exceed $100/month for moderate usage, making it pricier than Nango or Zapier for simple integrations. Enterprises with high volume should negotiate annual bundles.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Arcade AI — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
For an engineering team with existing identity provider integration, you can have a basic agent making authenticated calls within a few hours. Full production deployment with SSO, RBAC, and custom tool definitions typically takes 1-2 weeks. Arcade's dashboard guides you through connecting IDPs and setting up tools.
Switching to or from Arcade AI
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From custom auth middleware: Replace your token-handling code with Arcade's runtime; connect your IDP and map tools using MCP.
- →From Composio: Migrate by replacing Composio tool calls with Arcade's MCP endpoints and reconfiguring auth connections via Arcade's console.
- ↗To Composio: Export audit logs from Arcade's control plane; reimplement tool calls using Composio's SDK.
- ↗To a custom solution: Use Arcade's API to export auth event logs and tool call history; rebuild auth infrastructure manually.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
Official links
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Frequently Asked Questions
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