Smithery vs Glama in 2026: Features, Pricing and Use Cases
Smithery is the broader platform of the two: a registry and hosting service for MCP servers that connects agents to 100K+ tools and skills, with a free Hobby plan (3 namespaces) and paid Pay-as-you-Go and Custom tiers. Glama is narrower on paper — an MCP server registry with an inspector and gateway for testing and routing MCP traffic — and also offers a free plan. For a small business that wants one-click managed connections, Smithery's documented feature set is deeper; for teams focused on inspecting and routing MCP traffic, Glama covers that slice well.
TL;DR
- Smithery is a registry and hosting platform for MCP servers that connects agents to 100K+ tools and skills, with auth, credentials, and sessions handled for you.
- Glama indexes MCP servers and provides an inspector and gateway for testing and routing MCP traffic, alongside a directory of available servers.
- Both platforms offer a free tier: Smithery's Hobby plan includes 3 namespaces, and Glama has a free plan per third-party buyer guides.
- Smithery's free Hobby plan caps you at 3 namespaces; the Pay-as-you-Go plan raises that to 100 and the Custom plan to 100+.
- Smithery was acquired by Arcade.dev in August 2026, which positions it toward enterprise production use.
- Smithery's Uplink feature lets you expose a local MCP server as a regular Smithery connection for development and private team tooling.
- Glama's documented strength is the inspector and gateway — testing and routing MCP traffic — rather than full server lifecycle management.
Head to head
| Dimension | Glama | Smithery |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Freemium; free plan available per third-party buyer guides | Freemium; Hobby plan free with 3 namespaces, Pay as you Go (100 namespaces) and Custom (100+) tiers above it |
| Registry and discovery | Directory of available MCP servers | 100K+ tools and skills, with per-server install counts (e.g., Brave Search at 106.86k uses) 🏆 |
| Hosting | Not documented in the research | Hosted registry plus publishing with dedicated server pages and analytics 🏆 |
| Testing and inspection | Dedicated inspector for testing MCP servers 🏆 | CLI tool schema inspection (smithery tool get) and quality scores shown on server pages (e.g., 84/100) |
| Local development | Not documented in the research | Uplink tunnels a local MCP server through Smithery as a regular connection 🏆 |
| Auth and credentials | Gateway handles routing; auth management not detailed in the research | Managed OAuth flow, credential storage, token refresh, and policy-scoped service tokens 🏆 |
| Team collaboration | Not documented in the research | Namespaces as shared workspaces with scoped API keys (3 on Hobby, 100 on Pay as you Go) 🏆 |
| Publishing tools | Not documented in the research | Publish via URL or local MCPB bundle; get analytics, spec compliance, and auto-generated OAuth UI 🏆 |
The contenders
Smithery is a public registry and hosting platform for MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, describing itself as the marketplace for AI agents that connects them to 100K+ tools and skills instantly. It handles auth, credentials, and sessions on the user's behalf, and every server, connection, and skill lives inside a namespace that acts as a shared workspace for team collaboration. Developers can publish their own MCP servers via URL or local bundle and get a dedicated server page, analytics on tool calls, automatic MCP spec compliance, and generated OAuth UI. A CLI supports searching, connecting, inspecting, and calling tools, and the Uplink feature tunnels a local MCP server through Smithery so agents reach it like any hosted connection. Smithery also hosts reusable AI skills, such as its own CLI skill with 1,652 installs. In August 2026, Arcade.dev acquired Smithery, with the company citing a shift toward trustworthy, production-grade MCP tooling.
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- + Very large catalog — 100K+ tools and skills connectable instantly, with popular servers like Brave Search at 106.86k uses and Gmail at 59.79k uses
- + Auth, credentials, and sessions are handled for you, removing a common MCP pain point for non-experts
- + Uplink lets you develop and test a local MCP server against a real agent before publishing
- + Namespaces double as team collaboration workspaces with API keys scoped per namespace
- + Publishers get analytics, automatic spec compliance, and generated OAuth UI for their servers
- + Backed by Arcade.dev after the August 2026 acquisition, with enterprise security and governance ambitions
- − The free Hobby plan is capped at 3 namespaces, limiting how many separate apps or environments you can organize
- − Uplink is explicitly a development primitive, not a hosting solution — if the CLI is offline, connections report disconnected and calls fail
- − Uplink adds a round trip to the host machine, so latency includes your network
- − Smithery is not open source, and its GitHub presence (~840 stars per tokens&) is far smaller than open-source peers like CrewAI (59k stars)
- − The Arcade.dev acquisition may mean platform direction and packaging shift toward enterprise buyers over time
Glama is an MCP server registry that indexes Model Context Protocol servers and provides an inspector and a gateway for testing and routing MCP traffic, alongside a directory of available servers. It is consistently listed among the top Smithery alternatives — Respan ranks it #2 in the MCP Tooling space, and Spotsaas categorizes it as MCP Server Software with a free plan available. Where Smithery emphasizes the full lifecycle (discover, connect, host, publish), Glama's documented strength is the middle of that pipeline: inspecting what a server actually does and routing MCP traffic through a gateway you control. For teams that already know which servers they want and need a way to evaluate and route calls to them, Glama covers that slice directly. Third-party buyer guides note it suits small and medium businesses as a SaaS/cloud offering with a freemium model.
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- + Combines registry, inspector, and gateway in one place — useful for evaluating servers before committing to them
- + Free plan available, making it low-risk to try for a small team
- + Focused scope means less to learn than a full lifecycle platform
- + Ranked the #2 Smithery alternative in Respan's 2026 MCP Tooling market map, indicating solid ecosystem recognition
- − No documented hosting, managed OAuth connections, or publishing analytics comparable to Smithery's platform in the available research
- − No documented equivalent to Smithery's Uplink for local development and testing against real agents
- − Third-party guides list it with no user reviews yet, so real-world feedback is thin
- − The narrower feature set means teams may still need complementary tools for hosting and credential management
Verdict
Winner: Smithery
Smithery's documented platform covers discovery, hosting, managed OAuth connections, local development via Uplink, and publishing with analytics, while Glama's documented scope centers on its registry, inspector, and gateway. Both offer free entry points, so the decision comes down to whether you need full lifecycle tooling (Smithery) or traffic testing and routing (Glama).
| Option | Overall | Breakdown |
|---|---|---|
| Smithery | 8 | : 7: 9: 8: 8 |
| Glama | 7 | : 7: 7: 7: 6 |
Platform scope compared
Pricing compared
Which fits a small business in 2026?
Which should you pick?
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FAQ
Is Smithery free to use?
Yes, Smithery has a free Hobby plan that includes up to 3 namespaces. Above that, its documentation lists Pay as you Go (100 namespaces) and Custom (100+ namespaces) tiers, and the site invites users to sign up for free and start connecting MCP servers immediately.
Is Glama free to use?
Glama offers a free plan according to third-party buyer guides, which categorize it as a freemium MCP Server Software product. Its documented core features — the MCP server registry, inspector, and gateway — are positioned around testing and routing MCP traffic.
What happened to Smithery in 2026?
Arcade.dev acquired Smithery, announcing the deal on August 5, 2026. Arcade positions itself as an actions runtime for enterprise AI agents and said the acquisition combines Smithery's developer experience with Arcade's focus on security, reliability, and governance for production agents.
Can I use Smithery and Glama together?
Yes, and many teams effectively do. Glama's inspector and gateway cover the evaluation and routing stage of MCP traffic, while Smithery handles discovery, managed connections, hosting, and publishing. The two overlap on registry features but complement each other on testing versus lifecycle management.
Which is better for a non-technical small business team?
Smithery, on the documented evidence. Its pitch is one-click connections with auth, credentials, and sessions handled for you, plus a CLI skill that teaches canonical workflows. Glama's inspector-and-gateway focus assumes more comfort with MCP internals, which suits developer-heavy teams better.