Arcade vs FastMCP
A side-by-side comparison of Arcade and FastMCP, two MCP tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
The honest brief
Arcade
Auth-first MCP runtime: brokers per-user OAuth so an agent acts as the real end user, not behind one shared token.
- Real actions in Gmail, GitHub, Slack
- Prebuilt agent-optimized tools
- Open framework for custom tools
- Exposed over MCP standard
- Closed/hosted core platform
- Newer entrant in MCP space
- Setup needed per integration
- Free tier limited
FastMCP
v2 is the standalone superset most Python MCP servers build on; v1 was folded into the official MCP Python SDK.
- Decorate a function, get an MCP tool
- Handles transport, auth, lifecycle
- Apache-2.0, free to self-host
- Pythonic, low boilerplate
- Python-only
- Managed hosting is a separate paid product
- MCP spec still evolving