Arcade vs Toolhouse
A side-by-side comparison of Arcade and Toolhouse, 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
Toolhouse
Bundles the agent runtime and MCP tooling behind one API, so you skip wiring the infrastructure together yourself.
- Deploy agents as APIs in one command
- 1,000+ MCP tool integrations built in
- Built-in RAG, memory, and code execution
- Free tier includes OpenAI model usage
- Free Sandbox capped at 50 agent runs/month
- Vendor-hosted; less control than self-hosting
- Younger platform with a smaller ecosystem