Smithery vs Toolhouse
A side-by-side comparison of Smithery and Toolhouse, two MCP tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
The honest brief
Smithery
Largest MCP registry (6,000+ servers) with managed OAuth and hosting, so agents get authenticated tool access without config wrangling.
- Browse and install community servers
- CLI installs without editing JSON
- Persistent authenticated connections
- Deploy your own servers
- Only the CLI is open-source (AGPL)
- Registry/hosting is a closed platform
- Quality of community servers varies
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