Best AI Control Planes for Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Forest is an operational backend for regulated companies that need to run human teams, AI agents, BPOs, LLMs, workflows, and suppliers in one governed environment. The platform connects databases, compliance providers, internal tools, specialized agents, and external systems while keeping data inside the customer’s infrastructure. Forest provides the shared control plane where business logic, workflows, permissions, RBAC, smart actions, and audit trails are managed. Teams can use Forest to run regulated workflows on top of existing KYC and KYB providers such as Sumsub, Onfido, Veriff, Persona, and Trulioo. It supports onboarding workflows that combine identity verification, business registry checks, beneficial-owner discovery, document checks, screening, risk-based routing, agent triage, and human review. Forest’s MCP support lets AI agents call the same workflows used by human operators while attaching audit records to each action. The platform is designed for agentic operations in regulated environments where every action by humans, agents, BPOs, LLMs, and workflows must remain traceable. Forest also provides an implementation method that maps the company’s ecosystem, connects data and suppliers, designs operator journeys, and brings workflows into production. By combining governed workflows, live data access, MCP-based agent execution, auditability, permissions, and compliance controls, Forest helps regulated companies scale operations safely.

Arcade.dev is a platform designed for AI tool calling that empowers AI agents to safely carry out real-world tasks such as sending emails, messaging, updating systems, or activating workflows through integrations authorized by users. Serving as a secure authenticated proxy in line with the OpenAI API specification, Arcade.dev allows models to access various external services, including Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, and Notion, through both pre-built connectors and custom tool SDKs while efficiently handling authentication, token management, and security. Developers can utilize a streamlined client interface—arcadepy for Python or arcadejs for JavaScript—that simplifies tool execution and authorization processes without complicating application logic with the need for credentials or API details. The platform is versatile, supporting secure deployments in the cloud, private VPCs, or local environments and features a control plane designed for managing tools, users, permissions, and observability. This comprehensive management system ensures that developers can maintain oversight and control while leveraging the power of AI to automate various tasks effectively.

Obot functions as an open-source AI infrastructure platform and Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway, providing organizations with a centralized control system to discover, onboard, manage, secure, and scale MCP servers, which facilitate the connection of large language models and AI agents to various enterprise systems, tools, and data sources. It incorporates an MCP gateway, a catalog, an administrative console, and an optional integrated chat interface, all within a modern design that works seamlessly with identity providers like Okta, Google, and GitHub to implement access control, authentication, and governance policies across MCP endpoints, thus ensuring that AI interactions remain secure and compliant. Moreover, Obot empowers IT teams to host both local and remote MCP servers, manage access through a secure gateway, establish detailed user permissions, log and audit usage effectively, and create connection URLs for LLM clients, including tools like Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, or custom agents, enhancing operational flexibility and security. Additionally, this platform streamlines the integration of AI services, making it easier for organizations to leverage advanced technologies while maintaining robust governance and compliance standards.

Lunar.dev serves as a comprehensive AI gateway and API consumption management platform designed to empower engineering teams with a singular, integrated control interface for overseeing, regulating, safeguarding, and enhancing all outbound API and AI agent interactions. This includes tracking communications with large language models, utilizing Model Context Protocol tools, and interfacing with external services across various distributed applications and workflows. It offers instantaneous insights into usage patterns, latency issues, errors, and associated costs, enabling teams to monitor every interaction involving models, APIs, and agents in real time. Furthermore, it allows for the enforcement of policies such as role-based access control, rate limiting, quotas, and cost management measures to ensure security and compliance while avoiding excessive usage or surprise expenses. By centralizing the management of outbound API traffic through features like identity-aware routing, traffic inspection, data redaction, and governance, Lunar.dev enhances operational efficiency. Its MCPX gateway further streamlines the management of multiple Model Context Protocol servers by integrating them into a single secure endpoint, providing robust observability and permission oversight for AI tools. Thus, the platform not only simplifies the complexity of API management but also significantly boosts the ability of teams to harness AI technologies effectively.

The Microsoft MCP Gateway serves as an open-source reverse proxy and management interface for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, facilitating scalable and session-aware routing along with lifecycle management and centralized oversight of MCP services, particularly within Kubernetes setups. Acting as a control plane, it adeptly directs requests from AI agents (MCP clients) to the corresponding backend MCP servers while maintaining session affinity, effectively managing multiple tools and endpoints through a singular gateway that prioritizes authorization and observability. Additionally, it empowers teams to deploy, update, and remove MCP servers and tools through RESTful APIs, enabling the registration of tool definitions and the management of these resources with security measures such as bearer tokens and role-based access control (RBAC). The architecture distinctly separates the management of the control plane, which includes CRUD operations on adapters, tools, and metadata, from the data plane's routing capabilities, which support streamable HTTP connections and dynamic tool routing, thus providing advanced features like session-aware stateful routing. This design not only enhances operational efficiency but also fosters a more secure environment for managing AI services.

Peta serves as an advanced control plane for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), streamlining, securing, governing, and overseeing how AI clients and agents interact with external tools, data, and APIs. This platform integrates a zero-trust MCP gateway, a secure vault, a managed runtime environment, a policy engine, human-in-the-loop approvals, and comprehensive audit logging into a cohesive solution, enabling organizations to implement nuanced access controls, safeguard raw credentials, and monitor all tool interactions conducted by AI systems. At the heart of Peta is Peta Core, which functions as both a secure vault and gateway, encrypting credentials, generating short-lived service tokens, verifying identity and compliance with policies for each request, managing the MCP server lifecycle through lazy loading and auto-recovery, and injecting credentials during runtime without revealing them to agents. Additionally, the Peta Console empowers teams to specify which users or agents can access particular MCP tools within designated environments, establish approval protocols, manage tokens, and review usage statistics and associated costs. This multifaceted approach not only enhances security but also fosters efficient resource management and accountability within AI operations.

Barndoor serves as a robust management layer for data and access, ensuring that artificial intelligence systems interact securely with enterprise data and infrastructure. Acting as a unified control center, it oversees AI agents and applications, empowering organizations to set policies, automatically enforce access rules, and retain comprehensive oversight of AI tool operations within business frameworks. Moving beyond traditional identity-based permissions, Barndoor employs context-aware governance, which allows administrators to dictate the allowed actions of an AI agent by considering variables such as the user in charge of the agent, the system being accessed, the nature of the data, and the task at hand. This system assesses each AI request in real time to apply policies before actions are undertaken, thereby thwarting unsafe or unauthorized operations from affecting internal systems or altering sensitive data. Furthermore, by integrating such a nuanced approach to governance, organizations can enhance both security and compliance, ultimately fostering a more trustworthy AI ecosystem.

Agent Control represents a groundbreaking open-source framework designed to manage the behavior of AI agents on a large scale, setting a new benchmark for governance in this domain. It addresses the issue of disjointed and hardcoded checks by providing teams with a unified governance layer that enforces regulations at each step, all managed from a single control interface that can be updated dynamically without altering the agent's underlying code. Developers can easily designate any function as governable by applying the control() decorator, thereby transforming key decision points within an agent into independently regulated control points, each equipped with its own governance policies. When a decorated function runs, Agent Control assesses the input or output against the prevailing policy and generates a response that could be to deny, steer, warn, log, or allow the action. If a denial occurs, the SDK triggers a ControlViolationError, preventing any unsafe actions from being executed. This separation of policies from the actual code empowers developers to strategically position control hooks, while policy teams determine the enforcement specifics of those hooks, ensuring a collaborative approach to governance. The flexibility and robustness of Agent Control make it an invaluable tool for organizations looking to standardize AI agent governance effectively.

Preloop serves as an open-source control plane designed for AI agents that perform tangible actions. It integrates a multi-layered security approach featuring an MCP firewall for managing tool access, an AI model gateway that ensures cost-effectiveness, safety, and accountability, along with policy-as-code that incorporates human oversight, all while providing runtime session visibility and audit trails—all within a self-hosted environment. Given the rapid capabilities of AI agents to deploy code, modify infrastructure, manage financial transactions, access production data, and incur model costs almost instantaneously, Preloop empowers teams to regulate agent activities, monitor expenditures, and determine which actions necessitate human consent. It is compatible with a variety of tools such as OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode, and any agents that adhere to MCP standards. Additionally, access rules can evaluate not only the tool names but also arguments and context, utilizing CEL expressions to establish detailed conditions. Furthermore, teams have the flexibility to initiate with observability features and progressively introduce approval and denial protocols without the need for SDKs or extensive modifications to existing applications, thus streamlining the implementation process. This comprehensive approach ensures that organizations remain in control of their AI agents' functionalities and impacts.

Cloudflare AI Gateway serves as an advanced control plane for AI applications, designed to seamlessly connect to various models while dynamically managing request routing, usage tracking, billing, and logging through a single, cohesive interface. This platform empowers teams by providing enhanced visibility and oversight of their AI applications, enabling them to analyze user interactions through detailed analytics and logs, as well as efficiently manage application scalability through features like caching, rate limiting, request retries, and model fallback. By utilizing response caching and minimizing redundant API calls, AI Gateway effectively lowers costs and reduces latency, allowing frequent requests to be fulfilled directly from Cloudflare’s cache rather than relying on the original model provider. Additionally, it boosts reliability with adaptable controls that determine the timing and conditions under which model provider APIs are accessed, guided by various factors such as attributes, fallbacks, latency, cost, and availability. Importantly, routing rules can be modified directly from the dashboard or via API calls without necessitating redeployments or causing any service interruptions, ensuring a smooth operational experience. In this way, organizations can optimize their AI app performance while maintaining flexibility and control.

JetStream Security serves as a governance platform focused on security, enabling enterprises to gain comprehensive visibility, control, and responsibility over their AI systems by transforming them from unclear, disjointed applications into managed and traceable infrastructures. Functioning as a unified control center, it integrates identity management, operational governance, monitoring, and financial management into one cohesive system, empowering organizations to “monitor every AI action, associate actions with accountable individuals, and ensure workflows stay within authorized limits” while applying policies during runtime. Furthermore, it incorporates agentic identity, linking human, agentic, and non-human identities to specific actions and access rights, thereby ensuring that each invocation, tool usage, or workflow can be tracked and governed according to least-privilege access standards. By maintaining ongoing runtime governance, JetStream continuously evaluates actual AI behavior against pre-approved frameworks, utilizing immutable logging and real-time monitoring to identify deviations, thereby reinforcing security and compliance. This robust approach not only enhances accountability but also supports organizations in navigating the complexities of AI governance effectively.

Singulr is a comprehensive platform designed for enterprise AI governance and security, providing a cohesive control framework that aids organizations in discovering, securing, and optimizing their AI implementations on a large scale. By tackling the widening gap between the rapid deployment of AI technologies and the constraints of governance, it offers unparalleled visibility into all AI systems utilized within the organization, which includes custom applications, integrated AI solutions, public tools, and shadow AI that often evade detection by security teams. It systematically identifies and catalogs AI resources throughout the organization, creating a real-time inventory of agents, models, and services while evaluating their associated risks through thorough contextual assessments of data management, model lineage, vulnerabilities, and compliance requirements. The platform's intelligence layer, Singulr Pulse, processes millions of AI systems, assigns risk ratings, and facilitates automated onboarding processes that significantly shorten approval timelines from weeks to mere hours, all while ensuring robust security measures are in place. This innovative approach not only enhances the efficiency of AI adoption but also empowers organizations to maintain a strong governance framework as they navigate the complexities of AI integration.

Bevel serves as a vendor-neutral, Git-integrated control plane tailored for enterprise AI agents, allowing organizations to define their agents, context, skills, tools, permissions, and identities as owned files within their infrastructure, which can then be accessed by any agent runtime through MCP. The context is organized as typed knowledge nodes, each with documented provenance detailing its source, the last modification, and verification timestamps, and this information is compiled into a navigable graph that can be updated and utilized for creating dashboards. Skills are articulated as straightforward Markdown procedures, enabling process owners to easily read, review changes, and transfer them across different runtimes. Additionally, tool manifests outline the capabilities available, while sensitive information is stored securely in a vault, governed by access rules that dictate which agents can read certain files or invoke specific endpoints. Each agent is assigned a unique identity and credentials, ensuring that all actions can be traced back to their source. This comprehensive framework not only enhances security and organization but also promotes transparency and accountability in AI operations.