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Composition axis

Gateway MCP servers

Reaches many systems at once. One connection that fans out to hundreds of apps, trading depth for breadth.

Example · Zapier

A Gateway server trades depth for breadth. One connection, and the agent can reach hundreds of applications behind it.

For a small practice that runs on ten tools and has nobody to maintain integrations, that trade is often correct. Connecting a gateway once is less work than connecting nine separate servers, and it covers applications that will never publish an MCP server of their own.

The cost is credential custody. A Gateway holds tokens for every system it fans out to, which means one vendor now sits between your agent and your client data, and a breach there is a breach everywhere at once. That is not a reason to avoid gateways. It is a reason to know which of your systems the gateway can reach, and to scope it to the ones you actually need rather than accepting the default grant.

Depth is the other trade. A Gateway usually exposes a generic shape across every app it touches, so you get a common denominator rather than the specific, well-modeled tools a native System server publishes for its own product.

Gateway servers in the directory

4 servers in this directory play this role

The other roles

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