What I learned evaluating five MCP gateways for production

When Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol in November 2024, the initial conversation was mostly about the protocol itself: a standard way for AI agents to discover and call tools without building custom integrations for every API. That problem was real and the protocol mostly solved it.

But MCP adoption created a second problem that teams started hitting around mid-2025: how do you manage dozens of MCP server connections at scale, control what agents can access, see what they're actually doing, and handle credential rotation without your security team losing sleep? The base protocol doesn't address any of this.

That's the gap MCP gateways fill. I spent several weeks evaluating the main options. This covers what I found, including where each tool has a genuine edge and where it falls short.