Runlayer Alternatives: How Runlayer Compares With Deployed OS, Mintive, Obot, Docker, Cloudflare, Kong and Glean

What Runlayer is

Runlayer started as an MCP gateway and now calls itself an AI control plane: the layer between a company’s AI tools and agents and the systems they reach. MCP is the standard Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and coding tools use to connect to other software; our guide to MCP gateways explains the idea if it is new. According to Runlayer’s platform page and its product summary, the main parts are:

• Gateway. One route for MCP requests from more than 300 AI clients, including Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor and GitHub Copilot.
• Catalog. Approved connectors, skills and plugins, drawn from what Runlayer says are more than 18,000 vetted MCP servers, plus a way to turn internal APIs into MCP servers.
• Guard. Threat detection that scans tool definitions for hidden instructions and prompt injection, and watches sessions for tool poisoning, data exfiltration and agents drifting from their task. It also masks personal data.
• Watch. Discovery of shadow MCP servers, skills and client configurations on employees’ devices, through device management tools.
• Identity. Single sign-on and SCIM provisioning with Okta and Microsoft Entra ID, with access driven by directory groups.
• Deployment. Runlayer’s cloud, or your own VPC, for companies that want no data to leave their environment.

In short, it is a security product first. That is a deliberate choice, and for many large companies it is exactly the right one.

Founders, funding and customers

Runlayer was founded by Andrew Berman (CEO), Vitor Balocco and Tal Peretz, and came out of stealth in November 2025 with an $11 million seed round led by Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures and Felicis, as TechCrunch reported. David Soria Parra, one of the creators of MCP, joined as an angel investor and adviser. In June 2026 Fortune reported a $30 million Series A, pre-empted by Felicis with Khosla Ventures taking part, which brought total funding to $42 million.

Customers named in that launch coverage include Gusto, Instacart, dbt Labs, Opendoor, Rippling and Ramp. The pattern is clear: fast-growing US technology companies with their own security teams, many of whose staff use coding tools as well as chat assistants.

Runlayer pricing

Runlayer does not publish prices. On 3 November 2026 we found no price list or free tier on its site; the route in is a demo and a quote. Expect enterprise pricing agreed per customer, and ask how the quote scales with users, servers and deployment in your own cloud.

Runlayer vs seven alternatives

These are not all the same kind of product. Docker, Cloudflare, Kong and Azure are building blocks for technical teams; Runlayer, Mintive, Glean and Deployed OS are products a company buys and rolls out. Zapier MCP is different again: it lets one person connect their own apps to their own AI client, rather than giving the company a control point, so we have left it out.

The alternatives one by one

Deployed OS

Our own, built for companies of 50 to 1,000 people where most AI users are not developers. The company connects its business systems once and the same connection works in Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and coding tools that accept MCP, such as Claude Code and Cursor, on top of the plans you already have (see Claude Team vs Enterprise and ChatGPT Business vs Enterprise). Each person signs in with their own login where the system allows it, user groups decide who may read or change what, and every call is logged and can be exported. Company skills and guardrails come with every question, so people work the same way under the same rules. There are ready connectors for common business systems, and we build the ones you are missing, including industry and regional systems no catalogue covers. It is made by an EU company: it runs managed by us, in your own cloud or on your own servers, and you choose where data is stored. Less suited if you need deep security tooling such as threat detection on tool definitions or device-level shadow AI discovery. Runlayer goes further there. See the connectors.

Mintive (formerly MintMCP)

Renamed in October 2026, Mintive now combines an MCP gateway with an LLM gateway, guardrails for tool calls, agent monitoring and agents that work in Slack. Tools are grouped into bundles per team, and prices are quoted per customer. Closest to Runlayer in who it sells to; worth a side-by-side if you also want an LLM gateway in the same product. mintive.com

Obot

An open-source MCP gateway with registries for MCP servers and skills, access by user or identity-provider group, and audit logs. You run it on your own Kubernetes cluster or use Obot Cloud. The pick if you want open source and full control over hosting, and have a platform team to run it. obot.ai

Docker MCP Gateway

Docker’s open-source gateway, the engine behind the MCP Toolkit in Docker Desktop. It runs MCP servers in isolated containers and acts as one proxy between AI clients and those servers, handling configuration, credentials and access control. Docker lists a wider governance offering around it as invite-only. The pick if your developers want a free, container-based way to run MCP servers safely. Docker’s documentation

Cloudflare MCP server portals

Part of Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform. A portal puts several MCP servers behind one URL, Access policies decide which users see which server, and Cloudflare logs the requests made through the portal. The pick if you already run Cloudflare Zero Trust and mainly need access control and logging in front of MCP servers. Cloudflare’s documentation

Kong and Azure API Management

If you already run an API gateway, it may cover part of the job. Kong’s AI Gateway Enterprise adds an MCP OAuth plugin, still in tech preview, that checks tokens before requests reach an MCP server. Kong’s documentation. Azure API Management can expose existing REST APIs as MCP servers, with rate limits, IP filtering and monitoring. Microsoft’s documentation. The pick if the job is mainly exposing your own APIs to AI under rules your API team already runs.

Glean

Enterprise search and an assistant over indexed company data, now with its own MCP server and MCP gateway so Claude, ChatGPT and other tools can use it. The pick if permission-aware search across very many apps is the main need. More in our page on Glean alternatives. glean.com

When Runlayer is the better pick

• Security leads the decision. You want threat detection on tool definitions and sessions, not only access control and a log.
• You need to find shadow AI on devices, including MCP servers and skills people installed themselves. Our guide to shadow AI covers why that matters.
• You are a large US company with a security team that will own and tune the platform.

If most of those are true, Runlayer is built for you, and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong tool.

How to choose

Start from who will use it and who will run it. For a company of a few hundred people where most staff work in Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot on ordinary business systems, the need is usually less about catching attacks and more about control and consistency: which systems the AI may reach, for which groups, under which rules, with a log you can show a client or auditor. That is the case we built Deployed OS for. For a large, security-led organisation, Runlayer, Mintive or a self-hosted gateway is the closer fit. Our comparison of MCP gateways goes wider, and AI agent governance covers the controls to ask any vendor about. Write down your rules first; our AI policy guide helps.

Want one control layer for Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot, with your company’s skills, guardrails and systems in it? Deployed OS connects them once for everyone, from an EU company, with data stored where you choose.

Frequently asked questions