Arcade Review 2026

An MCP-compatible actions runtime that lets AI agents securely authenticate users, call business tools, and enforce governance outside the model.

Arcade is an actions runtime for teams putting AI agents into production. It sits between an agent and the business systems the agent needs to use, providing one place to authorize, execute, and audit actions. This is especially useful when a prototype must move beyond answering questions and start doing real work, such as updating Salesforce, sending Slack messages, managing Google data, or closing support tickets. Arcade says its catalog contains more than 8,000 permission-aware tools, while also supporting custom MCP integrations that customers build or bring. Its MCP support is central to the product: Arcade operates as an MCP-compatible runtime/server that can connect to MCP clients, and the vendor says its team authored the MCP tool-authorization specification.

The security model is a major differentiator. Authentication runs against the customer's identity provider, authorization is delegated per user, and policies are enforced outside the language model. This avoids giving an agent a broadly shared service account or simply inheriting every permission held by a human. Arcade also offers built-in evaluations intended to catch hallucinated or destructive tool calls before execution. A central control plane can grant, revoke, and version tools, while each action produces an audit record identifying the agent, user, and target system. The vendor advertises SOC 2 compliance, SSO, RBAC, audit logs, SIEM streaming, and cloud, VPC, on-premises, air-gapped, or hybrid deployment options.