Smithery is a catalog and connection layer that points your agent at MCP servers other people publish; ToolRouter is a gateway where 254 specialist tools and 1,345 skills as of 3 September 2026 are already hosted and maintained behind one connection, and you pay per successful call. They overlap on "one place to connect an agent to tools" and diverge on who maintains and prices what you call.
Checked on 5 September 2026. Smithery facts below come from smithery.ai and smithery.ai/docs as they read that day. ToolRouter figures come from toolrouter.com/pricing and the catalog count published on 3 September 2026.
Smithery is now part of Arcade.dev
The Smithery homepage carries a banner reading "Smithery is now a part of Arcade.dev" with a link to the announcement. That matters when you are choosing between them: Smithery's roadmap and commercial terms now sit with Arcade, whose own product is a per-user authorization runtime. If per-user auth is what you actually need, the honest recommendation is Arcade, not ToolRouter.
What Smithery does
Smithery describes itself as connecting agents "to the outside world — search the web, query databases, control browsers, reach into business tools" and as connecting "your AI agent to a growing catalog of tools and integrations — and lets you publish your own". Its homepage adds that "Auth, credentials, and sessions handled for you." So it is a catalog plus a credential and session layer in front of MCP servers that the community and vendors publish.
The tools themselves are not Smithery's. Quality, uptime, pricing and breaking changes belong to whoever published each server. That is the model's strength — the catalog grows without Smithery building anything — and its weakness: two servers doing the same job can behave differently, and neither is on Smithery's bill.
What ToolRouter does
ToolRouter hosts and maintains the tools in its catalog — each one a versioned product with a published input schema, examples, a changelog and a normalized response, sitting over one or more upstream providers. One MCP connection exposes a fixed 47-tool surface; discover searches the catalog and use_tool runs a skill, so adding tools to the catalog does not grow what your agent loads at connect time (measured in the schema-weight benchmark). Free tools are free with no sign-up. A paid call costs the tool's own price plus a flat $0.005 platform fee, so paid tools start at $0.005, and a failed paid call is not charged.
Smithery vs ToolRouter
| ToolRouter | Smithery | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Hosted gateway; ToolRouter maintains the catalog | Catalog and connection layer for MCP servers others publish |
| Who maintains what you call | ToolRouter, over upstream providers | The publisher of each server |
| Catalog | 254 tools, 1,345 skills (3 September 2026) | "thousands of tools and services"; "a growing catalog of tools and integrations" — no exact count on the pages checked |
| Auth and credentials | Managed, with BYOK where a tool supports it | "Auth, credentials, and sessions handled for you" |
| What an agent loads | A fixed 47-tool surface, 9,286 tokens; the catalog is reached through discover | Depends on which servers you connect |
| Pricing | Free tools free; a paid call is the tool's price plus a flat $0.005 platform fee, so from $0.005; failed paid calls not charged; Lite $9/mo, Plus $19/mo | Not published on the pages reachable on 5 September 2026 |
| Ownership | Independent | Part of Arcade.dev |
| Publish your own | You can attach your own MCP server to your account with connector_add; there is no self-serve publishing to the public catalog | Yes — publishing for distribution is a core feature |
When Smithery is the better choice
Pick Smithery when you want breadth of *community* MCP servers, when you want to publish your own server to a distribution channel, or when the specific server you need already exists there and nowhere else. ToolRouter does not mirror the public MCP-server ecosystem and does not offer self-serve publishing to its catalog.
Pick ToolRouter when you would rather have one party accountable for whether the tool works: one maintained catalog, one bill, one measured context cost, and per-call pricing where a failure costs nothing.
Smithery alternative FAQ
Is ToolRouter a drop-in replacement for Smithery?
No. Smithery connects you to servers other people publish; ToolRouter replaces those servers with tools it hosts and maintains itself. If you depend on a specific community server, ToolRouter will not have it unless the same capability exists in its own catalog — check /tools.
Does ToolRouter let me publish my own MCP server?
Two different things. You can *attach* your own MCP server to your ToolRouter account — connector_add accepts a custom MCP URL and auth type — and your agent then reaches it through the same connection. What you cannot do is publish it into ToolRouter's public catalog for other people to use. If distribution is what you want, Smithery is the right product.
What happened to Smithery?
Smithery's homepage on 5 September 2026 states it is now part of Arcade.dev. Check Arcade's announcement for what that means for existing Smithery projects; ToolRouter has no visibility into their plans.
How much does each cost?
ToolRouter: free tools cost nothing, a paid call is the tool's own price plus a flat $0.005 platform fee so paid tools start at $0.005, failed paid calls are not charged, and optional Lite ($9/mo) and Plus ($19/mo) plans include credits. Smithery's pricing was not published on any page reachable on 5 September 2026, so it is not quoted here.
Which one costs less context?
ToolRouter's connect-time surface is a measured 9,286 tokens for 47 tool definitions, regardless of catalog size — see the benchmark. Smithery's cost depends on how many servers you connect and how large their schemas are; no equivalent published measurement was found.
Compare more: ToolRouter vs Arcade · ToolRouter vs Monid · ToolRouter vs Composio · Every "OpenRouter for tools" compared · All comparisons.