§ MCP Gateway Criteria Guide

§ Introduction

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem has expanded rapidly over the past year. Many organizations are now experimenting with MCP Gateways—specialized infrastructure layers that standardize how autonomous agents discover and call tools, securely connect to external services, and enforce enterprise policies.

An MCP Gateway acts as a trusted intermediary between agents and the broader network of tools and data sources. It provides a common interface for tool registration and discovery, manages context passing between agents and environments, and applies governance controls such as authentication, authorization, logging, and rate limiting. In enterprise deployments, the gateway often doubles as a reverse proxy, ensuring that agent interactions comply with internal security, privacy, and compliance policies while maintaining performance and observability.

To help readers navigate this fast-evolving space, the evaluation framework below scores each gateway across six major categories:

1. Core MCP Capabilities
2. Security and Compliance
3. Performance and Scalability
4. Operations and Reliability
5. Developer Experience
6. Architecture and Integration

Each criterion is weighted by priority: must-have (P0) features carry triple weight, should-have (P1) features double weight, and nice-to-have (P2) features single weight. Scores range from 0 (unsupported) to 3 (enterprise-grade), with higher totals indicating more mature and production-ready offerings.

§ High Level Architecture

The MCP Gateway serves as the central coordination and control layer within the Model Context Protocol ecosystem. It manages how autonomous agents (MCP Clients) interact with tools and services (MCP Servers), defining clear trust boundaries both inside and outside an organization. In essence, it is the policy and routing hub for all agentic traffic—governing what can talk to what, under which conditions, and with what level of visibility.

As shown in the high-level architecture diagram, an MCP Gateway typically sits between hosted MCP Servers and the clients that use them. Within an enterprise, this allows the gateway to function as an internal trust boundary, unifying multiple servers into a single access layer. All requests from agents—whether they involve querying data, invoking tools, or retrieving contextual information—flow through the gateway, where they can be authenticated, authorized, and observed in real time. This ensures that internal systems remain consistent and compliant without slowing down innovation or experimentation.

At the same time, the gateway also manages the external boundary of an organization’s trust domain. It acts as the secure bridge to external partners, ecosystems, or marketplaces of MCP clients and servers. By brokering these cross-boundary interactions, the gateway can apply enterprise policy—such as filtering prompts, enforcing rate limits, or anonymizing data—before information leaves the internal network. This dual role makes the MCP Gateway a foundational piece of infrastructure for enterprises that want to safely participate in the emerging, interconnected agent economy.

Beneath this architectural layer lies a rich set of capabilities. The gateway maintains a registry of available servers and tools, allowing agents to discover and bind to them dynamically. It handles authentication and authorization (AuthN/AuthZ), ensuring only approved entities can access sensitive resources. It performs translations between schemas or tool definitions to preserve interoperability, and provides observability across all interactions for auditing and performance tuning. Other capabilities include routing and proxying, networking controls, virtual server orchestration, LLM testing, and prompt filtering—each adding another layer of safety, control, and insight.

Together, these features make the MCP Gateway far more than a traffic router. It is the governance and policy enforcement point of the Model Context Protocol—enabling enterprises to control both the surface area and behavior of their agent networks while maintaining trust, compliance, and performance at scale.

§ Criteria Considerations

To objectively assess the maturity and enterprise readiness of MCP Gateways, a consistent set of evaluation criteria is used. Each category captures a distinct dimension of gateway capability — from core protocol adherence and agent orchestration to compliance posture, scalability, and developer ergonomics.

These criteria are not merely technical benchmarks; they represent the practical considerations that determine whether an MCP Gateway can operate reliably in complex, real-world environments. By defining these categories, evaluators can score each solution along comparable axes, identify trade-offs, and highlight differentiators among competing implementations.

We describe how to score each category relative to your use case in the Scoring section

§ Scoring Methodology

To score, each MCP Gateway is evaluated against the defined criteria using a weighted scoring system designed to balance functional depth with enterprise readiness. The framework quantifies both feature completeness and implementation maturity, allowing for consistent comparison across diverse gateway architectures.

Each capability within a category is scored on a 0–3 scale, where higher values indicate greater robustness, integration depth, and production readiness:

To account for varying importance across features, each capability is assigned a priority weight:

• P0 (Must-Have) → ×3 weight
• P1 (Should-Have) → ×2 weight
• P2 (Nice-to-Have) → ×1 weight

Defaults may be chosen by industry alignment, but your organization may have it’s own requirements and may decide to weigh each of the priorities differently.

The total score for a gateway is computed as the weighted sum of all category scores, normalized to produce an aggregate rating that reflects overall maturity and alignment with enterprise needs. This allows readers to identify strengths and trade-offs—for example, a gateway with strong developer experience but limited compliance features—while maintaining transparency in how evaluations are derived.

§ High Level Categories

The follow are high level categories. For a simple calculation, you may score against these high level categories instead of through the Sub-Categories, which represent a more detailed evaluation.

§ Referencing Categories and Features

Each category and criterion in this evaluation framework is assigned a unique identifier to enable consistent referencing in discussions, documentation, and scoring sheets:

• Category Codes: High-level categories are referenced using codes C1 through C6 (e.g., “C1: Core Protocol & Agent Logic” or simply “C1”).
• Criterion Codes: Individual criteria within each category use a hierarchical code format: CategoryID.SubCriterionNumber (e.g., C1.1, C2.5, C3.2). The first number indicates the category, and the second number identifies the specific criterion within that category.
• Usage: When evaluating gateways or discussing specific capabilities, use these codes for brevity and precision. For example:
  • “Gateway X scores 3 on C2.1 (Client Authentication)”
  • “The gateway meets all P0 requirements in category C1”
  • “Feature C4.3 (Circuit Breakers) is implemented as enterprise-grade”

This referencing system makes it easy to track which capabilities are being evaluated, compare implementations across different gateways, and maintain consistency in documentation and scoring artifacts.

§ Sub-Categories

Each high-level category can be further broken down into sub-categories, represented as criteria with unique hierarchical identifiers (e.g., C2.5, C4.3). These sub-categories provide a more granular approach to evaluating an MCP Gateway’s capabilities.

Scoring at the sub-category (criterion) level enables detailed assessments that capture not only whether a feature exists, but also how robust and enterprise-ready its implementation is. This level of detail supports more nuanced comparisons between gateways—and helps organizations identify areas of strength or potential risk tailored to their specific use cases.

When conducting a full evaluation, consider using the sub-category criteria below as your primary checklist. For rapid, high-level assessments, scoring just the main categories may be sufficient.

A comprehensive scoring sheet should reference both category and sub-category (criterion) codes to ensure clarity, avoid ambiguity, and empower efficient cross-team collaboration during procurement, architecture reviews, or compliance audits.

§ Category Governance Guide

When creating or evaluating sub-categories for MCP Gateway assessments, follow these three core principles to ensure criteria are practical, objective, and actionable:

§ Observable

A criterion must be directly observable through testing, inspection, or documentation review. Evaluators should be able to verify the feature or capability exists and functions as described without requiring internal knowledge or proprietary information.

• ✅ Good: “Supports OAuth 2.0 authentication” — can be verified by testing authentication flows or reviewing documentation
• ❌ Poor: “Has good security practices” — too vague and subjective; cannot be objectively observed

§ Measurable

Each criterion must be quantifiable or scorable on the 0–3 scale defined in the Scoring Methodology. The evaluation should produce a specific score (0, 1, 2, or 3) based on observable evidence, not subjective judgment.

• ✅ Good: “Latency overhead” — can be measured with metrics (P50/P95/P99) and compared against benchmarks
• ❌ Poor: “Provides good performance” — lacks specific metrics or thresholds for measurement

§ Only

A criterion should assess one distinct capability or feature at a time. Avoid bundling multiple unrelated features into a single criterion, as this makes scoring ambiguous and prevents accurate comparison across gateways.

• ✅ Good: “Client Authentication” — focuses solely on authentication mechanisms
• ❌ Poor: “Security and Authentication” — combines multiple distinct security capabilities that should be evaluated separately

§ Guidelines for Adding New Sub-Categories

Before adding a new criterion:

1. Verify necessity: Ensure the capability is not already covered by an existing criterion (C1.1 through C6.10)
2. Check observability: Confirm the feature can be verified through testing, documentation, or standard evaluation methods
3. Define measurement: Specify how to score the criterion (what constitutes 0, 1, 2, or 3)
4. Ensure uniqueness: Verify it addresses a distinct capability not already captured elsewhere
5. Update numbering: Assign the next sequential ID within the appropriate category (e.g., C1.9, C2.11)
6. Submit via Pull Request: Propose new criteria through a pull request to this repository. All reasonable proposals that follow the Observable, Measurable, and Only principles will be accepted and integrated into the framework.

§ Criterion Template

When documenting a new criterion, use this structure:

| **Category ID** | **Criterion ID** | **Criterion** | **Description** | **Considerations** |

• Criterion: Brief, descriptive name (4–5 words maximum)
• Description: Clear explanation of what is being evaluated
• Considerations: Specific things to check, metrics to review, or documentation to examine

This governance ensures that all criteria remain objective, comparable, and useful for making informed decisions about MCP Gateway implementations. Contributions that propose new sub-categories following these principles are welcome and will be accepted through the standard pull request process.

§ Current Scores

TODO. This will feature a matrix of scores.