Browsing and listing are free. Smithery sells no paid placement, no ads and no dofollow product at all; it makes money on the platform side through hosted execution, OAuth and usage tracking. Pricing for those platform services is not clearly published.

Smithery was acquired by Arcade.dev on August 5, 2026. The acquisition points the company toward enterprise agent infrastructure, which is why some in the community wonder whether the public directory will stay a priority.

What is the best alternative to Smithery?

For skills specifically, MCP Market runs the only paid skills marketplace. For discovery across the whole stack, aiagentslisting.com covers AI agents, MCP servers and agent skills in one human-reviewed directory with browsable categories and alternatives pages, the SEO-facing surface Smithery mostly lacks.

Smithery Alternatives – AI Agents Listing

	Smithery
Listings	17.5K MCP servers, 19.8K agent skills
Scope	MCP registry, hosted execution and agent skills
Pricing	No paid placement; monetizes hosting and platform usage
Coverage	AI agentsMCP serversAgent skills
Notable	Acquired by Arcade.dev in August 2026; shows usage counts on listings

Smithery

Listings

17.5K MCP servers, 19.8K agent skills

Scope

MCP registry, hosted execution and agent skills

Pricing

No paid placement; monetizes hosting and platform usage

Coverage

AI agentsMCP serversAgent skills

Notable

Acquired by Arcade.dev in August 2026; shows usage counts on listings

What Smithery does well

Smithery is a registry with a runtime attached. Beyond its 17.5K MCP servers it hosts the largest agent skills catalog anywhere at 19.8K skills, and it can actually run what it lists: hosted execution, OAuth handling and usage tracking are the product. That last part gives it a trust signal most directories cannot fake, real usage counts printed on listings. A server showing tens of thousands of uses tells you more than any badge. Just as notably, Smithery sells no placement whatsoever: no featured slots, no ads, no dofollow links. What ranks well there ranks on merit.

Why people look for an alternative

The big one is the acquisition. Arcade.dev bought Smithery on August 5, 2026, and the pull toward enterprise infrastructure raises a fair question about how much attention the public directory will get going forward. The discovery surface was already thin: skills get just 12 categories, MCP servers are browsed mostly by search and popularity, and there are no category, use-case or alternatives pages to explore from. Pricing for the platform side is opaque. And despite the enormous skills catalog, Smithery has no AI agents vertical, so it cannot tell you which agents a skill or server actually pairs with.

Where aiagentslisting.com fits

That pairing is exactly what aiagentslisting.com exists for. We are the only directory cross-linking AI agents, MCP servers and agent skills, so a skill's page can point to the agents that use it and a server's page to the agents it powers. Every listing passes human review, and like Smithery we refuse to sell rankings: our Heat score is computed from community engagement, never from spend. Listing is free forever, and everything paid is on a public price list. Honest caveat: we are newer and much smaller, and we cannot show hosted usage counts the way a runtime can. What we offer instead is a browsable, curated map of the whole stack.

Other alternatives worth considering

For skills, MCP Market is the only directory where creators can sell skills directly, though its listings lean heavily on scraped scale. For MCP server data quality, Glama grades 80K+ servers from A to F and runs security audits on each.