MCP Context Forge is IBM’s open-source AI gateway, registry and proxy for the Model Context Protocol. It sits in front of any MCP, A2A or REST/gRPC API and exposes everything behind a single unified endpoint, so agent applications connect to one governed front door instead of wiring up dozens of individual tool servers by hand.
As agent stacks grow, teams end up with scattered MCP servers, ad-hoc API integrations and no central place to enforce policy or see what is being called. Context Forge solves that with federation, centralized discovery and management: tools and servers are registered once, then discovered and invoked through the gateway with authentication, guardrails and observability applied consistently. It is built on FastAPI and asyncio, ships with a plugin system for extending gateway behavior, and deploys via PyPI, Docker or Kubernetes. The project is developed by IBM under the Apache-2.0 license, has earned more than 4,600 stars on GitHub, and was still under very active development in 2026, with commits landing the same week this listing was written. For organizations standardizing on MCP, it provides the operational layer โ registry, gateway and policy enforcement โ that individual tool servers deliberately leave out.
Free. MCP Context Forge is open source under the Apache-2.0 license; you run the gateway on your own infrastructure with no paid tiers.
Platform and AI engineering teams operating multiple MCP servers or agent tool integrations who need one governed endpoint with discovery, security controls and visibility, instead of point-to-point connections for every tool.