Catalogue vs MCP gateway: choosing the right layer

When teams talk about “managing MCPs,” they often mean two different jobs. One is a gateway that brokers live tool calls. The other is a catalogue that records what is connected, how it should be used, and who may see it. Joyst is deliberately the second.

Why start with a catalogue

• You cannot govern what you cannot see.

• Annotations and skills are content problems, not only networking problems.

• Multi-tenant permissions and audit are easier when you are not also proxying every call.

• Agents already know how to talk to MCPs; they need a source of truth for organisational knowledge.

Where Joyst still touches runtime

Joyst hosts a skills MCP so agents can pull published skills and agent setup recipes. Secrets can be substituted server-side for controlled HTTP calls. Neither turns Joyst into a general MCP proxy for ClickUp, Missive, or the rest of your stack.

Pick the layer that matches the pain

If your pain is “nobody knows what we have,” start with a catalogue. If your pain is “we must inspect every tool call,” you may eventually need a gateway — but you will still need inventory and permissions. Read more about Joyst’s approach on the about page.