Gareth MorgansProduct
Private MCP catalog vs public MCP marketplace
Search for “MCP marketplace” and you will find directories of servers to browse. Those are useful, but they are the wrong product for an organisation that needs to know which tools are allowed, who owns them and how they behave.
A private MCP catalogue is your organisation's allow-list: documented, owned and approved. It answers a different question: what can our people connect, with what docs, under whose ownership?
Start free beta | Private vs public MCP registry
Related: how-to: connect and document an MCP server | AI governance | catalogue vs MCP gateway | AI governance for skills, prompts and MCPs.
What a public MCP marketplace is for
Public marketplaces and directories help individuals discover MCP servers. They are built around listings, popularity and trying new servers.
They do not give you:
An allow-list for your organisation
Internal documentation of how a tool is meant to be used
Owners and permissions for who can connect or manage
An audit trail when something changes
If your team installs from a public list and documents nothing, onboarding and reviews both suffer.
What a private MCP catalog controls
A private MCP catalogue is the inventory your organisation controls:
Connect the servers you actually use
Document tools so people know what each one does. See document MCP tools
Approve what the team may use
Assign owners, so “who maintains this?” always has an answer
Strangers do not browse your internal tool list. Your people stop inventing one-off connections.
Document and approve
Undocumented MCP tools slow down every new starter and every incident review. Keep notes in the catalogue beside the connection, where they stay current, rather than in a separate wiki that drifts.
Approval turns “someone on the team found this” into “this server is signed off for our work”. That is the difference between a marketplace bookmark and a managed catalogue.
Where Joyst sits
Joyst's MCP catalogue is private by design. For a comparison with public registries, see private vs public MCP registry. Approved servers feed skills and agents. Secrets stay in the secrets vault, referenced rather than pasted into tool configs.
An enterprise MCP gateway is on our roadmap. The catalogue comes first.
FAQ
Is Joyst an MCP marketplace?
No. Joyst is a private catalogue for your organisation. There is no public storefront for downloading servers.
Can we still use public MCP servers?
Yes. Connect, document and approve them in your catalogue first. Find servers anywhere, and control them in Joyst.
How is this different from an MCP gateway?
The catalogue covers inventory, documentation, ownership and the approved list. A gateway handles traffic and policy at the point of connection. The two are related, but they are different jobs.