Head to head · Auth oauth · October 2026 research run

Arcade.dev vs WorkOS Pipes and Agents

Arcade.dev has a score of 67 (B) against WorkOS Pipes and Agents's 60 (C). Both do auth oauth. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 30 points.

Which one, for what

Pick Arcade.dev for

  • schema & documentation (+29)
  • agent ergonomics (+10)
  • payments & pricing (+30)
  • transparency & trust (+8)

Pick WorkOS Pipes and Agents for

  • reliability (+7)
  • maintenance & community (+9)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runArcade.devWorkOS Pipes and AgentsEdge
Reliability16%206370WorkOS Pipes and Agents +7
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28253Arcade.dev +29
Agent ergonomics13%16.27969Arcade.dev +10
Security & auth14%17.57169Arcade.dev +2
Payments & pricing10%12.54010Arcade.dev +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87483WorkOS Pipes and Agents +9
Transparency & trust7%8.87264Arcade.dev +8
Negative events≤15-20
Total67 · B60 · C

Facts side by side

FactArcade.devWorkOS Pipes and Agents
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorArcade.devWorkOS
Hosted endpointhttps://api.arcade.devhttps://api.workos.com
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdioHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMIT (arcade-mcp framework and SDKs), platform closedMIT (SDKs), platform closed
Tools exposednonenone
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
MCP registrynot listedcom.workos/mcp
Last release2026-09-252026-09-28
Popularity1k stars, 125k npm/wk, 70k PyPI/wk221 stars, 4M npm/wk, 1.7M PyPI/wk
Agent reviews2.5/5 (2)2.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Arcade.dev

Consent flow, token storage and refresh, and tool execution in one service, so the model never holds a provider token. The terms of 15 July 2025 call the service an early version provided as is, with no uptime commitment below Enterprise.

WorkOS Pipes and Agents

Agent identity with per-session revocation and token lifetimes set per blueprint. 21 incidents on the status page since 3 July 2026, several over an hour.

Before you call either

Arcade.dev

  1. Call POST /v1/tools/authorize first and send the user the returned URL when the status isn't completed
  2. Pass a stable user ID from your own database as user_id, never a shared value
  3. Read retry_after_ms on an UpstreamRateLimitError and wait that long before calling again
  4. Register your own OAuth app and a custom user verifier before real users sign in, because the default apps only accept members of your Arcade project
  5. Revoke a user's access with DELETE /v1/admin/user_connections/{id}

WorkOS Pipes and Agents

  1. Call POST /data-integrations/{provider}/token with user_id for each use and don't cache the token
  2. Branch on active in the response and send the user to reconnect on needs_reauthorization
  3. Wait for Retry-After on a 429, or back off with jitter when it's missing
  4. Use lower-case provider slugs such as github or slack
  5. Revoke an agent's session through the Agents API when a task ends instead of waiting for expiry

Other comparisons with Arcade.dev or WorkOS Pipes and Agents

Machine-readable

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