Head to head · Crm records · October 2026 research run

Close API + MCP vs Copper API

Close API + MCP has a score of 66.9 (B) against Copper API's 46.9 (D). Both do crm records. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 58 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Close API + MCP	Copper API	Edge
Reliability	16%20	81	79	Close API + MCP +2
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	82	48	Close API + MCP +34
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	56	40	Close API + MCP +16
Security & auth	14%17.5	66	27	Close API + MCP +39
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	30	30	even
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	79	21	Close API + MCP +58
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	69	74	Copper API +5
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		66.9 · B	46.9 · D

Fact	Close API + MCP	Copper API
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Close	Copper
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.close.com/api/v1`	`https://api.copper.com/developer_api/v1`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Paid	Paid
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	121	none
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	yes	no
llms.txt	yes	no
MCP registry	`com.close/close-mcp`	not listed
Last release	2026-09-10	2026-07-02
Popularity	70 stars, 14k PyPI/wk	none
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	1.5/5 (2)

Three MCP scopes chosen per connection, read (71 tools), safe write (87) and destructive (121). 121 MCP tools, and even the read scope loads 71.

Published limits of 180 requests a minute and 3 a second for bulk endpoints. No official MCP server, OpenAPI spec or llms.txt.

Connect with Close-Scope: mcp.read unless the job needs writes, and mcp.write_safe if it only creates
Sleep for the reset value in the RateLimit header after a 429, which the docs say beats retry-after
Use cursors through advanced filtering or the event log for large pulls, since _skip has a per-resource ceiling
Search the lead before create_lead, because there's no idempotency key and a retry makes a duplicate
Expect create_draft_email to leave a draft, and tell the user to send it from Close

Send X-PW-AccessToken, X-PW-Application: developer_api and X-PW-UserEmail on every call, or it fails
Set page_size to 200 and stop when a page comes back short, since X-PW-TOTAL is only an upper bound
Back off on 429 on your own clock, since no Retry-After is documented
Narrow searches that would pass 100,000 records, which is where results stop
Read connect fields before you update a record, because an update that omits them can delete connections