# Descope Agentic Identity Hub vs Keycard

> Descope Agentic Identity Hub has a score of 79.2 (A) against Keycard's 56.3 (C). Both do auth oauth. The largest gap is reliability, 65 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-04

Descope Agentic Identity Hub has a score of 79.2 (A) against Keycard's 56.3 (C). Both do auth oauth. The largest gap is reliability, 65 points.

- Descope Agentic Identity Hub: grade A, 79.2/100, rank #10 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/descope-agentic-identity.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/descope-agentic-identity.json
- Keycard: grade C, 56.3/100, rank #303 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/keycard.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/keycard.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Descope Agentic Identity Hub for reliability (+65), schema & documentation (+21), agent ergonomics (+20), payments & pricing (+10), transparency & trust (+25).

Pick Keycard for nothing in particular (no category where it leads by five points or more).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Descope Agentic Identity Hub | Keycard | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 100 | 35 | Descope Agentic Identity Hub +65 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 82 | 61 | Descope Agentic Identity Hub +21 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 80 | 60 | Descope Agentic Identity Hub +20 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 86 | 86 | even |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 30 | Descope Agentic Identity Hub +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 76 | 79 | Keycard +3 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 70 | 45 | Descope Agentic Identity Hub +25 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **79.2 · A** | **56.3 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Descope Agentic Identity Hub | Keycard |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Descope | Keycard Labs |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.descope.com` | `https://api.keycard.ai` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT (SDKs), platform closed | MIT (SDKs), Apache-2.0 (keycard-python API client), platform closed, BYOC or on-prem on Enterprise |
| Tools exposed | none | 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 | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-22 |
| Popularity | 67 stars, 354k npm/wk | 1 stars, 52 npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.1/5 (8) | 2.5/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Descope Agentic Identity Hub.** Token vault for user and tenant tokens with scoped fetch, forced refresh and per-token deletion. No tool catalogue, so you write every provider call yourself.

**Keycard.** Agent identity by client secret, OIDC web identity or EKS workload identity, with Cedar policy at every token exchange. Early Access with sign-up by request, and no terms of service page.

## Before you call either

### Descope Agentic Identity Hub

1. Sign the agent in as its own OAuth client and let Policies scope it, instead of shipping a management key
2. Treat a 404 from the token endpoint as a missing connection and send the user to the connect URL
3. Back off for the full window on a 429, 60 seconds for most management endpoints
4. Ask for a tenant token, not a user token, for organisation-wide API keys
5. Budget monthly active tokens, since every token fetched and used counts once a month

### Keycard

1. Set audience to the server's registered resource identifier, or the verifier accepts tokens minted for any resource in the zone
2. Check `AccessContext.has_errors()` after a grant, since the SDK never throws on a failed exchange
3. Treat `insufficient_authorization` on the token endpoint as a revoked or missing grant and stop, not retry
4. Keep credentials short-lived, because revocation only stops the next issuance
5. Pin keycardai-mcp to a major version, since 1.0.0 and 2.0.0 shipped a day apart

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- [Arcade.dev vs Descope Agentic Identity Hub](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/arcade-vs-descope-agentic-identity.md)
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