# Permit MCP Gateway vs Temporal

> Temporal has a score of 77.2 (BB) against Permit MCP Gateway's 54.5 (C). Both do hitl approve. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 47 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-04

Temporal has a score of 77.2 (BB) against Permit MCP Gateway's 54.5 (C). Both do hitl approve. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 47 points.

- Permit MCP Gateway: grade C, 54.5/100, rank #321 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/permit-mcp-gateway.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/permit-mcp-gateway.json
- Temporal: grade BB, 77.2/100, rank #21 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/temporal.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/temporal.json

## Which one, for what

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

Pick Temporal for reliability (+38), schema & documentation (+38), security & auth (+6), payments & pricing (+10), maintenance & community (+47), transparency & trust (+25).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Permit MCP Gateway | Temporal | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 47 | 85 | Temporal +38 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 53 | 91 | Temporal +38 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 83 | 85 | Temporal +2 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 80 | 86 | Temporal +6 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 10 | 20 | Temporal +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 43 | 90 | Temporal +47 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 45 | 70 | Temporal +25 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **54.5 · C** | **77.2 · BB** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Permit MCP Gateway | Temporal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | Model platform |
| Vendor | Permit.io | Temporal Technologies |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://{subdomain}.agent.security/mcp` | no (local only) |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | MIT |
| 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 | yes |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | none | 2026-09-15 |
| Popularity | none | none |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (2) | 3.6/5 (8) |

## Verdicts

**Permit MCP Gateway.** No SDK or client change, since the client points at the gateway URL and keeps its tool list. Approvals are Enterprise only, through a demo, with no published price.

**Temporal.** Waits of any length with a timeout survive worker restarts and deploys. No reviewer inbox, notifications or routing, so the human side is all your code.

## Before you call either

### Permit MCP Gateway

1. Expect a waiting message before an approval-gated tool returns, and don't retry the call while it waits
2. Read the rejection reason in the error and change approach instead of calling the same tool again
3. Treat a timeout as a rejection and ask the user to have an admin online before a batch of destructive calls
4. Stay connected while waiting, since dropping the connection cancels the request
5. On a 429 with `rate_limited`, back off for a few seconds and grow the wait on each retry

### Temporal

1. Put the decision in a typed Signal payload (approver, decision, comments, timestamp) instead of a bare boolean
2. Always wait with a timeout and treat the timeout path as a rejection or an escalation on purpose
3. Use the workflow ID as the approval ID, so the reviewer's tool only needs one value to send the Signal
4. Use an Update instead of a Signal when the approver's tool needs an acknowledgement back
5. Expect `ResourceExhausted` under load and let the SDK retry it, since signals are throttled last

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