MCP Census and Smithery
Smithery connects agents to tools and handles auth, credentials, and sessions. The MCP Census checks public evidence and returns PASS, REVIEW, BLOCK, or UNKNOWN. They answer different questions.
| Smithery | The MCP Census | |
|---|---|---|
| Job, in their words | Connect agents to thousands of tools and services. Auth, credentials, and sessions handled for you. Their homepage said this on 15 October 2026. | Public-evidence gate before install. |
| Operator | Privacy notice: Clavia, Inc., doing business as Smithery (notice last updated 20 June 2025). About page names Henry Mao, co-founder and CEO, and Anirudh Kamath, co-founder. Arcade.dev’s post of 5 August 2026 says Arcade acquired Smithery. smithery.ai was still the public site on the check date. | Jaco Veldsman, Australia. |
| Connect or host | Yes. Their docs describe local and remote servers, and deployed servers hosted on Smithery infrastructure. Registry search docs say a Smithery API key is required. | No. We do not host Smithery servers and we do not store third-party credentials. |
| Policy decision | Not what the pages above describe. | PASS, REVIEW, BLOCK, or UNKNOWN, with the sources named in the result. |
| Try | smithery.ai | curl -s https://api.mcpcensus.com/v1/stats needs no account. |
Use Smithery when
You want to find a server and connect an agent, including auth that Smithery handles. That is their product. This page does not rate their use counts or their hosting.
Use the Census when
You want a named policy applied to public evidence before you install or call a server. A Census PASS is not a statement that Smithery’s connection is safe, and a Smithery listing is not a Census PASS.