LeanMCP vs Workato
Workato was massively anti-MCP initially. They had advertising saying MCP is “AI noise.” Now they’ve pivoted and actually provide a way to host MCPs — but it’s very basic. Workato is a closed-source platform built for enterprise integrations. They’ve been in the space for a long time, but their approach has always been proprietary. They wanted to go against open platforms. Now that MCP is becoming the standard, they’re playing catch-up. LeanMCP provides a full-fledged platform — logging, automatic observability, MCP-based optimization of infrastructure. It’s not just hosting; it’s end-to-end from framework to deployment. And it’s open source. Workato gives you basic MCP hosting. LeanMCP gives you the SDK to build, the CLI to manage, and the platform to deploy with production-grade observability.LeanMCP vs Vercel
Vercel is one of the best ways to deploy frontend code, especially if you’re using Next.js. It’s tightly coupled with Next.js (which Vercel also created), and if you’re building a minimalist web app, Vercel shines. For MCPs, it’s a different story. Vercel doesn’t have an MCP SDK — you have to build your own or use a generic Express server. And because Vercel runs on AWS Lambda under the hood, you inherit Lambda’s limitations. The main problem is timeouts. Lambda has a 5-second limit on edge functions and 30 seconds otherwise. If your MCP does anything sophisticated — like summarizing API responses to reduce tokens — it might take longer than that. You’ll hit timeouts and your requests will fail. Vercel works fine for minimalist MCPs that just wrap APIs and return responses in under 2-3 seconds. But for complex MCPs with token-efficient summarization, it’s not the right choice. LeanMCP runs on a virtualization layer deployed on bare metal — not AWS Lambda. No arbitrary timeouts. Seamless scaling. And an SDK built specifically for MCPs, so you can get from idea to deployed production server really fast.| Aspect | Vercel | LeanMCP |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Frontend, Next.js apps | MCP servers |
| Timeout limits | 5-30 seconds | None |
| MCP SDK | None (DIY) | Built-in |
| Infrastructure | AWS Lambda | Bare metal virtualization |
LeanMCP vs AWS Directly
If your SaaS is already deployed on AWS, you might think “why not just deploy MCPs there too?” You can. AWS gives you all the features to scale and build — but the learning curve is brutal. To deploy MCPs properly on AWS, you need to figure out logging, observability, access controls, scaling, networking, security groups, IAM roles. Even experienced teams need 6-7 DevOps engineers and around 500-600 DevOps hours to get everything right. That’s months of work before you even start building MCP features. LeanMCP abstracts this away. For most teams,leanmcp deploy handles everything. For enterprise customers who need to stay on AWS for compliance or existing infrastructure reasons, we can deploy our platform on your AWS account with our infrastructure code. You get a battle-tested platform without the DevOps overhead.
| Approach | Time to Deploy | DevOps Required |
|---|---|---|
| AWS (DIY) | 500-600 hours | 6-7 engineers |
| LeanMCP | Minutes | None |
| LeanMCP on your AWS | Days (with our help) | Our team handles it |
Summary
| Platform | Strengths | Weaknesses for MCPs |
|---|---|---|
| Workato | Enterprise integrations | Closed source, basic MCP support |
| Vercel | Frontend deployment | Lambda timeouts, no MCP SDK |
| AWS, GCP, Azure | Full control, scalability | Massive learning curve, DevOps overhead |
| LeanMCP | Built for MCPs, end-to-end |