archestra

Archestra sits between your AI agents and your company's data, and tries to make that connection safe enough for a real enterprise. It is an open-source control plane: an LLM gateway that fronts any model provider, a registry and gateway for MCP servers, an agent orchestrator, and a layer of guardrails (SSO, RBAC, sandboxed code execution, prompt-injection defense). The pitch is that you can let agents touch internal systems with auditing and cost limits instead of hoping nothing goes wrong. Self-hosting is free for teams under 30 people.

This is enterprise infrastructure, and it installs like it. Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes are the deployment paths, so standing it up is a platform-team job, not an afternoon. The upside of self-hosting is the whole point of the product: your prompts, your data, and your agent traffic stay inside your own boundary, which is exactly the property security teams want before they let an LLM near anything sensitive.

Solo builders and small teams experimenting with agents can run it free, but it is heavier than you need unless governance is the actual problem you are solving. Where it earns its keep is the mid-size company standardizing how dozens of agents reach internal tools: the AGPL self-host covers you up to 30 users, and past that you are into enterprise licensing. The comparison set is commercial AI gateways like Portkey or Kong's AI Gateway; Archestra's bet is open source plus security as the differentiator.

Two catches. It is young and venture-backed, which means fast movement but also a roadmap that answers to investors, so watch how the open-core line shifts over time. And the README's talk of migrating from Claude Cowork and similar reads more like marketing than the substance underneath, which is solid. Judge it on the gateway and guardrails, not the launch copy.