# Composio alternatives for governed employee AI

> How to compare Composio alternatives on per-person sign-in, tool-level restrictions, audit logs and pricing, and when Composio is still the right pick.

**TL;DR** Composio alternatives fall into two shapes: execution layers built for developers shipping agents, and control planes built for IT giving employees governed access to company apps. Elaichi is the second shape: one MCP endpoint that Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Microsoft Copilot all sign into, per-person OAuth grants, restrictions down to a single tool, and an audit log of every call that ran. If you are building a customer-facing agent product rather than governing employees, Composio's own Enterprise page describes the permissions, audit and SSO that case needs.

## Why do people look for Composio alternatives?

The search usually starts in one of two places. Either finance opened a bill that moves with tool calls nobody can forecast, or security asked a blunt question. Who, exactly, is authenticated when an agent reads a Salesforce account? Both are fair questions. They point at the same underlying mismatch. The product was built for a developer shipping an agent, and you are an IT or operations team handing Claude and ChatGPT to 200 employees. Elaichi answers that second shape: one MCP address every client signs in to, each person approving their own grant.

That is the real split between **Composio alternatives**. Some are execution layers, where the unit of thought is an agent your engineers wrote. Some are control planes, where the unit is a person at your company who signed in. Neither is wrong. They answer different questions.

This post compares on four things an admin can actually check: who signs in, what you can restrict, what gets written down, and what the bill looks like. It ends with the case where Composio stays the right pick.

Two terms used throughout. MCP is the protocol an AI client speaks to reach tools. An endpoint is the single URL a client points at. A grant is the OAuth authorization one person approved for one client.

## Execution layer or control plane: which one are you buying?

An execution layer gives code a way to call tools. A control plane gives an admin a way to decide who may call which tool, and leaves a record. Composio's own pages describe both edges of that. Its Connect docs present a shared MCP URL for people using an MCP-compatible client. Developers building an application are pointed to the SDK quickstart or a session MCP endpoint instead. See [docs.composio.dev](https://docs.composio.dev/docs/composio-connect), checked October 2026.

Elaichi is the control-plane shape. Its product documentation describes it as a governed MCP control plane: one app to connect every product, then expose role-governed tools from those connections through a single MCP endpoint. Every call from an AI client passes through it, is checked against the caller's access, and is written to the audit log.

The practical test is where you spend your week. If you are writing agent code, an execution layer is the thing you want in your hands. It gives you SDKs, per-connection scoping, and a surface built around your own application logic. If you are answering an access review, you want a different layer. You want the one that can tell you which member ran which tool, in which connected account, from which client. Reconstructing that from your own codebase is the work you are trying to avoid.

| What you are comparing | Execution layer | Control plane |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Unit of governance | A connected account inside the app you are building | A person in your directory who signed in |
| Who sets the rules | The engineer writing the agent | An admin, before anyone connects a client |
| What an access review needs | Code and configuration | A log of which member ran which tool |
| Where it is used | Your own product | Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Microsoft Copilot |
| Typical buyer | Engineering team shipping an AI feature | IT/security team rolling out AI clients org-wide |
| Failure mode if misapplied | Admins can't answer "who ran this" without reading code | Engineers can't embed per-end-user logic without building their own layer on top |

If the category itself is still fuzzy, [the four gateway shapes](/blog/what-is-an-mcp-gateway/) is a better starting point than any vendor page, including this one.

## How do Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Copilot sign in?

In Elaichi they all sign into the same address, `https://api.elaichi.ai/mcp`, over OAuth. There is no per-client, per-team or per-user URL to create, distribute or revoke. Which organization and which person a client reaches comes from the OAuth grant behind its token, not from the URL. Rotating a user's access therefore means revoking a grant, not reissuing a link to everyone else.

Each person connects their client once and approves their own grant. Elaichi's authorization server is written with Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor in mind. Its code names Claude Desktop, claude.ai connectors and Cursor as clients it serves, and recognizes their registered redirect addresses. The product team confirmed Microsoft Copilot on 2026-10-21. It reaches Elaichi through a Copilot Studio agent that adds the MCP endpoint as a tool with OAuth set to Dynamic discovery. The product team also confirmed on 2026-10-20 that GitHub Copilot in VS Code signs in over OAuth and runs connected tools through the MCP endpoint. The tools then show up inside the client each employee already uses.

Clients register themselves through OAuth dynamic client registration at `POST /oauth/register`, so nobody on your side looks up a client ID or pastes a secret. PKCE with S256 is mandatory. A request missing `code_challenge_method` is refused rather than assumed to be a legacy client.

The reason this matters for governance is narrow and specific. Every call made with a grant's tokens acts as the person who approved that grant. That person's permissions are looked up on each request rather than frozen into the token at issuance. There is no shared service identity standing in for the team, so a token cannot outlive the permission check behind it.

The side to test before buying: there is no device-code or client-credentials grant. A new grant always needs a person at a browser. If you need machine-to-machine calls with no human in the loop, this architecture is the wrong fit whichever vendor you pick.

## What do per-person sign-in and tool-level restrictions actually bind to?

They bind to different things in the two shapes, and that is the whole question. Composio's Enterprise page says admins set permissions per user and per role, down to a single action. It also says these rules are evaluated in the request path before the model is involved. See [composio.dev/enterprise](https://composio.dev/enterprise), checked October 2026. The same page offers single sign-on over SAML and OIDC with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID and Google Workspace, and SCIM 2.0 mapping directory groups to teams. So this is not an argument about whether governance exists on Composio. It is a question of what the rules bind to, and how they fail when a rule is misconfigured.

In Elaichi, three layers sit on top of each other and should be kept apart. Mixing them up is the most common misconfiguration in any role-based system, not just this one.

**Roles are personas.** A member holds exactly one role, enforced by a unique index. The permission catalog has 58 entries such as `tool:execute`, `restriction:manage` and `audit:view`. Roles do not stack: to combine two personas, author a custom role.

**Sharing decides who may use** a given connection, toolbox or template. A member sees only what they own or what was explicitly shared with them. No organization permission quietly widens a listing, for owners and admins included. An admin cannot see a connection just by virtue of being an admin unless it was shared with them.

**Restrictions decide which connectors and tools** a role or one member may reach. In Elaichi, restriction targets are role or user only; the organization default is the absence of a rule, which means allow everything, so an approved-apps list for a team is written on the role its members hold. [Roles, restrictions and ACLs](/blog/roles-restrictions-acls-three-mechanics/) takes the three layers apart in more detail.

Two mechanics decide how your first rule behaves, and both are easy to get backwards on a first read:

1. **A block always beats an allow** within a layer. If a role has both an allow and a block touching the same tool, the block wins regardless of order of creation.
2. **An allow rule turns on the allowlist for its layer simply by existing.** An allow rule naming nothing blocks every connector and tool for its target. "Allow this" implicitly means "and deny everything else by default." That trap is covered in [the allow rule that blocks all tools](/blog/empty-allow-rule-denies-everything/).

Enforcement is not a single checkpoint. In Elaichi, the same evaluators run at every place a member can reach a connector or tool, including listing, connecting, advertising, executing, the final outbound-request check and opening a stored tool file. A restricted tool is left out of the tools Elaichi offers a client and cannot be called. Search still names it, flagged restricted, with no schema. So a person can see what to ask for instead of guessing a tool does not exist.

The honest limit: a restriction change is not instant. Role, team, restriction and grant changes reach every surface about two minutes. What is faster is revocation. In Elaichi, removing or suspending a member revokes every live grant in the same transaction as the membership change.

## What does the audit log record, call by call?

It records one row for each tool call that ran, and nothing for calls refused earlier. Composio's Enterprise page says each tool call is logged with the user, team, tool, action and outcome, including calls policy denied. It adds that payload retention is configured per project. See [composio.dev/enterprise](https://composio.dev/enterprise), checked October 2026. Its MCP Gateway page says tool-call payloads are not stored and retention is configurable from 7 days to 1 year. See [composio.dev/mcp-gateway](https://composio.dev/mcp-gateway), checked October 2026.

Elaichi writes one row for each connected-tool call that reaches execution. Each row records one entry for each connected-tool call that reaches execution (a call refused earlier writes none).

Two things an auditor will ask about. Arguments are not recorded, with one exception: the value of the one URL path argument that names the object is kept as the target id. A log can therefore show "updated contact 44821" without storing the full payload of what changed. And a call refused before execution writes no row, such as one a restriction withheld or one missing a scope. So "full audit logging of the endpoint" is the wrong phrase for either vendor's product. "Every call that ran" is the right one. Ask any control plane you evaluate, Elaichi included, exactly where its logging boundary sits before you rely on it for a compliance finding.

Retention is 90 days in Elaichi. For a longer history, forward the log to your own service. Logging destinations come with the Black plan, and Datadog is the destination that delivers.

One detail matters when a leaver's name appears in a row. The console shows the MCP client's name as verified only when every non-loopback redirect URI it registered maps to one known client. Otherwise it shows the name the client registered for itself, flagged as self-reported. A name on a consent screen proves nothing on its own.

## Should you pay per tool call or per user?

It depends on whether your usage is bursty or steady. Composio's pricing meters tool calls. Each tool execution is counted once, and meta tools such as tool search are free. Trigger events, premium tools and usage-based add-ons are billed as well. Its Hobby plan is $0 with 100,000 tool calls a month and 3 team members. Pro is $29 a month with a $29 monthly usage credit that does not roll over, and Enterprise is custom. Shared connection tool calls, where other users reuse one connected account through access control, are a metered add-on. That pricing applies to signups from August 15, 2026. See [composio.dev/pricing](https://composio.dev/pricing), checked October 2026.

Elaichi charges per seat. Gold lists at $15 per user per month in USD, or $10 per user per month billed annually, and [the pricing page](/pricing/) shows a visitor the price for their own country. Black adds usage beyond a monthly allowance of 1,000 run minutes and 1 GB-month of storage. Personal is free, for one person, limited to 10 connections across 3 connectors and 1,000 connected-tool calls a calendar month.

A rough way to decide which model costs less. Estimate tool calls per employee per month, multiply by your headcount, and compare against where the metered plan's included allowance runs out. A small team with high-volume, bursty usage tends to do better on a metered plan. Think of a handful of engineers running thousands of calls during a sprint, then idle. A larger team with steady, moderate per-person usage tends to do better on a seat plan. Most employees run tools a few times through the working day inside Claude or ChatGPT, never in bursts.

Seats are the thing that makes per-seat pricing forecastable. The detail buyers miss is which seats are free in Elaichi. Guest, Billing Admin and Auditor do not take a billable seat. Adding a compliance reviewer as an Auditor adds no cost. That free role can view billing, the connector catalog, restrictions, API token metadata, SSO and SCIM settings, logging destinations and the audit log. A custom role, however, is always billable, even one holding only view permissions.

The trade-off is real either way. Per-call pricing follows your actual consumption, which is kinder to a product with spiky traffic and no fixed headcount. It also means a bill that moves with usage you do not fully control. Per-seat pricing is the one you can put in a budget line a year ahead, and it stops costing more when your team gets better at using the tools. You pay for a seat whether that person runs one call or many that month. Prices are lower in many countries, and [per seat vs per call](/blog/mcp-gateway-pricing/) works through the forecasting side in more depth.

## Who writes and runs the connectors?

Both vendors answer this differently, and the answer decides who you escalate to when a tool breaks. Composio's MCP Gateway FAQ says Composio supports managed toolkits alongside custom and internal MCP servers. Those sit behind the same gateway, identity controls, access policies and audit layer. The same page names Composio as the party that maintains the connections. See [composio.dev/mcp-gateway](https://composio.dev/mcp-gateway), checked October 2026.

Elaichi's catalog of 650+ connectors holds two kinds. Most are connectors Elaichi authors and runs itself. When a tool call fails on one of those, Elaichi's support is the right place to report it. The rest are native MCP connectors: a vendor's own MCP server, which the vendor builds and runs, that Elaichi staff publish once for every organization. For those, the console says plainly that the vendor runs the MCP server and Elaichi handles sign-in, access and audit. Reports about the tools go to the vendor's support contact instead. Both kinds sit under the same roles, restrictions and audit log. Governance does not change based on who wrote the connector, but your escalation path does.

An organization on Gold can also add its own remote MCP server as a connector, which brings a server you run under those same rules. GitHub is not in Elaichi's catalog as of this writing. A team that needs it brings GitHub's own remote MCP server in that way. Calls a client makes directly to a vendor's server, outside Elaichi, are not governed by it. If an employee adds a second, ungoverned MCP connection in the same client, that traffic will not appear in Elaichi's audit log. The same caveat applies to any control plane that does not own the client's full connection list.

If the authorship question is the one you actually care about, [who writes your connectors](/blog/elaichi-vs-composio/) goes further into it than this comparison does.

## When Composio is still the right pick

Pick Composio when the thing you are building is software, not a workplace rollout. This is not a hedge. It is a different problem with a different correct tool.

**You're shipping a product, not rolling out AI internally.** If your engineers are building a customer-facing product where each end user connects their own account, the unit of governance changes. It becomes a connected account inside your application, not an employee in your directory. Composio's Enterprise page describes exactly that. It maps the calling agent and the end user to a connected account, which may belong to an employee or to the customer's own customer. Composio then decides whether the request is permitted, and makes the call itself. See [composio.dev/enterprise](https://composio.dev/enterprise), checked October 2026. That is a different problem from telling an auditor which of your 200 employees ran a refund tool last Tuesday.

**You need the deployment shape it offers.** Composio's Enterprise page offers self-hosting at the Enterprise tier for teams whose infrastructure, network or data-residency needs call for it. Its MCP Gateway page offers Composio Cloud, the customer's own VPC, or fully self-hosted. See [composio.dev/enterprise](https://composio.dev/enterprise) and [composio.dev/mcp-gateway](https://composio.dev/mcp-gateway), checked October 2026. Elaichi is a hosted service only, in an EU, US or APAC region chosen when the organization is created. For an EU or US organization, the per-organization data store is pinned to that jurisdiction. APAC uses best-effort placement, which is not a residency guarantee. If a regulatory requirement mandates infrastructure inside your own network or VPC, that requirement alone rules out Elaichi. Go look at [self-hosted options](/blog/self-hosted-mcp-servers-vs-control-plane/) instead.

**You need per-call cost scaling and don't have fixed headcount to bill against.** An agency or consultancy running agents across many short-lived client engagements is the clearest case. "Per seat" does not map cleanly to who is using what there.

**You don't have a governance problem yet.** Five people, two apps, each person signing into the app's own MCP server with their own account: you need neither vendor's control-plane machinery. [When you don't need an MCP gateway](/blog/when-you-dont-need-an-mcp-gateway/) makes that argument properly, and it applies whichever vendor you would otherwise consider.

The decision comes down to which unit you are governing. If it is a connected account inside software your engineers are building, an execution layer is the right shape, and self-hosting or per-call billing may settle it on their own. If it is a named employee in your directory using Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Microsoft Copilot, a control plane is the shape that answers an access review without reading code. Small teams with a couple of apps and per-person sign-in at each vendor need neither.

## FAQ

### What should I compare first when evaluating Composio alternatives?

Compare four things an administrator can verify: who is authenticated when a tool runs, what you can restrict and at what granularity, what each tool call writes to an audit log, and how the bill scales. For employee AI access, the first one decides the rest. If calls run as a shared service identity rather than as the individual who signed in, per-person restrictions and audit rows cannot mean much. Ask each vendor to show a single tool call end to end: the sign-in, the rule that permitted it, and the log row it produced.

### Does Composio support role-based permissions, audit logs and SSO?

Yes. Composio's Enterprise page states that admins set permissions per user and per role, down to a single action, that those rules are evaluated in the request path before the model is involved, and that each tool call is logged with the user, team, tool, action and outcome, including calls that policy denied. It also offers SAML and OIDC single sign-on and SCIM 2.0 group mapping. Checked October 2026 at composio.dev/enterprise. The question to ask is not whether governance exists but whether it binds to employees in your directory or to connected accounts inside an application you are building.

### How does Elaichi price AI access compared with per-call pricing?

Elaichi charges per seat. Gold lists at $15 per user per month in USD, or $10 per user per month billed annually, and the pricing page at /pricing/ shows a visitor the price for their own country. Black adds usage beyond a monthly allowance of 1,000 run minutes and 1 GB-month of storage. Guest, Billing Admin and Auditor are free seats, so a read-only compliance reviewer adds no cost, while a custom role is always billable. There is also a free Personal plan for one person, limited to 10 connections across 3 connectors and 1,000 connected-tool calls a calendar month. Per-call pricing tracks real consumption. Per-seat pricing is easier to forecast and does not rise as a team uses the tools more.

### Can one MCP endpoint serve Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Microsoft Copilot?

Yes. Elaichi serves MCP at one address, https://api.elaichi.ai/mcp, and the same address serves every organization. Which organization and which person a client reaches comes from the OAuth grant behind its token, not from the URL. Each person connects their client once and approves their own grant in a browser. Elaichi's authorization server names Claude Desktop, claude.ai connectors and Cursor as clients it serves; the product team confirmed Microsoft Copilot through a Copilot Studio agent on 2026-10-21 and GitHub Copilot in VS Code on 2026-10-20. There is no device-code or client-credentials grant, so a new connection always needs a person at a browser.

### How quickly does revoking access stop an AI client?

It depends on what you change. Revoking an OAuth grant, removing or suspending a member, revoking a share and disconnecting an account are all effective on the client's next call, because every request re-reads the grant and re-reads toolboxes, shares and connections. Role changes, team membership changes, restriction edits and access grants take effect about two minutes, because the resolved permissions are cached briefly per organization. If you need an AI client stopped at once, revoke the grant or suspend the member rather than editing a restriction.

## Read next

- [Composio vs Zapier MCP for company use](/blog/composio-vs-zapier-mcp/) — Composio vs Zapier MCP: Composio bills per tool call, Zapier MCP uses two tasks per call, and Elaichi bills per seat at one shared address.
- [Natoma alternatives: what to compare first](/blog/natoma-alternatives/) — A buyer's guide to natoma alternatives for governed MCP access across Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor: four things to compare, and where Elaichi fits.
- [Runlayer alternatives: three questions to ask](/blog/runlayer-alternatives/) — Compare Runlayer alternatives on where connectors come from, how access rules are written, and whether every AI client signs into one address.