# Elaichi vs Composio: two different buyers > Elaichi vs Composio is not a feature race. One is sold to a developer embedding tool access in a product, the other to the person who has to answer for what the agents did. **TL;DR** Composio is a developer platform with a gateway attached. Elaichi is a control plane with a catalog attached. The tell is the price list: Composio meters tool calls and puts SSO and SCIM behind a sales call, while Elaichi charges per person and ships the governance on day one. If you are building a product for your own users, Composio is aimed at you. If you are answering to an auditor, it is not. ## Elaichi vs Composio starts with who is buying Both products connect AI clients to the systems a company already runs, and both do it well enough that a feature grid will not separate them. The useful question is who each one was designed for, because that decision shows up in everything downstream: the pricing meter, where the access controls sit, and what happens when somebody leaves. [Composio](https://composio.dev) is a developer platform. Its landing page leads with SDKs, tool execution and auth infrastructure for shipping agents, and it advertises access to more than 1,500 tools. The product it is really selling is the thing you would otherwise have to build: OAuth flows, token refresh, a sandbox to run multi-step work in, and a catalog large enough that you stop thinking about connectors. Elaichi is a control plane. It exists because a company gave staff AI clients and then could not say who may reach what, take it away quickly, or prove afterwards which account an agent touched. ## The price list tells you where governance sits This is the fastest way to read either product honestly. Composio's [pricing page](https://composio.dev/pricing) starts at $0 with 100,000 tool calls a month and three team members, steps to $29 a month for unlimited team members, and places SSO, SCIM and customer-managed keys in an Enterprise tier priced by conversation. That is a sensible ladder for a developer who starts alone and scales with usage. It also means the controls a security reviewer asks about first are the ones furthest from the signup form. Elaichi has two plans, Gold and Black, and no free step. Gold is $15 per user per month or $120 per user per year, with a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card. SSO, SCIM and the audit trail are not a tier. See [pricing](/pricing/) for the current terms. ## Metering tool calls against counting people A usage meter and a seat count fail in opposite directions, and which failure you prefer is a real decision rather than a marketing one. Metering on tool calls is cheap while adoption is low and gets harder to forecast exactly when adoption succeeds. An agent that retries, or one that a team wires into a schedule, moves the bill without anybody deciding to spend more. Composio's own page frames 100,000 calls a month as more than most individuals will need, which is true and is also a statement about who the plan is for. Counting people is the opposite trade. The bill is boring and predictable, and it does not reward you for using the product less. It also means a company with many occasional users pays for them. Elaichi softens that at the edge rather than the middle: Guest, Billing Admin and the read-only Auditor seat are free, so a compliance reviewer who needs to read the log and nothing else does not consume a license. ## What "governed" means on each side Composio handles the hard parts of connecting: consent, token storage, refresh and scopes for every connected account, plus the option to pass your own access tokens at execution time so it never stores them. For a product team, that is most of the problem solved. Elaichi's model is aimed at a different question, which is not "how do I connect this" but "who may reach it, and what did they do". It answers that with three layers kept deliberately distinct: - **Roles.** Around 38 action strings grouped into roles, with exactly one role per member enforced by a unique index. That constraint is why each role is a complete persona rather than a pile of bolt-ons. - **Sharing.** A member sees only what they own or what was explicitly shared with them. No org-level permission silently widens a listing, including for owners and admins. - **Restrictions.** Which connectors and which individual tools a target may reach, where the target is a role or a user. Blocks beat allows, and a user rule replaces the role rule rather than layering on top of it. There is one detail in there worth stealing regardless of what you buy. A restriction is written against a connector and tool, but the canonical operation is pinned against the catalog when the rule is saved. A tool's advertised name can be edited by whoever maintains the connector's documentation, which makes the name a token the governed party controls. Governance should bind the operation, never the label. ## Revocation and the audit trail Ask both vendors what happens on the Friday somebody leaves. On Elaichi, removing or suspending a member revokes every live grant in the same transaction as the membership change, and the grant is re-read from the store on every single call with no cache. Nothing has to be found and reissued, because nothing was issued. Role and restriction changes are slower and honest about it: they resolve within about two minutes through a short cache plus edge propagation. The audit trail is one entry per tool-call attempt, succeeded or failed, naming the connection that was actually reached rather than the one that was intended. That distinction sounds pedantic until the first surprise, when the question is which of two connected workspaces an agent wrote to. Argument names and counts are recorded; argument values never are. ## Where Composio is the better answer If you are embedding tool access into software you ship to your own users, stop reading comparisons and use Composio. A per-seat control plane priced for staff is the wrong instrument for a product whose users are customers, and the SDK, the sandbox and the white-labeled connection page are all built for exactly that job. The same applies if your bottleneck is catalog breadth for a prototype, or if you want to pass your own tokens and have nothing stored at all. Those are real strengths and we do not match them. Where the balance tips the other way is the moment the buyer changes from the person building the agent to the person accountable for it. At that point the questions become who, what, and prove it, and those want a control plane. ## Choosing between them without a trial Write down three sentences before you book either demo. What happens when somebody leaves on a Friday. What the log can tell you about an action taken last Tuesday by an agent acting for a person who has since changed teams. And what your bill looks like if usage grows tenfold. The first two are governance questions and the third is a pricing-model question, and between them they separate these two products more cleanly than any catalog count. If you want the wider field rather than just this pair, the [MCP gateway comparison](/blog/mcp-gateway-comparison/) covers five approaches on the same axis. ## FAQ ### What is the main difference between Elaichi and Composio? Who they are sold to. Composio is a developer platform: SDKs, managed OAuth, an execution sandbox, and pricing metered on tool calls, which fits a team embedding tool access into a product for their own users. Elaichi is a per-person control plane for a company governing its own staff, so roles, restrictions and the audit trail are the product rather than an enterprise add-on. ### Is Composio cheaper than Elaichi? At low volume, yes, and the shapes are not comparable. Composio publishes a $0 entry plan with 100,000 tool calls a month and a $29 monthly step, metered on usage. Elaichi is $15 per user per month with no usage meter and no charge for Guest, Billing Admin or read-only Auditor seats. Usage pricing is cheaper until the agents get busy; seat pricing is predictable from the headcount you already know. ### Can I get SSO and SCIM on both? Both offer them, at different points in the funnel. Composio lists SSO, SCIM and customer-managed keys in its Enterprise tier, which is a custom quote and a sales call. Elaichi builds SAML and OIDC SSO in-house along with SCIM v2 and group-to-role mapping, available without a separate enterprise negotiation. ## Read next - [MCP gateway comparison: what each one governs](/blog/mcp-gateway-comparison/) — An MCP gateway comparison across five ways to give a company governed AI access, what each one actually controls, and the question that separates them: what varies from one person to the next. - [A Zapier MCP alternative for governed access](/blog/zapier-mcp-alternative/) — Looking for a Zapier MCP alternative usually means one thing: the server is provisioned per person and scoped to that person's own connections, and you need the opposite. - [Running your own MCP servers, or not](/blog/running-your-own-mcp-servers/) — Running your own MCP servers is cheap for one team and expensive for a company. The line is not the servers, it is credentials, revocation and the audit trail.