Cloudflare vs Vercel

Product engineer: Pick Cloudflare if you need to issue tokens yourself; pick Vercel if you already run Next.js and have an identity provider. Developer-platform lead: Cloudflare adds a central portal with per-tool controls; Vercel leaves central control to your code and firewall.

The sourced difference

Cloudflare ships its own OAuth authorization server library (Workers OAuth Provider v1, DCR and CIMD) and a portal product that fronts up to 80 servers; Vercel's mcp-handler verifies tokens and serves resource metadata but does not issue tokens, so you bring the authorization server. (Cloudflare: Cloudflare changelog: Workers OAuth Provider v1 (1 Oct 2026), read 5 November 2026 and Cloudflare MCP server portals docs, read 5 November 2026; Vercel: Vercel: deploy MCP servers to Vercel, read 5 November 2026)

Verdicts by reader

Cloudflare or Vercel, by who is asking
Reader	Verdict
Product engineer	Pick Cloudflare if you need to issue tokens yourself; pick Vercel if you already run Next.js and have an identity provider.
Developer-platform lead	Cloudflare adds a central portal with per-tool controls; Vercel leaves central control to your code and firewall.
Agent builder	Both serve Streamable HTTP only, so either works with current clients.

Side by side on the rubric

Cloudflare and Vercel on the same rubric
Dimension	Cloudflare	Vercel
Remote transport	Streamable HTTP only	Streamable HTTP only
OAuth with client registration	yes, DCR and CIMD	bring your own AS; CIMD on Vercel MCP
Per-tool auth scoping	yes, at the portal	scopes per handler
Hosting and scale limits	80 servers per portal	Vercel Functions limits
Observability	Access logs, API analytics, Logpush on Enterprise	platform logs, rollbacks, rolling releases
Pricing	not published for MCP	Functions pricing
Registry submission	not a registry	not a registry
Discoverability by agents	portal endpoint, no public catalog	none built in
Own server in the registries	yes	yes

Evidence for every cell is on the profiles: Cloudflare and Vercel.