IBM ContextForge: MCP vendor profile
ContextForge is IBM's open-source registry and proxy that federates MCP servers, A2A agents and REST or gRPC APIs behind one MCP endpoint with guardrails, plugins and observability, as documented by the vendor. ContextForge runs as an MCP server itself, installs from PyPI or Docker, and scales on Kubernetes with Redis-backed federation and caching (github.com).
At a glance
| Type | Gateways and proxies |
|---|---|
| Also covers | registry or directory |
| Operator | IBM |
| Home | github.com |
| Price | open source, Apache-2.0 |
| Read | 5 November 2026 |
What it does for this layer
ContextForge's Tools Gateway covers MCP, REST, gRPC-to-MCP translation and TOON compression (github.com). The IBM/mcp-context-forge repository is licensed Apache-2.0 (github.com). The repository had about 4.8k stars and 3,367 commits on 5 Nov 2026 (github.com, observed 5 November 2026).
The repository ships Docker Compose files for SSO, TLS, SIEM export to OpenSearch, and tracing with Langfuse or Phoenix (github.com, observed 5 November 2026). ContextForge supports plugins for guardrails on agent and tool calls, according to the repository description (github.com). ContextForge describes itself as "an open source registry and proxy that federates MCP, A2A, and REST/gRPC APIs with centralized governance, discovery, and observability" (github.com).
Products and plans
| Product | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| ContextForge | Self-hosted gateway, registry and proxy for MCP, A2A, REST and gRPC. | open source, Apache-2.0; from 0 USD (source, as of 5 November 2026) |
Standards
| Standard | Part of it | Status | What the page says | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MCP | MCP server | Supports | Runs as an MCP server in front of federated tools. | github.com |
| A2A | A2A federation | Supports | Federates A2A agents with MCP tools. | github.com |
What it does not do
- IBM ContextForge is self-hosted software; the repository does not describe a managed IBM service.
- ContextForge does not grade or verify the upstream servers it federates.