CONTEXT LAYER / vs / ACTION LAYER
Arcade gets your agent permission to act. Airbyte gives it the context to act correctly, a unified, permission-aware layer across every system.
Infrastructure trusted by 18% of the Fortune 500
10+
New production-grade connectors shipped weekly
7,000+
Companies in production
26B
Records moved daily
1.5M
Pipelines / day
THE PROBLEM WITH AN ACTION LAYER ALONE
Arcade authorizes your agent to act, and does it well — per-user OAuth delegation, an audit trail, governed execution. But authorization answers can this agent do this? It never answers should it, given everything the business knows? That question lives in your data, and a tool-calling runtime never unifies it. Four walls every production deployment hits:
CONTEXT GAP
Arcade proves the agent can take the action. It says nothing about whether the agent should — because it never unified the customer, billing, and support data the decision depends on. A perfectly permissioned action on stale, fragmented context is still a wrong action, now with an audit trail proving you made it.
NO CONTINUOUS CONTEXT
Arcade executes actions; it doesn't continuously sync your systems into something queryable. Need RAG, retrieval, or event-driven context behind the agent? That's a second platform to buy, integrate, and govern. The action layer stops exactly where the context problem begins.
RUNTIME ASSEMBLY
Five sources means five sequential calls before the agent can reason. Authorization makes each call safe — it doesn't make it fast. Your user still waits seconds while the agent fetches what a context store would have served in one shot.
FRAGMENTED TRUTH
The Acme in Salesforce, the Acme in Zendesk, the Acme in Stripe. A secure tool call returns three raw payloads, and your agent reconciles them in the context window — every single query, tokens burned, no shared definition of "Acme" anywhere in the stack.
SIDE-BY-SIDE
This isn't action vs context — it's context before action vs action without context. Arcade gets agents permission to act fast. Airbyte gets agents to truth first, so the action they take is the right one. Context is the foundation; the action is downstream of it.
Category
Context layer for production-grade AI agents
Secure action layer / MCP runtime for tool calls
Primary job
Get the agent the unified context to reason and act correctly
Get the agent authorized to take an action
When context is created
Pre-materialized before the agent runs
Assembled at runtime, per tool call
What the agent sees
Unified, normalized business entities
Raw API payloads from each tool call
Continuous data sync
Yes — 600+ replication connectors keep context fresh
No — tool calls only, no sync or webhooks
RAG / retrieval context
Native — built for it
Needs a second platform
Cross-system entity resolution
Resolved once in the Context Store
None — agent reconciles per call
Typical query latency
Sub-second retrieval
Per-tool round trips at runtime
Token efficiency
Up to 80% token reduction
Raw payloads flood context
Source coverage
600+ replication + 50+ agent connectors; 10+ shipped weekly
8,000+ MCP tools across ~81 servers
Auth & permissions
Managed OAuth, tenant isolation, permission-aware reads
Per-user OAuth delegation (Arcade's core strength)
Governance & observability
Every read and action observable, permissioned, traceable
Audit trail of actions (Arcade's core strength)
MCP support
MCP, SDK, or CLI — same Context Store
MCP runtime as the product surface
Who uses it
Engineers, ops, GTM — same shared context
Developers wiring up secure tool access
Pricing logic
Priced on running unified context in production
Usage-based per tool call
Best for
Agents that must reason on unified truth at F500 scale
Agents that must take governed actions on those decisions
WHY TEAMS SWITCH
Three measurements your PM will ask about on day one — and the proof points your CTO will ask about on day thirty.
40%
One query to a unified context store replaces the N round trips runtime assembly requires. Less latency, less failure surface, fewer rate-limit headaches.
→ Per Meta pre-compute engine research
80%
Indexed context beats raw payloads. Your agent consumes what it needs, not what the API returned. Production cost curves bend the right direction.
→ Benchmarked against Mem0 published results
10+
Production-grade connectors keep shipping every week, so your team can focus on building agents instead of maintaining integrations.
→ 1.5M pipelines / day in production
Same Context Store
Three different paths into the same room. Same connectors, same entities, same freshness, same permissions — whether your agent runs in Claude, in code, or from the Airbyte CLI.
Plug the Context Store into Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client. Your agent gets unified business context through the standard it already speaks — and pairs cleanly with whatever action runtime you use to execute on it.
Build custom agents in code. The SDK gives you typed access to the same unified entities, the same freshness, the same permissions — sub-second.
Query the Context Store straight from your terminal. The Agent CLI puts 50+ business systems one shell command away — unified, permission-aware, and scriptable into any agent or workflow.
Airbyte Agents has massively accelerated our roadmap. What we thought would take 6+ months, we were testing in the first week of the beta program. They're shipping everything we need for agentic workflows, and launching new connections faster than we can build them into our product. The team is awesome, both technically and as humans. If you're building an AI product, you can stop rolling your own pipelines and start shipping.
Free tier forever. 10+ new production-grade connectors shipped weekly. No credit card required.
