fastn vs Arcade
An agent tool-calling platform focused on authenticated actions performed on behalf of a user.
What Arcade is good at
A clear and well-argued focus on the hardest part of agent tooling, which is authorising an action on behalf of a specific human rather than running as a service account.
Good developer ergonomics for agent authors, with a tool-first mental model that maps cleanly onto how models actually call things.
Sensible handling of the interactive auth flow, which many agent frameworks simply leave to the developer.
The actual difference
Arcade solves user-level auth for the agent you are building. fastn solves tenant-level integration for the product you are selling. If you are a SaaS company, your customers are organisations, and each one needs its own isolated connection, its own field mapping and its own audit trail, with the same connections serving both your product features and your agents.
Choose Arcade when
You are building an agent that acts on behalf of individual users and user-level authorisation is the core of your problem.
Choose fastn when
You are embedding integrations into a product sold to organisations, and the same connection must serve in-product features as well as agents.
The question that settles it
Is the thing being authorised an individual user, or a customer organisation with many users and its own configuration?
Questions people actually ask
Do both handle OAuth?
Yes, both take the OAuth flow off your plate. The difference is the shape of what is stored afterwards: a per-user grant for an agent to act with, or a per-tenant connection your customer administers and your product reads and writes through.
Which is better for governance?
It depends whose governance. For auditing what an agent did on behalf of one user, Arcade is directly aimed at that. For a customer organisation needing to see and control what your product and your agents reach inside their systems, the tenant-scoped model is the one that answers it.
Other comparisons
The fastest way to judge this is to connect one system and see what your customer would see.
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