# Skills Board vs Smithery

> Smithery is a public registry for MCP servers and skills with managed connections and auth. Compare it with Skills Board, a free, MIT-licensed library for your own team's AI skills.

- Canonical URL: https://www.skillsboard.sh/alternatives/smithery
- Markdown URL: https://www.skillsboard.sh/alternatives/smithery.md
- Publisher: Skills Board (https://www.skillsboard.sh)
- Published: 2026-08-09
- Last updated: 2026-08-09
- Compared with: [Smithery](https://smithery.ai)

Smithery is a public registry. It lists MCP servers and a browsable skills catalog, and it takes over the connection plumbing so an agent can reach a service without you wiring up OAuth and credentials.

Skills Board does one narrower thing: it holds the skills your own team settled on, scoped to the people you invite, with the original source visible on every entry.

If your problem is connecting agents to third-party services, Smithery covers ground Skills Board does not. If your problem is that teammates cannot find what your team already uses, that is the library.

## Where the registry model stops answering the question

A public catalog is organised around what is published, not around what your team chose.

- A large public listing tells you what exists, not which of those entries your colleagues actually use.
- Install counts rank the ecosystem's behaviour, not your team's.
- Publishing and distribution are the registry's centre of gravity, so there is nowhere to record the small set your team standardised on.
- Teammates using different agents still need a way to reach the same skill without adopting the same runtime.
- Nothing captures the note explaining why your team picked one skill and not the near-identical one next to it.

## Side by side

Two products with different centres of gravity.

| Dimension | Skills Board | Alternative |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Primary object | Your team's AI skills, saved from their original repository and path. | MCP servers and skills published to a public registry, browsable at smithery.ai/servers and smithery.ai/skills. |
| Scope of the catalog | Your team's list, as short as your team keeps it. | A public registry whose homepage invites you to browse more than 14,000 MCPs, plus a paginated public skills catalog. |
| Who curates | Your teammates, by saving what they use. | Publishers, with skill pages showing publisher namespaces, badges, and install counts. |
| Access | Organization-scoped library, teammates join by invitation. | A public catalog anyone can browse. |
| What the connection does | An authenticated MCP endpoint for reading the team library and, with the granted scopes, saving skills and organizing collections. It does not install or run skills. | Managed connections to services: when a request needs auth, Smithery handles OAuth flows, credential injection, and retries automatically. |
| Ways to use a skill | Original source, install command, ZIP of the latest files, or a connected agent over MCP. | The Smithery CLI, with commands such as npx smithery mcp add and npx smithery tool call. |
| Openness | MIT licensed, code public at github.com/TommyBez/skillsboard. | Smithery Connect is powered by agent.pw, described on the homepage as its open-source agent vault. |
| Cost | Free forever for the hosted product. No trial, credit card, or paid tier. | Smithery publishes plans on its pricing page. |

## When Smithery is the better choice

There is a clear set of jobs where the registry is the right tool.

- Your problem is connecting agents to third-party services, and you want OAuth, credentials, and retries handled for you.
- You want the same connected accounts reused across chats, workflows, and different harnesses.
- You are publishing an MCP server and want distribution plus usage observability.
- You want to browse a large public registry of MCP servers rather than a short curated list.
- The bottleneck is authentication plumbing, not knowing which skill your colleagues use.

## When a team library fits better

The library exists for a smaller, more human problem.

- Teammates keep asking which skill to use and where the one you shared lives.
- Your team runs a mix of agents, so one runtime or one install path does not cover everyone.
- You want the list scoped to invited teammates rather than published publicly.
- You want the original source visible on every entry, so people can read a skill before using it.
- You want free forever and MIT licensed, with the option to self-host the same code.

## Running both

These sit at different layers, so most teams that need both simply keep both.

1. Keep Smithery for the service connections your agents depend on.
2. Create a Skills Board team library and save the skills your team uses, each from its original source.
3. Tag them the way your team searches, and add the note explaining why the skill made the list.
4. Invite teammates so everyone starts from the same entry.
5. Connect a compatible agent to Skills Board over MCP so it can search the team list without leaving the agent.

## Frequently asked questions

### Can I use Skills Board and Smithery together?

Yes. They solve different problems. Smithery focuses on connecting agents to services and on publishing to a public registry. Skills Board records the skills your own team settled on and makes them searchable for teammates and for a connected agent.

### Is Skills Board an MCP server?

Skills Board exposes an authenticated MCP endpoint and is listed on the Official MCP Registry as io.github.TommyBez/skillsboard. A compatible agent authorizes through the browser, so there is no API key to copy.

### Does Skills Board host or run skills?

No. It records the original repository and path, and offers the source link, an install command, or a ZIP of the latest files available at download time. It does not install or execute skills.

### What does Skills Board cost?

The hosted product is free forever, with no trial, credit card, or paid tier. The code is MIT licensed and open source.

## Sources

- [Smithery homepage](https://smithery.ai): Connecting agents to tools and services, the count of browsable MCPs, managed auth and credential injection, the CLI, and agent.pw as the open-source vault.
- [Smithery skills catalog](https://smithery.ai/skills): The public, paginated skills catalog with categories, publisher namespaces, badges, and install counts.
- [Smithery pricing](https://smithery.ai/pricing): The published plans page.

## Related resources

- [A shared MCP skill library for teams](https://www.skillsboard.sh/guides/shared-mcp-skill-library-for-teams)
- [Manage skills across Claude, Codex, and Cursor](https://www.skillsboard.sh/guides/manage-skills-across-claude-codex-cursor)
- [Pricing](https://www.skillsboard.sh/pricing)