MCP Skills vs Shieldly: Which is Better in 2026?
A comprehensive comparison of MCP Skills and Shieldly covering features, pricing, use cases, and which tool is the right choice for your needs.
⚡ Quick Verdict
Choose MCP Skills if:
- →You want more affordable paid plans (from $2/mo)
- →You need a broader feature set (8 features vs 6)
- →You need 15 trust signals across 4 dimensions scored per repository or verified / established / new tiering with explicit thresholds and disqualifiers
Choose Shieldly if:
- →You need detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals or privilege escalation path detection across chained policies
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MCP Skills vs Shieldly: At a Glance
Pricing Comparison: MCP Skills vs Shieldly
Understanding the pricing differences between MCP Skills and Shieldly is crucial for making the right choice. Here's how their plans compare side by side.
MCP Skills Pricing
Shieldly Pricing
💡 Pricing takeaway: Both MCP Skills and Shieldly offer free tiers, making it easy to try before you buy. Compare the specific plans to find the best value for your use case.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
Here's how every feature from MCP Skills and Shieldly stacks up.
What Makes Each Tool Unique
🔵 Unique to MCP Skills
Features available in MCP Skills but not in Shieldly:
- ✓15 trust signals across 4 dimensions scored per repository
- ✓Verified / Established / New tiering with explicit thresholds and disqualifiers
- ✓2,631 repositories scored across 5 registries
- ✓Safety Lab for running deeper checks on a server
- ✓Embeddable live trust badges and claimable Verified badges for maintainers
- ✓Monitoring so a repo's score change alerts you after install
- ✓API access for wiring trust checks into workflows
- ✓Published original research on malicious skills and ecosystem flaw rates
🟣 Unique to Shieldly
Features available in Shieldly but not in MCP Skills:
- ✓Detects wildcards, risky PassRole, NotAction traps and public principals
- ✓Privilege escalation path detection across chained policies
- ✓Graded score per analysis, usable as a workflow gate
- ✓Five analyses with no signup; browser-only linter and trust-policy explainer
- ✓Compliance panel mapping findings to CIS, SOC 2 and NIST
- ✓AWS account connect with auto-scan, webhooks and Slack alerts on the Team tier
Use Case Recommendations
Best for: MCP Skills
MCP Skills is a pre-install trust layer for MCP servers and agent skills. It turns public source, package, vulnerability, and supply-chain data into scored pages, trust badges, monitoring, and API workflows you can consult before an unknown tool reaches an agent. The reason it exists is documented on the site: OX Security submitted a benign proof-of-concept malicious MCP server to eleven public registries in April 2026, and nine of them — including LobeHub and Cursor Directory — published it with no security review. Only GitHub rejected it. MCP Skills scores each repository across fifteen trust signals grouped into four dimensions and assigns a tier: Verified means a composite of 7.0 or higher with dimension floors and no disqualifiers, Established means solid with caveats worth checking, and New means promising but unproven. It had scored 2,631 repositories across five registries as of late July 2026, and its own research found 1,184 malicious skills in the ClawHavoc incident and that 36.82% of skills carried at least one security flaw. Maintainers can claim a gold Verified badge on their score page or embed a live trust badge. Access is layered: a free tier allows ten scans per day with compact responses, a single full report costs $2, and Developer Pro adds monitoring and API keys.
Ideal use cases:
- •Teams or individuals who need 15 trust signals across 4 dimensions scored per repository
- •Teams or individuals who need verified / established / new tiering with explicit thresholds and disqualifiers
- •Teams or individuals who need 2,631 repositories scored across 5 registries
- •Teams or individuals who need safety lab for running deeper checks on a server
- •Anyone focused on mcp workflows
- •Anyone focused on supply-chain workflows
Best for: Shieldly
Shieldly analyses AWS policy documents — IAM policies, CloudFormation templates, S3, Lambda, SQS, KMS and SNS resource policies, plus cost policies — and returns a graded security assessment rather than a raw linter dump. The specific things it looks for are the ones that do not show up as syntax errors: wildcard actions and resources, risky PassRole grants, NotAction traps, public principals, and privilege escalation paths where a policy that looks bounded chains into something that is not. Each analysis returns a score, which is the part that makes it usable as a gate in a workflow rather than a report someone reads once. There is a genuinely low-friction on-ramp: paste an IAM policy JSON into the homepage and get a graded analysis with no signup at all, five free analyses before an account is needed, plus browser-only free tools — an IAM policy linter and a trust-policy explainer — that upload nothing and log nothing. Paid tiers add a cost advisor, analysis history, a compliance panel mapping findings to CIS, SOC 2 and NIST, a watchlist with alerts, a policy diff viewer, and at the team level a direct AWS account connection with automatic scanning, webhooks, Slack alerts and multi-account support.
Ideal use cases:
- •Teams or individuals who need detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals
- •Teams or individuals who need privilege escalation path detection across chained policies
- •Teams or individuals who need graded score per analysis, usable as a workflow gate
- •Teams or individuals who need five analyses with no signup; browser-only linter and trust-policy explainer
- •Anyone focused on aws workflows
- •Anyone focused on iam workflows
🛡️ Other AI Security & Testing Tools to Consider
MCP Skills and Shieldly aren't the only options. Here are other popular tools in the same space:
Lineation
Security control plane for AI agents — zero-trust agent identity, LLM and MCP gateways, policy-as-code, and prompt-injection defense
Axtary
Payload-bound authorization for AI agents — human approval is cryptographically tied to the exact action, so a changed payload is denied
Tracecat
Open-source SOAR for AI-native security teams — agents, cases, and workflows with human approval gates
Trestle
Local secret scanner with an MCP server so coding agents check their own output
Agentmetry
Local, open-source flight recorder that tags AI agent activity with MITRE ATT&CK
ZeroLeaks
Continuous AI red teaming for agents, endpoints and MCP tools, with unlimited scans on every plan
Is one of these your tool?
This page ranks for "MCP Skills vs Shieldly" — buyers comparing the two land here, and ChatGPT and Perplexity cite it. Claim your listing for $19 one-time — no subscription, nothing to cancel — and get a Featured badge, top placement in your category, and a permanent dofollow backlink. Prefer it ongoing? Monthly is one click away on the next page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is MCP Skills better than Shieldly?
It depends on your needs. MCP Skills offers 8 key features including 15 trust signals across 4 dimensions scored per repository and Verified / Established / New tiering with explicit thresholds and disqualifiers, while Shieldly provides 6 features including Detects wildcards, risky PassRole, NotAction traps and public principals and Privilege escalation path detection across chained policies. MCP Skills uses a freemium model with a free tier, while Shieldly is freemium with free access available. Choose based on which features and pricing model align with your requirements.
Is MCP Skills cheaper than Shieldly?
MCP Skills is cheaper, starting at $2/month compared to Shieldly's $19/month. Both tools offer free tiers, so you can try each before committing. Always check the official websites for the most current pricing.
Can I use MCP Skills and Shieldly together?
Yes, many users combine MCP Skills and Shieldly in their workflow. MCP Skills excels at 15 trust signals across 4 dimensions scored per repository, while Shieldly shines with detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals. Using both allows you to leverage the strengths of each tool, though this means managing two subscriptions — though free tiers can help manage costs.
What's the main difference between MCP Skills and Shieldly?
While both are ai security & testing tools, MCP Skills emphasizes 15 trust signals across 4 dimensions scored per repository, whereas Shieldly is known for detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals. The best choice depends on your specific workflow and feature priorities.
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