Alternatives to Agent Communication Protocol (ACP)
Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) and 2 alternative tools evaluated on the Tekai technology radar.
Agent Communication Protocol (ACP)
SubjectIBM Research's REST-based open protocol for AI agent interoperability, enabling agents built on different frameworks to discover and communicate with each other via standard HTTP and MIME types; merged into the A2A protocol under the Linux Foundation in August 2025.
open-source Apache-2.0
Alternatives
Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)
An open standard by Google for AI agent-to-agent interoperability, enabling capability discovery and task exchange over HTTPS and JSON-RPC.
open-source Apache-2.0
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open standard by Anthropic that defines how AI assistants connect to external tools, data sources, and services via a JSON-RPC protocol.
open-source MIT
Comparison Summary
| Tool | Radar | Type | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) | hold | open-source | Apache-2.0 |
| Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) | assess | open-source | Apache-2.0 |
| Model Context Protocol (MCP) | trial | open-source | MIT |