REST and MCP use the same registered catalog and execution plane. Choose based on who owns orchestration, not on expected output quality.

## Use REST when

- your service knows the capability it wants to call;
- you need explicit persistence, scheduling, batching, or observability;
- your code owns idempotency and retry policy;
- you want to generate a typed client from OpenAPI;
- a backend service, data pipeline, or application server is making the request.

REST uses an Upscrape API key and exposes execution and job resources directly.

## Use MCP when

- an AI client should search the live catalog;
- the model needs to describe a capability before supplying input;
- a consumer client should authorize through OAuth instead of receiving a copied API key;
- tool discovery is more useful than a preselected endpoint.

MCP exposes a compact default tool set that searches, describes, executes, and retrieves results. It does not turn every capability into an enormous unfiltered tool list unless you explicitly pin capabilities.

## What stays the same

Both surfaces use the same account, catalog visibility, capability input schema, worker execution, credit cost, and result provenance. A capability that costs one credit through REST costs the same through MCP.

## A practical rule

Use REST for deterministic application code. Use MCP for agent-driven discovery and execution. If an agent is writing deterministic application code, give it the REST integration brief rather than making the application itself depend on MCP.