What people are building with MCP

The land rush

The registry's first week saw 197 servers. By Nov 3, 2025 the pace had slowed to 34 a week - then the curve turned. The week of Sep 7, 2026 saw 3,671 new servers, a 108× multiple of that low - and every one of the last 6 complete weeks has cleared 1,074.

The jobs people install MCP for

The clearest signal of what MCP is for is where the installs go. Ranked by monthly installs of each category's MCP packages, these are the jobs people wire their agents up to do - and the single most-installed server doing each one.

1. 01 browser automation - most-installed: Playwright MCP (23,360,601 installs/mo) 33,195,726 installs/mo · 636 servers Playwright Tools for MCP
2. 02 developer tools - most-installed: Storybook MCP Addon (7,276,020 installs/mo) 9,212,288 installs/mo · 357 servers Help agents automatically write and test stories for your UI components.
3. 03 documentation - most-installed: Context7 (3,719,962 installs/mo) 7,643,406 installs/mo · 882 servers Up-to-date code docs for any prompt
4. 04 database - most-installed: Supabase (462,519 installs/mo) 1,526,687 installs/mo · 619 servers MCP server for interacting with the Supabase platform
5. 05 AI & ML - most-installed: Australian Tax MCP (848,015 installs/mo) 970,022 installs/mo · 363 servers Cited Australian tax answers from 34,500+ ATO documents, legislation and public rulings.
6. 06 API integration - most-installed: Microsoft 365 MCP Server (160,284 installs/mo) 909,753 installs/mo · 1,641 servers Interact with Microsoft 365 and Office services through the Microsoft Graph API.
7. 07 cloud infrastructure - most-installed: Azure MCP Server (524,104 installs/mo) 798,558 installs/mo · 684 servers All Azure MCP tools to create a seamless connection between AI agents and Azure services.
8. 08 media - most-installed: Comfyui MCP (435,014 installs/mo) 747,510 installs/mo · 1,118 servers MCP server + Claude Code plugin for ComfyUI: run workflows, generate images, manage models & VRAM.
9. 09 automation - most-installed: Ha MCP (344,083 installs/mo) 684,649 installs/mo · 702 servers Comprehensive Model Context Protocol server for managing Home Assistant through AI assistants.
10. 10 search - most-installed: Perplexity API Platform (145,099 installs/mo) 449,924 installs/mo · 243 servers Real-time web search, reasoning, and research through Perplexity's API

Browse any of these in the category rankings.

Where the usage is

Usage is concentrated to a degree the catalog size hides. The 11,932 installable packages we track pull 119,643,703 installs a month - and the top 0.1% of packages take 82% of them. Only 187 packages clear 10,000 monthly installs; just 47 clear 100,000. On the popularity side, 59% of actively maintained repos have zero GitHub stars, and only 35 of the 20,541 unique repositories in the ecosystem have more than 10,000. The attention follows the same power law as the installs: the top 1% of repositories hold 90% of all 2,018,484 GitHub stars across the ecosystem.

Stars measure attention, not usage

Cross-referencing GitHub stars against package installs exposes both directions of the gap: heavily starred servers almost nobody runs, and quiet workhorses with real production traffic and barely any stars. This gap is why our ranking weighs installs above stars.

High-star/low-install can mean a product repo that merely contains an MCP server, a mostly-remote service, or genuine star inflation - the numbers don't say which, so we show them and let you look.

The license landscape

Among the 20,921 actively maintained repos: MIT dominates at 60%, but 5,966 maintained servers (29%) declare no recognizable license at all - fine for a weekend project, a genuine problem for anything commercial.

What it's written in

Among actively maintained repos with a detected language, TypeScript leads at 46% (7,343 repos) , followed by Python (25%). Language is a GitHub signal, not a quality score - but it shows where tooling and contributions concentrate.

How the catalog is shaped

Categories by headcount (not installs). A big category can still be lightly used - cross-check with the jobs chart above.

How MCP servers are shipped

An MCP server reaches you one of two ways: a package you install and run locally, or a remote endpoint you point your client at. 42% ship as an installable package and 62% expose a hosted endpoint (some do both). Of the packaged servers, the distribution channel is lopsided: npm carries 59% of all published packages, PyPI another 25%, with Docker images and Anthropic's MCPB desktop bundles making up most of the rest.

On the hosted side, the transport has effectively settled: of 21,255 remote endpoints, 95% speak streamable HTTP and the remainder use the older SSE transport. Publishing is also concentrated: 12,956 distinct accounts have published the 25,657 repository-backed servers, but the ten largest publishers alone account for 25% of them, and the single busiest for 9%.

How much of it is maintained

Anyone can publish, so the catalog and the working set aren't the same thing. As of 2026-09-18, 79% of everything ever published is actively maintained - a commit in the last 90 days, or a remote endpoint still answering. That's the set our rankings default to, so what you browse here is the part that still works.

Maintenance runs highest in the largest categories. Among those with 200+ servers, browser automation is the best-kept (93% still maintained), followed by developer tools (93%) and coding agent (92%).

The remote shift

57% of all registered servers (19,098) are remote-only - no package to install, just an endpoint. 7,056 of those publish no source repository at all: code nobody outside the operator can audit. That's why we probe every registered remote endpoint and publish whether it's alive and whether it requires authentication.