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 Aug 17, 2026 saw 2,402 new servers, a 71× multiple of that low - and every one of the last 6 complete weeks has cleared 1,035.

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 (25,988,876 installs/mo) 34,389,146 installs/mo · 504 servers Playwright Tools for MCP
2. 02 developer tools - most-installed: Storybook MCP Addon (7,699,261 installs/mo) 9,780,143 installs/mo · 291 servers Help agents automatically write and test stories for your UI components.
3. 03 documentation - most-installed: Context7 (4,108,483 installs/mo) 8,838,407 installs/mo · 735 servers Up-to-date code docs for any prompt
4. 04 database - most-installed: MongoDB MCP Server (450,845 installs/mo) 1,462,192 installs/mo · 523 servers MongoDB Model Context Protocol Server
5. 05 API integration - most-installed: Hostinger API MCP (431,446 installs/mo) 1,324,669 installs/mo · 1,347 servers MCP server for Hostinger API
6. 06 automation - most-installed: Ha MCP (504,877 installs/mo) 829,529 installs/mo · 623 servers Comprehensive Model Context Protocol server for managing Home Assistant through AI assistants.
7. 07 cloud infrastructure - most-installed: Azure MCP Server (500,118 installs/mo) 804,797 installs/mo · 582 servers All Azure MCP tools to create a seamless connection between AI agents and Azure services.
8. 08 web scraping - most-installed: Firecrawl MCP Server (512,194 installs/mo) 719,849 installs/mo · 334 servers MCP server for Firecrawl - web search, scraping, and biomedical/arXiv paper search.
9. 09 media - most-installed: Comfyui MCP (374,183 installs/mo) 680,961 installs/mo · 894 servers MCP server + Claude Code plugin for ComfyUI: run workflows, generate images, manage models & VRAM.
10. 10 finance - most-installed: Yahoo Finance (narumiruna) (61,079 installs/mo) 464,609 installs/mo · 2,000 servers Access Yahoo Finance stock data, news, screeners, options, financials, and charts through MCP.

Browse any of these in the category rankings.

Where the usage is

Usage is concentrated to a degree the catalog size hides. The 10,458 installable packages we track pull 135,757,600 installs a month - and the top 0.1% of packages take 84% of them. Only 171 packages clear 10,000 monthly installs; just 47 clear 100,000. On the popularity side, 53% of actively maintained repos have zero GitHub stars, and only 32 of the 17,572 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 1,790,501 GitHub stars across the ecosystem.

Stars measure attention, not usage

Cross-referencing GitHub stars against package installs surfaces the quiet workhorses: servers with real install 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 16,239 actively maintained repos: MIT dominates at 67%, but 3,309 maintained servers (20%) 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 44% (6,027 repos) , followed by Python (27%). 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. 48% ship as an installable package and 55% expose a hosted endpoint (some do both). Of the packaged servers, the distribution channel is lopsided: npm carries 60% of all published packages, PyPI another 26%, 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 14,186 remote endpoints, 93% speak streamable HTTP and the remainder use the older SSE transport. Publishing is also concentrated: 10,898 distinct accounts have published the 19,317 repository-backed servers, but the ten largest publishers alone account for 18% of them, and the single busiest for 7%.

How much of it is maintained

Anyone can publish, so the catalog and the working set aren't the same thing. As of 2026-08-25, 80% 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 DevOps & monitoring (93%) and AI & ML (93%).

The remote shift

50% of all registered servers (12,442) are remote-only - no package to install, just an endpoint. 4,905 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.