Are There Really Over 9,000 MCP Servers? Sorting Them by What You Actually Want to Do | MCP Part 2
I set out to try MCP (Model Context Protocol), looked at the list of published servers, and stopped. There are simply too many. Similar names sit next to each other, and at a glance you cannot tell which is the official one and which someone built at the weekend.
So I pulled the data from the official registry myself and counted. Then I sorted it by what you would actually want to do, for anyone installing their first one.
This is where things stood in July 2026. For the specification I am referring to the latest revision, 2026-07-28.
The previous article in this series:
https://kimono-oyaji.com/en/what-is-mcp-part1-en/How many MCP servers are there? I counted
MCP has an official registry at registry.modelcontextprotocol.io, published in a form anyone can query. I asked it directly and pulled down 2,500 records.
Counting only what is listed in the official registry, a report from May 2026 puts it at over 9,000. Include the unofficial registries and some of them are handling close to 20,000.
Working backwards: a quick table by purpose
Looking through what is registered, the uses fall into roughly six groups. For each I have noted what to reach for first. Read it as a map of what kinds of thing exist for each purpose, rather than as a recommendation of specific products.
| What you want to do | What to search for | Suitability for a first install |
|---|---|---|
| Let it read and write files on your machine | Filesystem servers | Excellent. Good as your first one; the effect is obvious |
| Let it look things up | Web search / page fetching | Excellent. Lets it handle things newer than its training data |
| Let it drive a browser | Browser automation | Good, but the reach is wide, so it needs care |
| Let it help with development | Git, GitHub, database servers | Good, if you write code |
| Let it generate images | Image-generation integrations | Fair. You need the image-generation environment first |
| Hand work to a local LLM | Local LLM integrations | Fair. The one for readers of this blog; covered in Part 3 |
If you only install one, which one?
For me, the first one that felt like it did something was letting it read files. The reason is plain: the copying and pasting I had been doing by hand simply stopped being necessary.
Installing a pile of them at once, on the other hand, I would not recommend. The more tools there are, the more the AI dithers, and for reasons below the risk grows too. Install one, learn where it helps, then add the next — that turns out to be faster in the end.
Five things to look at before installing one
With that many, the quality varies. These are the five I check first.
I added the fifth because the situation shifted while I was writing this. The MCP specification was substantially revised on 28 July 2026, and the foundation of how connections work was swapped out (Part 1 covers it). Old-style builds will keep working for now, but a server that has stopped being updated may eventually stop fitting. As a signal, just looking at the last update date is enough.
The third one especially is not worth taking lightly. When the AI gets an operation wrong, a read-only tool does nothing at all; a tool that writes leaves you with no way back. When I install anything that writes, I take a backup of the target first.
Why I did not make “a list"
My first plan for this article was a complete list. Two reasons I dropped it.
One is the count. Nobody reads a list of 9,000. The other is shelf life: this field moves quickly and a list starts going stale the moment it is written. A way to check how many there are right now seemed likely to stay useful for longer.
The official registry can be opened straight in a browser and read as-is. Looking for yourself, whenever you happen to wonder, is the surest approach.
Wrap-up: work backwards from the job, do not count
- Over 9,000 in the official registry alone. Browsing a list and picking is not a realistic method
- The uses fall into roughly six groups. Working backwards from what you want to do is faster
- For a first one, something that reads files is the easiest to appreciate. Do not add many at once
- Before installing, check: who built it, what it asks for, whether it can write, where it runs, and whether it is still maintained
- The specification was substantially revised on 28 July 2026. Servers that stopped being updated will presumably stop fitting at some point
The fourth point — where it runs — collides head-on with the subject of this blog, which is running things locally. Next time I classify the 2,500 records I pulled from the official registry and look at the current ratio between servers that run on your own machine and servers that run somewhere else.
Sources
Checked 30 July 2026. Counts move. Specification referenced: 2026-07-28 (current).
- Part 1: What is MCP?
- Part 2: How many MCP servers are there? (you are here)
- Part 3: Can you keep MCP entirely local?