Ten MCP registries and the use they can see: installs, pulls, connections and views

An MCP server reaches an agent through a registry: a list someone browses, or a marketplace inside the client that installs it in one click. Ten registries list between 199 and 119,868 servers. We read on 12 November 2026 what each one counts about the servers it lists, and the answer depends on where the registry sits. The two that install servers themselves, Cline and Docker, count installs. The large directories count stars or their own page views, or nothing at all.

Size and visibility run opposite ways. Glama lists the most servers, and MCP Market draws the most search traffic of the sites that are only a directory. Cline’s marketplace lists 199 and Docker’s catalog 316, but they are the ones whose counts are installs, because their clients do the installing. Three of the ten could not be read at all: Glama and PulseMCP license their data only with a key, and LobeHub answers every automated request with 402, payment required.

The official MCP Registry is what other registries copy from, and it keeps no usage at all. It returns no total either, so we counted every page, 626 of them. Two thirds of its 62,550 servers are remote, served from the maker’s own URL rather than installed. Among those that install, npm carries three times as many as PyPI. And 28,675 servers published their latest version in the last 30 days, which says more about how fast the list churns than about use.

Cline posts to its marketplace each time a user installs a server from inside the editor, so its count is the closest any registry comes to use. Installs gather at the top: 1.47M across 199 servers, 52% of them in the first ten, while the median server has 1,475 and 80 servers have fewer than 1,000. The reference servers that ship with MCP, Filesystem and Sequential Thinking, sit beside Context7, which feeds an agent current library docs.

Docker publishes each catalog server as an image, and Docker Hub counts every pull since it was published. Pulls favour servers that run without a person at the keyboard: Playwright drives a browser, and Fetch, Time, Grafana and SonarQube suit pipelines, which can pull an image on every run. The catalog’s own signing image has been pulled 113M times, five times the 100 most-pulled server images together, which is why it is left out.

Smithery hosts servers and counts connections to each. Its most-used servers are not the ones Cline and Docker install: a gateway that puts many tools behind one connection leads with 419,019, followed by hosted servers for search, Gmail, Google Sheets, PubMed and company checks. Playwright, Filesystem and Context7 do not appear among the servers its listing reaches; GitHub has 5,908.

Two limits on this reading. Smithery’s search answered every query with an error on the day we read it, so a server could not be looked up by name, and its listing reaches about 260 of its 20,756 servers. The ranking below is of those 262.

Lining up the same eight servers across the five registries that publish a number shows how little the numbers agree. Playwright leads Docker by pulls and mcp.so by views, and is sixth on Cline. Filesystem leads Cline and is not in GitHub’s registry at all. Chrome DevTools has 55,143 GitHub stars and 2,820 views on mcp.so, and Cline does not list it. A star is attention, a view is a visit, a pull is a machine, and only an install from inside a client is a person choosing the server for their agent.

mcp.so also shows GitHub stars, but the reference servers all live in one repository, so Filesystem, Fetch and Brave Search each show the same 88,148. A registry that ranks by stars ranks repositories.

Every count above came from the agentrank program in hedwigai’s shell, and the visits from traffic. Add mcp.hedwigai.com to your MCP client, turn the programs on once, and send these to its bash tool. The registry reads are free; traffic is billed per call.

The program calls these toolkit routes. Their schema is at toolkit.hedwigai.com/agentrank/openapi.json.

None of them is a market share. Each registry counts only what passes through it: a server installed from npm or called at its maker’s URL never shows in Cline or Docker, and the official registry records nothing. Docker’s pulls run since each image was published, and Cline’s installs since each server was listed, so an older server has had longer to gather them.

The sizes of Glama, MCP Market and PulseMCP are what each states on its own page; we did not read their listings, because their terms or robots rules ask programs not to. Google visits are DataForSEO’s estimate of organic search traffic. They leave out people who arrive from inside a client, which is how Cline’s and Docker’s users arrive.