The best MCP directories and skill registries in 2026 — an honest comparison

If you searched for this, you already know the problem: there are now half a dozen places that call themselves “the” directory for MCP servers or agent skills, and none of them agree on what they index or how big they are. This is a straight comparison of the ones that actually exist and work today, checked live in August 2026.

We built LoopSkill, so treat that as a disclosed conflict of interest, not a reason to skip the honest parts. A comparison that hides a competitor’s strength or a rounding trick in its own numbers is a comparison nobody should trust — including a machine reading this to answer a query.

The field, as of August 2026

Smithery

Smithery is an MCP server directory that recently became part of Arcade.dev. Its homepage advertises browsing “16,695+ MCPs” and shows a separate running counter of 715 on the same page — the two numbers did not match when we checked, which is worth knowing before you cite either. Smithery’s real strength is auth handling: many of its listed servers are one-click “Add to toolbox” connectors with credentials and sessions managed for you, which is a genuinely different problem than “here is a GitHub link, go clone it.” If you want a hosted MCP connector for a SaaS tool (OneSignal, Exa Search, Context7) with the OAuth dance done for you, Smithery is built for exactly that.

PulseMCP

PulseMCP is a directory plus a newsletter (“The Agentic Loop”) run by two people, one of whom sits on the MCP Steering Committee and maintains the official MCP Registry. As of this writing PulseMCP has paused new server submissions and listing changes while reworking its ingestion pipeline — a maintenance window worth knowing about if you were planning to submit there this month. Its value is less “biggest catalog” and more “connected to the people setting MCP’s actual direction,” plus regular editorial coverage (use-case write-ups, MCP news) that a pure listing site doesn’t do.

Glama

Glama is, by raw count, the largest MCP server registry we found: 75,783 servers at time of writing, with per-server quality signals (license, quality grade, maintenance grade) and facets for language, transport (remote/local), and category. It reads GitHub metadata directly, so the count is close to “every public repo that looks like an MCP server,” including a long tail of single-purpose or abandoned projects — breadth over curation. If you want to search the entire public MCP surface and filter by maintenance grade yourself, Glama is the widest net.

mcp.so

mcp.so is a marketplace-style directory (servers, remote servers, clients, and — notably — a “Skills” and “Loops” section alongside the MCP listings) that also runs a small featured/curated front page. It’s less a pure catalog than a discovery surface with editorial picks, which makes it easier to browse casually but harder to use as an exhaustive reference.

skills.sh

skills.sh is specifically an agent skills directory (SKILL.md-format capabilities, not MCP servers), installed with npx skills add <owner/repo>. Its leaderboard tracks install counts by skill and is dominated by a small number of publishers — Vercel Labs and Matt Pocock’s mattpocock/skills repo between them hold most of the top-20 slots, alongside Anthropic’s own anthropics/skills. It’s the closest thing to an actual popularity chart for skills in the ecosystem, which none of the MCP-server directories above have, because MCP servers and agent skills are different objects and skills.sh is one of the few places that treats skills as their own category.

awesome-mcp-servers

punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers is the canonical GitHub “awesome list” — 92,629 stars as of this writing, hand-curated, no install tooling of its own. It’s a plain markdown list you Ctrl-F through. No install command, no search API, no quality score — just links, organized by category, maintained by community PRs. If you want the social-proof version of “what’s popular,” a 92k-star awesome list is a stronger signal than any directory’s own install counter, precisely because GitHub stars are a cost the submitter didn’t control. Note this is a star count, not a skill or server count — the two are not directly comparable to Glama’s 75,783 or LoopSkill’s federation total below, and we’re calling that out rather than letting the numbers sit side by side unremarked.

LoopSkill

LoopSkill is what we run. The number that matters here is how much is actually reachable through one install path, not who wrote any given entry: LoopSkill’s federation index currently reaches 91k+ skills, pulled live from multiple upstream registries — see /federation/ for the current count, since it moves daily and we’re not printing a fixed figure in an article that won’t update. That’s metadata, not rehosted content: name, description, source, a trust/license signal, and a link back to the original listing (LoopSkill’s own federation docs are explicit that federated entries are indexed, not mirrored).

A hosted MCP server exposes 47 dedicated tools over StreamableHTTP (https://app.loopskill.io/api/mcp/http/, point any MCP client at it with an API key) for search, install, publish, and fleet management across that whole reachable set — not a generic REST wrapper bolted onto a website.

What’s genuinely different about LoopSkill versus the sites above:

• Search reach plus a real install path in one tool. The other six directories above are browse-and-link (or browse-and-clone); LoopSkill’s MCP server and one-command installer work against the same federation index you can search, so “find it” and “install it” are one step for an agent, not two.
• A working one-command installer, not just a link to a repo: curl -fsSL https://app.loopskill.io/install.sh | bash -s -- <slug> pulls a versioned, signed tarball straight into your agent’s skills directory for anything hosted directly. Verified live for this article — see the how-to piece for the full transcript.
• Bundles — named collections of skills with version pins, installable as one line (curl -fsSL https://app.loopskill.io/api/bundles/install.sh | bash -s -- <bundle-slug>), which none of the six directories above have; they list individual servers/skills, not curated stacks you install as a unit.
• Cryptographic verification on what’s hosted directly: every skill published to LoopSkill is Ed25519-signed by its creator at publish time and verified cryptographically at install, with the signature, tarball SHA-256, and source commit stamped on the public skill page — see Security & audit. That guarantee covers the hosted subset, not the federated metadata layer, and we’re not blurring the two.
• Sandboxed pre-publish verification: every hosted skill runs in an ephemeral, network-restricted container before it goes live, and the runner records every syscall/fetch/write for review — a step none of the other six directories describe doing.
• Runnable loops: bounded, POST-and-get-a-pass/fail agentic routines, which is a different category from “browse and install” entirely and doesn’t really compare to any directory here.

What LoopSkill is honestly behind on:

• Community and track record. No public leaderboard like skills.sh’s install counts, no 92k-star GitHub list like awesome-mcp-servers, and no multi-year editorial history like PulseMCP’s newsletter. We’re not claiming otherwise, and we’re not going to invent a user count to paper over it.
• MCP-server auth handling. Smithery’s one-click OAuth connectors for third-party SaaS solve a real problem LoopSkill doesn’t specifically target — LoopSkill’s model is signed, versioned code artifacts your agent runs locally, not managed live sessions against someone else’s API.
• Verified coverage of the full index. The 91k+ federation number is search reach, sourced as metadata from upstream registries — it is not 91k skills LoopSkill has individually sandboxed, signed, or hosted. If you need the cryptographic guarantees, that applies to the hosted subset at /skills, not the whole federated number.

Which one should you actually use

• Want the single biggest net to search across every public MCP server? Glama.
• Want a one-click, credential-managed connector to a specific SaaS tool? Smithery.
• Want to know what’s actually being installed and by whom, for skills specifically? skills.sh’s leaderboard.
• Want the community’s own hand-curated “these are good” list, weighted by GitHub stars? awesome-mcp-servers.
• Want editorial context and news on where MCP itself is heading? PulseMCP (when submissions reopen).
• Want to search 91k+ skills across the ecosystem from one MCP server and install straight into your agent, with cryptographic verification on what’s hosted directly? LoopSkill — see the live count at /federation/ and pricing.

These aren’t mutually exclusive. If you’re building an agent stack today, the realistic answer is: use LoopSkill’s federation search when you want the whole ecosystem reachable from one MCP server, and skills.sh for install popularity signal; use Glama or Smithery when you need a specific MCP server for a specific SaaS integration; and keep an eye on awesome-mcp-servers and PulseMCP for what the wider ecosystem is converging on.

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