MCP connectors: where to start (2026)
The verdict
Start at the official MCP Registry for anything infrastructure-grade, then Smithery for skills and community servers, with Glama as the widest-coverage catalog to search. The practical starter set for a founder: your knowledge wiki, your repo host, your CRM, and your workflow engine — connected read-only first.
The contenders — v2026.Q3
| Tool | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| MCP Registry | Free · open API · Apache-licensed codebase | Publishing your server once and being discoverable everywhere — the canonical metadata layer every marketplace and client syncs from. |
| Smithery | Hobby free (50k RPCs/mo, 3 namespaces) · Pay-as-you-go from 100k RPCs · Custom w/ SLA; publishing always free | Developers who want the app-store experience — hosted remote servers, managed OAuth/credentials/sessions, plus a growing catalog of reusable agent skills. |
| Glama | Starter $9/mo (3 hosted servers) · Pro $26 (10) · Business $80 (30) · open-source servers hosted free | Vetting before installing — the widest lens on the ecosystem, with A–F maintenance grades, an inspector, a gateway, and cheap hosting in one place. |
| Composio | Free 20k tool calls/mo · $29/mo 200k · $229/mo 2M · Enterprise (SOC-2, VPC); pricing changes Aug 15, 2026 | Wiring an agent to your actual SaaS stack — one managed MCP endpoint over 1,000+ apps with OAuth, sandboxing, and per-user auth handled. |
| Docker MCP Catalog & Toolkit | Included in Docker plans: Personal free · Pro $9/mo · Team $15 · Business $24; needs Docker Desktop ≥4.48 | Teams that read the CVE list — curated, containerized MCP servers (Stripe, Elastic, Grafana...) run sandboxed, with credentials stored once in Docker and shared across clients. |
How to choose
MCP went from spec to table stakes in eighteen months; every element you add to your stack should answer 'does it speak MCP?'. Watch install quality — community servers still carry high failure rates, so prefer first-party servers from the vendors that hold your elements.
- If you're shipping an MCP server for others to use
- Publish to the official MCP Registry first — namespace-verified, free, and every aggregator (Smithery, Glama, PulseMCP, GitHub) syncs from it hourly. Then containerize for Docker's catalog if you want enterprise reach.
- If you want your agent connected to your SaaS stack this afternoon, auth included
- Composio (deepest agent-native tooling, 1,000+ apps) or Zapier MCP if you already pay Zapier — 9,000+ apps at zero marginal cost, two tasks per call.
- If you're evaluating an unknown server before letting it near your data
- Check it on Glama (A–F maintenance grade, source inspection) and prefer a containerized or hosted-remote version — 15.4% of registry servers have no public source at all (NimbleBrain, Mar 2026).
- If security review keeps blocking `npx`-installed local servers
- Docker MCP Toolkit for sandboxed local, or a gateway (Composio, Glama, TurboMCP self-hosted) so credentials never live in a plaintext .env — the pattern behind most of MCP's 7 CVEs.
- If you're building a remote server and choosing where it lives
- Cloudflare Workers or Vercel functions — the 2026-07-28 stateless spec removed sessions precisely so MCP servers run behind ordinary load balancers and serverless platforms with no sticky-session gymnastics.
Beyond these five, we track 16 more tools in this category — including 2 dead, renamed, or sunsetting. The full field, the comparison matrix, and every source live on the MCP Connectors element page.
Also consider — combining elements
Method
From edition v2026.Q3 of the elems table, verified 2026-08-06. Elements are jobs, not brands; picks are editorial and never paid for — see the independence charter. When a tool loses its seat, the changelog records the succession.
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