MCP Registry vs Smithery: the honest comparison
The short answer
Edition v2026.Q3 · pricing and status verified 2026-08-06.
Choose MCP Registry for publishing your server once and being discoverable everywhere — the canonical metadata layer every marketplace and client syncs from. Choose Smithery for developers who want the app-store experience — hosted remote servers, managed OAuth/credentials/sessions, plus a growing catalog of reusable agent skills.
On the elems table, MCP Registry holds seat #1 of the MCP Connectors element and Smithery holds #2 — this is the closest call in the category, and the honest answer depends on which trade-off you can live with.
The case for each
1MCP RegistryMCP project / Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation)
Free · open API · Apache-licensed codebaseBest for Publishing your server once and being discoverable everywhere — the canonical metadata layer every marketplace and client syncs from.
Watch Still 'preview' as of Aug 2026 — no durability guarantees, breaking changes allowed. It solves discovery, not trust: no security scanning (delegated downstream), and CI/CD re-publishing bloated it to tens of millions of duplicate version entries over ~1,700 unique packages (SafeDep, Dec 2025). Deliberately machine-facing — humans browse the aggregators instead.
2SmitheryClavia, Inc.
Hobby free (50k RPCs/mo, 3 namespaces) · Pay-as-you-go from 100k RPCs · Custom w/ SLA; publishing always freeBest for Developers who want the app-store experience — hosted remote servers, managed OAuth/credentials/sessions, plus a growing catalog of reusable agent skills.
Watch Smaller catalog than Glama or PulseMCP, and built by-and-for developers — non-technical users hit a steep curve. Corporate trail is muddy: the site operates as Clavia, Inc. but the smithery-cli repo now lives under the arcadeai-labs GitHub org — worth watching for consolidation.
MCP Registry vs Smithery: side by side
Edition v2026.Q3 · verified 2026-08-06.
| MCP Registry | Smithery | |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog size (Aug 2026) | 97 | 13,942+ |
| What it is | Curated dev registry | Marketplace + skills |
| Hosted remotes | No | Yes |
| Auth handled | No | Yes (OAuth/creds) |
| Quality signal | Hand-picked | Uptime + success metrics |
| Pricing | Free | Free → usage |
| Open source | Yes | CLI only (AGPL) |
What each side won't tell you
MCP Registry: Still 'preview' as of Aug 2026 — no durability guarantees, breaking changes allowed. It solves discovery, not trust: no security scanning (delegated downstream), and CI/CD re-publishing bloated it to tens of millions of duplicate version entries over ~1,700 unique packages (SafeDep, Dec 2025). Deliberately machine-facing — humans browse the aggregators instead.
Smithery: Smaller catalog than Glama or PulseMCP, and built by-and-for developers — non-technical users hit a steep curve. Corporate trail is muddy: the site operates as Clavia, Inc. but the smithery-cli repo now lives under the arcadeai-labs GitHub org — worth watching for consolidation.
If it's neither
The rest of the top five: Glama (largest tracked catalog) · Composio (managed auth, 1000+ apps) · Docker MCP Catalog & Toolkit (containerized trust layer). The complete field — 16 more tools including the graveyard — is on the element page.
This analysis is drawn from the MCP Connectors element dossier — the ranked top 5, the comparison matrix, and the complete field of 16 more tools live there, with every source. Data: mc.json (CC BY 4.0).
Every claim above is dated and sourced from the elems dossiers — 1,421 tools tracked across 58 categories, verified 2026-08-06, including the 276 we found dead, renamed, acquired, or sunsetting. Rankings are editorial, never paid — the charter.
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