MCP registry comparison 2026: Official Registry vs Glama vs PulseMCP vs Smithery vs Lulu MCPs

If you're deciding where to list your MCP server — or where to look for one — there are effectively five places, and they're not interchangeable. Here's what each one actually is, with real numbers as of today.

The official MCP Registry

19,824 listings. Run under the Model Context Protocol spec itself (modelcontextprotocol.io) — the canonical, spec-governed index. Naming follows a strict reverse-DNS convention (io.github.user/repo), which is unglamorous but means every listing traces to a real, verifiable source. If you want the listing that signals "this follows the spec properly," this is it. It's also the smallest of the four source registries, because it's the newest and the most structured about what goes in.

Glama

67,282 listings. The largest single index by a wide margin — a broad, crawl-based directory that picks up servers other registries miss. If reach is the only thing you care about, Glama alone gets you closer to "everywhere" than any other single registry. The tradeoff of being the biggest crawl is exactly what you'd expect: more noise, more abandoned repos, less curation per listing.

PulseMCP

2,347 listings. The smallest of the four, and the most editorial — PulseMCP pairs its directory with a newsletter and community following, so a listing here reaches an audience of people who read about MCP servers, not just search for them. Small numbers, but not comparable to the others on a raw-count basis; different job entirely.

Smithery

3,663 listings. The one with real hosting infrastructure attached — Smithery's own CLI (npx @smithery/cli) can run a server for you, not just point at a repo. If your server needs an actual runner rather than a plain install command, Smithery's mechanic matters more than its count.

Lulu MCPs

75,824 listings — every one of the above, deduplicated into one canonical page per server, with a linkback to its real source. That's not a fifth registry competing with the other four; it's the index that reads all of them so you only have to search once. What we add on top of aggregation:

• Liveness, checked weekly. 14,247 servers probed on the last full run — 12,680 alive, 1,567 dead. A registry listing that points at a dead endpoint isn't useful no matter how it got there; dead listings sink in trust score automatically here, not manually curated out.
• Real one-click installs, not "read the README." 80.2% of the aggregate corpus (60,822 of 75,824) is stdio-only with no hosted URL — historically a dead end. Every server page shows every real install path across Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, and ChatGPT, using the actual package data the source registries capture.
• The only one that pays you back. Claim your listing and turn on Lulu Ads: one disclosed sponsored line in your own tool responses, 70% revenue share on every real conversion. None of the four registries above offer this — being listed on them costs nothing but also earns nothing.

The honest answer

List everywhere — it's free distribution on all five, and they serve different audiences (PulseMCP's newsletter readers aren't the same people crawling Glama). Don't pick one. But if you only have time to check one dashboard, aggregate-search one index, and set up one monetization switch, that's the point of building this one. Browse the marketplace, or submit your server if it's not listed yet — most servers already are, since we're reading the other four.