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

24,574 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

77,321 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

2,384 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

6,181 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

89,865 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. 23,271 servers probed on the last full run — 20,589 alive, 2,682 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." 81.8% of the aggregate corpus (73,485 of 89,865) 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.

List everywhere among these four source registries — it's free distribution, and they serve different audiences (PulseMCP's newsletter readers aren't the same people crawling Glama). Don't pick one.

The other kind of "largest MCP marketplace"

The four registries above are sources — places a server actually gets submitted, and the places Lulu MCPs reads and dedupes. Search "largest MCP server marketplace" or "best MCP registry directory," though, and a different set shows up: destinations built to be the search result itself. Worth being straight about these too, since they're the real competitive set for anyone actually shopping around.

LobeHub MCP Marketplace

91,067 listings, by their own stated count on the page. It's the largest raw number in the category, full stop — we're not going to pretend otherwise. What it's built for is quality signal at that scale: every listing carries a trust grade (A PREMIUM, B GOOD, or Unvalidated), an activity score, and results are explicitly ranked by activity, stability, and community feedback rather than shown as a flat list. It also leans hard into agent-native onboarding — you can point your own coding agent at their skill.md and have it set up the marketplace for you. The tradeoff: it's a first-party crawl-and-rank number, not a deduped-with-provenance one, and the page doesn't state which upstream sources it pulls from.

MCP.so

No single headline count — instead, overlapping per-category totals (Developer Tools 2,361, AI & Agents 1,153, Cloud & Infrastructure 752, and so on), which puts the real unique total at "several thousand-plus" without a number they claim themselves. What actually differentiates it is scope past servers: a real directory of MCP clients, a separate "Remote Servers" list, plus "Loops" (reusable agent workflows) and "Agent Skills." If you're trying to pair a server with a compatible host app, or you're looking for prebuilt workflows rather than a server, this is the more useful stop.

claudemarketplaces.com

12,800+ listings, and the pitch is freshness, not curation — it bills itself as an automatically updated directory with a live "last updated" timestamp and cites 380,000+ monthly visitors as its traffic signal. No claim of hosting, security screening, or manual review on either the homepage or the server page. If what you want is a fast-moving, high-traffic index and don't need vetting, that's exactly what it's for.

Protodex

27,744 listings, "indexed, ranked, and screened, refreshed from GitHub every week." The one clear differentiator here is real: they run listed servers through static analysis and surface risk signals, with the tagline "we make it safe to choose." The catch is the source is singular — they state plainly they re-index from GitHub only, so anything that never touched GitHub (or isn't currently active there) won't show up, and nothing is deduped against the other named registries.

MCPDrops

33+ listings. Genuinely small, and worth naming honestly: the site's own copy calls itself "the #1 MCP marketplace" and "the largest collection of verified MCP servers," which doesn't square with its own stated count. What it's actually doing well is hand curation — every listing looks reviewed, with community ratings and real documentation per entry, on a scale small enough that a human plausibly looked at all of it. If you want a short, manually-vetted list rather than a big index, that's a legitimate reason to check it.

Where Lulu MCPs actually stands against these

89,865 listings. That's not the biggest number in this list — LobeHub's own 91,067 is larger, and we're not going to round up to claim otherwise. What we're not doing is the same thing LobeHub is doing: this isn't a first-party crawl ranked by our own activity score, it's four separately-run registries merged and deduped against each other, so the same server submitted to two or three of them shows up once, not two or three times — plus the weekly liveness checks and real one-click installs covered above. And every marketplace in this section — LobeHub, MCP.so, claudemarketplaces, Protodex, MCPDrops, and the four source registries — lists your server for free. None of them send you a check.

The honest answer

Bigger-by-raw-count and trust-ranked (LobeHub), workflow-and-client-scoped (MCP.so), fast-and-high-traffic (claudemarketplaces), security-screened (Protodex), and hand-curated-but-tiny (MCPDrops) are all real, different jobs — check whichever matches what you're actually optimizing for. Lulu MCPs isn't trying to out-crawl LobeHub or out-screen Protodex; it's the one that reads the four registries servers actually get submitted to, merges them into a single trustworthy page per server, and is the only stop in this whole list where a listing can earn you something. Browse the marketplace, or submit your server if it's not listed yet — most servers already are, since we're reading the other four.