Top 10 MCP Servers for Developers in 2026
The MCP servers I actually keep installed — Tavily, Context7, DeepWiki, Supabase, Playwright, GitHub, Sentry, and others. Use cases, install commands, rough pricing.
There are 500+ MCP servers now. Most are demos. These ten are the ones I keep permanently installed across every Claude Code and Cursor project because they pay for themselves in saved time.
1. Tavily — the web search that actually works for agents
Tavily is the one I miss the most when it is not there. It is search-engine-as-an-API optimised for LLM ingestion — results come with cleaned, deduped snippets rather than the SEO-spam-infested HTML Google returns. Use for: "find the current version of X", "what changed in Y between version A and B", any research step.
Pricing: free tier 1,000 searches/mo, $20/mo for 4,000. Install: claude mcp add tavily --api-key tvly-...
2. Context7 — up-to-date library docs
Context7 indexes the docs of every major open-source library and exposes them as an MCP tool. The difference with "Claude reads the README" is that Context7 is always current and has the exact APIs, not a training-data approximation. Ask Claude "how do I do server actions in Next 15" and it hits the current Next docs, not a June 2024 snapshot.
Pricing: free. Install: claude mcp add context7
3. DeepWiki — explore any GitHub repo as a wiki
DeepWiki converts any public repo into a structured, linked wiki. Useful when you need to understand a codebase before you touch it. Claude can ask "what does the auth module do in repo X" and get a real answer derived from the actual code, not a hallucination.
Pricing: free for public repos. Install: claude mcp add deepwiki
4. Supabase MCP — database + auth, talking to you
The official Supabase MCP lets Claude query your schema, generate migrations, inspect RLS policies, and run one-off SELECTs against your dev database. It is read-heavy by default — opt-in flags for writes, which is the right default.
Pricing: free, uses your existing Supabase project. Install: claude mcp add supabase --project-ref ...
5. Filesystem — the one everyone should have
The Anthropic filesystem MCP gives Claude read/write access to a scoped directory. Obvious but easy to forget to install. Use --scope project in Claude Code to limit it to one repo at a time.
Pricing: free. Install: built into Claude Code by default.
6. GitHub — the gold standard MCP
The official GitHub MCP is the reference implementation everyone points at for "what a production MCP looks like". Create PRs, read issues, query CI status, check commit history. Shipped in Go, OAuth-gated, paginated tools — all the things a demo MCP usually skips.
Pricing: free, uses your GitHub token. Install: claude mcp add github --token ghp_...
7. Notion — for docs-driven teams
The Notion MCP reads your workspace and makes page content queryable. Useful for "summarise the Q2 roadmap" or "find the RFC about auth" type prompts. Write operations exist but I keep them off by default; Claude enthusiastically editing a shared Notion page is not what you want at 11pm.
Pricing: free, uses your Notion integration token.
8. Slack — targeted, not full firehose
Slack MCP is brilliant if you scope it down. Do not give Claude "read all channels" — give it one channel or a search tool scoped to the last 30 days. At that scope it can do things like "summarise what was decided in #eng-platform this week" cleanly.
Pricing: free, uses a Slack bot token.
9. Sentry — the incident response accelerator
The Sentry MCP lets Claude query issues, read stack traces, and inspect release data. Pair it with the GitHub MCP and you can say "find the Sentry issue that spiked after yesterday's deploy, open a PR that fixes it" — and it genuinely works about 60% of the time now, which is 60% faster than doing it by hand.
Pricing: free with Sentry account.
10. Playwright — the browser in your agent
The Microsoft Playwright MCP gives Claude a real headless browser with accessibility-tree navigation. Use for: "test that my login flow still works", "take a screenshot of the pricing page on mobile", "scrape this page that requires JS". It is the one MCP that turns agents from text-only into something that can drive real web UIs.
Pricing: free. Install: claude mcp add playwright
Bonus: the MCPizy proxy
Once you have 5+ MCP servers installed, the per-call cost starts mattering. The MCPizy proxy sits between your agent and these servers, applies APC (see the plan caching guide), and gives you centralised usage analytics. Typical savings: 40–70% token reduction, depending on how repetitive your workloads are.
Running MCP in production?
Centralised auth, cost analytics, and the APC optimization layer — free tier included.