context-modeLearn more

MCP Clients

Browse and discover Model Context Protocol compatible clients.

All clients

What is an MCP Client?

An MCP client is an application that connects to MCP servers using the Model Context Protocol— the open standard that lets AI assistants use external tools and data. Clients include desktop chat apps like Claude Desktop, AI-powered code editors like Cursor and VS Code, agent frameworks, and custom applications. The client handles discovering a server's tools, passing them to the language model, and executing tool calls on the user's behalf.

How to Choose an MCP Client

This directory lists 520+ open-source MCP clients from GitHub with AI-analyzed descriptions, setup guides, and feature breakdowns. Consider where you work (terminal, IDE, desktop app, or web), which models the client supports, and whether it handles the MCP features you need — tools, resources, prompts, and sampling. GitHub stars and recent commits are good signals of an actively maintained project.

Connect Clients to Servers

A client is only half of the setup — it needs MCP servers to be useful. Browse our MCP servers directory to find integrations for databases, web search, file systems, and hundreds of APIs, or check our MCP guides and tutorials for step-by-step setup walkthroughs.