5 of 44 top MCP server repos are archived

An MCP server is a service that provides context and capabilities to a host. The specification for revision 2026-07-28, fetched at 03:49:28 UTC on November 13, 2026, says servers offer resources, prompts, and tools. Five of 44 repositories in the star ranking below are archived. Those five still have 9,827 stars.

The 44 are what remains of the first page of GitHub's search for mcp-server in the repository name, sorted by stars, at 03:44:49 UTC the same morning, after lists and one guide were removed. The raw page's first row was a list, at 97,667 stars. It is not a server. The count of registry records, 59,506 on November 8, is not this list either. That census is How many official MCP servers are there?.

What an MCP server is

The specification says the protocol uses JSON-RPC 2.0 among three roles. Hosts are LLM applications that initiate connections. Clients are connectors inside the host. Servers are services that provide context and capabilities.

The same page says servers offer any of these features to clients:

Tools, the same page says, represent arbitrary code execution and must be treated with appropriate caution. Hosts must obtain explicit user consent before data access and operations. A star count does not carry that consent. The short glossary entry is What is an MCP server?. The loop that calls the tool is How do AI agents work?.

A harness is the program that decides which servers are connected and what the model may call. Tool use is the call. The JSON for a connected tool is sent on turns where the model never uses it. That cost is Why tool JSON costs more than your system prompt.

Why the most-starred name is a list

total_count was 56,008. incomplete_results was false. This note requested 50 rows. It did not download 56,008 repositories.

Six rows came off the page before any share was computed:

The kept 44 hold 160,466 stars and 20,344 forks. The median star count, the mean of the 22nd and 23rd rows, is 1,868. GitHub's own server is first among the 44, at 34,421. 34,421 divided by 160,466 is 0.2145, which is 21.45 percent of the stars in the set.

A topic search is a different index. On November 10 this site recorded 42,072 repositories tagged mcp-server. That page is MCP server meaning: 42,072 repos carry the tag. The query here is the name, not the topic. The two totals are not a time series.

Five archived repositories still hold 9,827 stars

Archived is GitHub's boolean on the search hit. Five are true.

3,399 + 2,112 + 1,862 + 1,285 + 1,169 = 9,827. That is 6.1 percent of the 160,466 stars, and 11.4 percent of the repositories. A harness that ranks servers by stars will meet these five before it meets Atlassian, which sits at 1,157 and is not archived.

Stale is a second cut. Three repositories were last pushed more than 365 days before the search. Gmail is one of them, and it is archived. The other two are not archived: financial-datasets/mcp-server at 525.3 days, and leonardsellem/n8n-mcp-server at 491.3 days. BeehiveInnovations/pal-mcp-server has 11,840 stars and was pushed 332.4 days earlier. It is not archived. A year of silence and an archived flag are different facts. Report both.

Twenty-five of the 44 were pushed in the 30 days before 03:44:49 UTC. Thirty-one were pushed in the 90 days. A push is not a release, and it is not a security review. It is the field GitHub calls pushed_at.

Six descriptions say official. Twenty-five owners are users.

The word official appears in six description fields. Every one of those owners is an organization.

Six of 44 is 13.6 percent. It is the wrong denominator for "servers a company maintains." Apify's description does not contain official. The README's second sentence calls it the official Apify MCP server, and the search hit was pushed the same hour, at 16,010 stars. The description field missed a vendor. The README can also overclaim. Notion's description still says official after the README has sent readers elsewhere.

Owner type is the mechanical split. 25 repositories belong to a user account. 19 belong to an organization. 25 of 44 is 56.8 percent. A user account can be a vendor's founder. An organization can be a weekend project. The type is not a warranty. It is the field that separates "someone's repository" from "a GitHub org" without a judgment call.

Licenses on the 44 hits: MIT 23, Apache-2.0 12, BSD-3-Clause 2, MPL-2.0 1, GPL-3.0 1, NOASSERTION 2, and no license object on 3. The three with no license object are DaxianLee/cocos-mcp-server, harishsg993010/damn-vulnerable-MCP-server, and jerry-ai-dev/MODULAR-RAG-MCP-SERVER. The Damn Vulnerable server is a teaching lab. Its README says so. A missing license is still a missing license.

Most of the READMEs tell you to run the server yourself

Remote, in this note, means the README gives a vendor-hosted URL as a way to connect. Local means you run the process, even when that process speaks HTTP on your machine. Both means the README documents the two for this repository.

The four hosted-only READMEs are Exa (https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp), Cloudflare (hosted /mcp URLs, including https://mcp.cloudflare.com/mcp), AnySearch (https://api.anysearch.com/mcp), and Atlassian (https://mcp.atlassian.com/v2/mcp). The seven that document both include GitHub, Apify, Firecrawl, Browserbase, Terraform, Jupyter, and MongoDB. GitHub's remote URL in the README is https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/. MongoDB's README separates an Atlas connection over OAuth, which you do not run, from a local server and a connection string.

Eleven READMEs name OAuth as a way to connect to this server. Sixteen name an API key, a token, or a bearer and do not name OAuth. One, designcomputer/mysql_mcp_server, names a database password. The LinkedIn README names a browser session and not a key. Fifteen name no auth method in the passages this reading used. Notion is in the sixteen that name a token, not the eleven: the OAuth sentence is about Remote Notion MCP, and this repository's own setup is a manual token.

A token in a config file is a secret the model can be tricked into reading. OAuth is not automatically safer. It is a different grant, and the spec still puts consent on the host. The archived Gmail server is an OAuth server with 1,169 stars and no push in 464 days. Do not prefer it because the README says OAuth.

What to connect, and what to leave

Connect the server the vendor documents for the system you already use. Then read three fields before the harness is allowed to call it: archived, pushed_at, and the auth the README names. Stars are the sort key that put a list first and an archived Gmail server inside the top 44. They are a bad allow-list.

GitHub's server is the clearest row in the set: 34,421 stars, MIT, not archived, pushed 0.2 days before the search, remote or local, OAuth or a personal access token. Atlassian's row is the one a buyer misses if they stop at the top ten: 1,157 stars, not archived, hosted, OAuth 2.1 or an API token, description says official. Notion's row is the warning. The description says official. The README says this repository is no longer actively maintained. Use the hosted product the README names, not the star count on the old tree.

If you publish a server, the description and the README are the two sentences a procurement review will quote. They disagreed on Notion. They disagreed, in the other direction, on Apify. Write the auth in the install block. An archived flag with 3,399 stars still ranks. The flag is the fact. The stars are the bait.

The same kind of GitHub snapshot, for agent frameworks rather than servers, is AI agent framework GitHub stats, November 2026. The seat a small business buys when it wants an assistant for every person, which is not this server list, is AI staff for a small business: $7, $18, and $20 a seat.

The 44 repositories

Days are the search time, 2026-11-13T03:44:49Z, minus pushed_at. Owner is org or user. Official is whether the description field contains that word. Runs and auth are the README reading defined above.