MCP server popularity is extremely concentrated

On October 19, 2026, the top 1% of MCP servers hold 67.6% of GitHub stars and the top 10% hold 94.6%. Median stars: 23.

3,465Servers

3,387GitHub repos

2.7MTotal stars

67.6%Top 1% star share

94.6%Top 10% star share

0.57%Bottom half star share

23Median stars

77.1%Under 100 stars

60.8%Top 5 download share

How this was counted

Snapshot 2026-10-19. Unique servers are the servers listed in the MCP Morning directory (mcp.json; 3,465 on this date). GitHub repositories are deduped by owner/repo (case-insensitive); if two registry listings still share a repo after the daily merge, the higher star count is kept. Star shares use the 3,363 servers with a known star count — missing GitHub data is omitted, not treated as zero. The top 1% and top 10% are ceil(n × fraction) of that starred set, sorted by stars. Bottom half is the lower n // 2. Median is the middle of the starred set.

Weekly download share is the top five servers with a counted npm/PyPI total, over every server that has a count (1,962 of 3,465). Host packages whose installs are not treated as MCP usage, and servers with no package, are missing from that denominator.

Caveats: stars can be gamed; downloads include CI traffic; a high concentration figure is a popularity fact, not a quality rating. Open data: mcp.json. Ranking rules: methodology.