Star velocity: top 10 fastest-growing tools

Raw star counts tell you popularity. Star velocity — stars gained per week — tells you momentum. These are the 10 MCP tools with the highest star acquisition rate in March 2026 (March 1 through March 19), estimated from daily snapshot deltas in the AgentRank index.

microsoft/playwright-mcp is the outlier at the top. It gained roughly 7,200 stars in the first 19 days of March — more than many tools have in total. The Glama install milestone (crossing 1.7 million installs) created a visibility spike that fed directly into star growth. Microsoft's browser automation MCP is now the most-installed and second-most-starred tool in the entire index at 29,150.

oraios/serena deserves attention at #2. It is not backed by a major corporation, not attached to a popular framework — it is a focused semantic code editing agent that developers are discovering organically. +6,173 stars in March at 2,286 stars per week is a signal that the "AI coding assistant" category still has significant appetite for new entrants.

The #4–6 cluster — mcp-go, mcp-use, and unity-mcp — are all in the 600–730 stars/week range and represent three completely different ecosystems: Go infrastructure, multi-LLM agent frameworks, and game development. The MCP ecosystem is not a single community. It is several.

Category momentum

The AgentRank index groups tools into 9 categories. Below are the categories that added the most new repositories in March 2026, measured as a percentage growth rate against the estimated March 1 baseline.

Browser Automation is the fastest-growing category by percentage (+50%), though it is starting from the smallest base (10 repos in March). This is the Playwright effect: one dominant tool creating category gravity that pulls in competitors and forks.

Agent Frameworks at +28% reflects the broader shift from "I am building an MCP server" to "I am building a system that coordinates multiple MCP servers." mcp-use, mcp-go, and new entries in multi-agent orchestration are driving this.

Code Assistants (+18%) are growing faster than MCP Servers (+14%) and AI Tools (+11%). The implication: developers are increasingly not just using MCP servers, they are building opinionated development workflows on top of them. laravel/boost and the spec-workflow category exemplify this pattern.

First-time top-100 entries

These tools entered the AgentRank top 100 for the first time in March 2026. All five are new to the scored index — either launched in Q1 or sufficiently new that their score only recently passed the threshold. The velocity of their rise is notable: all five cleared the 90+ elite-tier threshold within weeks of their first appearance.

The two Microsoft entries — azure-devops-mcp (#2, 97.3) and playwright-mcp (already in index, but accelerating) — confirm a strategic pattern: Microsoft is shipping official MCP servers for its entire developer toolchain. Expect an official GitHub MCP server, a VS Code MCP server, and likely an M365 MCP server in Q2. Each will be an immediate top-25 entry.

mcp-use/mcp-use is the independently-built standout. 9,450 stars with no major corporate backing, entering the top 10 in its first month of widespread visibility. It solves a real problem — connecting any LLM to any MCP server without framework lock-in — and the market is clearly responding.

rekog-labs/MCP-Nest is worth tracking specifically because it represents an opinionated community adoption pattern: the NestJS ecosystem bringing its own conventions to MCP. When a developer community starts building framework-native MCP tooling, it signals that the community has moved past "what is MCP" to "how do we do MCP our way."

Maintenance health

Growth is meaningless if the tools are not being maintained. Here is the maintenance picture as of March 19, 2026, split between the curated index and the broader ecosystem.

The split between the curated index (52.2 average score) and the broader ecosystem (29.6 average score) reflects exactly what you would expect: most of the 25,750 repos are experiments, proofs-of-concept, and abandoned early attempts. The AgentRank scoring model weights freshness and issue health heavily precisely because this problem is real — a starred-but-dead repo is worse than no repo at all.

100% of the top-110 curated tools received at least one commit this week. This is the maintenance baseline you should expect from any tool worth deploying. The 40 elite-tier tools (score 90+) represent roughly 0.16% of all indexed repos but account for the majority of practical ecosystem usage. That 0.16% is where real investment should go.

The 42% dormancy rate across the broader ecosystem is not alarming — it is expected. Open-source tool exploration peaks, most experiments die, a few survive and compound. What is notable is that the survival rate appears to be increasing: the percentage of repos active in the last 90 days was around 52% in Q4 2025, and it has risen to 58% in March 2026. The ecosystem is maturing and the surviving tools are pulling further ahead.

What the signals suggest

Official tooling is arriving fast

Microsoft shipped azure-devops-mcp and maintains playwright-mcp. Laravel shipped boost. Home Assistant shipped ha-mcp. The pattern is clear: mature ecosystems are adding official MCP servers to their product surface. Each official server creates an instant high-score entry because it comes with contributors, issue attention, and dependents from day one. Expect the top 20 to have significantly more official tools by end of Q2.

TypeScript is the language of momentum

TypeScript's share of high-score tools has been growing quarter-over-quarter (+5.1pp in Q1). March velocity confirms this: 7 of the top 10 fastest-growing tools are TypeScript or multi-language with TypeScript as primary. Python is still dominant by repo count, but TypeScript is winning on the maintenance health and score distribution metrics. Go and Rust continue to punch above their weight on average scores.

The frameworks are becoming infrastructure

When fastmcp hits v2, it gets 4,775 stars in a month. When mcp-go adds contributors, it sustains 724 stars per week. These are not product tools — they are infrastructure for building product tools. The fact that framework-layer repos dominate the velocity chart signals that we are in a "build the picks and shovels" phase. The application layer on top of these frameworks is still being built, which means there is significant greenfield opportunity above the framework level.

Browser automation is a category, not a single tool

Playwright MCP is dominant, but the 50% category growth rate in March shows that browser automation is attracting new entrants. The use cases are clear (web scraping, automated testing, form filling, research agents) and the Playwright MCP reference implementation is mature enough that new tools can be built on top of it rather than competing with it.

Methodology note

All data in this report is sourced from the AgentRank D1 database, populated nightly by the AgentRank crawler. Star counts and scores reflect the March 19, 2026 snapshot. Star counts at "February 28" and "March 1" baselines are estimated from the quarterly trajectory data (Q4 2025 end → March 19 total gain), distributed using observed growth curves rather than equal linear interpolation. Growth velocity numbers are labeled as estimates. Category repo counts come from the live /api/v1/stats endpoint and the AgentRank tools table as of March 19.

The curated index (110 scored tools and 1,625 skills) is a subset of the 25,750-repo full crawl. Curated tools are those that cleared minimum thresholds for stars, freshness, and contributor count. Methodology for the composite score is documented at agentrank-ai.com/docs/api/.