Growth trajectory

The MCP ecosystem grew at extraordinary speed in early 2025 and is now decelerating toward a normal compounding rate. Q1 2025 saw a 1,600% jump — that's what protocol announcement effect looks like. Q1 2026 added 4,532 new repositories, a 21% quarter-over-quarter increase. That's healthy, sustainable growth for an ecosystem this size.

The deceleration from 188% (Q2 2025) to 21% (Q1 2026) is not a sign of stagnation. It's what ecosystem maturation looks like. The initial wave was developers trying the protocol. Q1 2026 growth is production adoption — companies and maintainers building tools they intend to ship.

If current trends hold, the index will cross 30,000 repositories by Q2 2026. The skills registry count (3,124) is growing faster proportionally — Glama and skills.sh added significantly more listings in Q1 2026 than in any prior quarter.

Category breakdown

Developer Productivity and AI/ML Integration are the two largest categories, together covering 28.5% of the indexed ecosystem. This reflects where agent-assisted tooling is finding product-market fit: coding assistance and LLM integration are the two use cases with the widest early adoption.

The 34% uncategorized bucket is worth noting. A significant portion of MCP repositories don't fit clean categories — they're composites, experiments, or domain-specific tools with no standard taxonomy. The AgentRank categorization model will improve as the index matures and signal volume grows.

Security & Compliance is underrepresented at 1.2% (320 repos) but is the fastest-growing category by count this quarter. Enterprise security teams are starting to build MCP tooling for vulnerability scanning, secrets management, and compliance audit. Expect this category to double by Q3 2026.

Browse by category: Database · DevOps · AI/ML · Browser · Security

Biggest movers this quarter

These are the five tools with the largest star growth from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026 mid-point. Star velocity is a leading indicator of score improvement — it usually precedes the issue health and dependency signals that drive AgentRank scores higher.

CoplayDev/unity-mcp is the standout story of Q1. A community-built tool with no corporate backing that holds the #1 AgentRank score (98.67) and grew 126% in stars this quarter. It reached the Unity game-dev community through a single well-timed demo video and spread organically from there. This is what the top of the index looks like when community momentum beats corporate investment.

Pimzino/spec-workflow-mcp grew the fastest at 233% — from 1,200 to nearly 4,000 stars in one quarter. Spec-driven development is resonating with the vibe-coding wave: agents that can plan before they build are the next unlock after raw code generation.

Notable new entrants

Three new tools entered the top-10 scoring tier this quarter, all with strong institutional backing. These were either launched or substantially v2'd during Q1 2026.

laravel/boost (#3 overall, score 96.94) is the most surprising entrant. PHP was never an early adopter of AI tooling, but the Laravel Foundation moved fast once the spec was stable. Official maintainer backing gives it exceptional issue health and freshness signals. It's a reminder that ecosystem coverage is not determined by language popularity alone.

microsoft/azure-devops-mcp (#2 overall, score 97.17) launched in January 2026 and immediately showed what corporate release quality looks like: 1,400 stars in its first two months, a responsive issue tracker, and a team large enough to ship point releases.

Language momentum

Python's share of the ecosystem is declining slightly — not because Python projects are disappearing, but because TypeScript and Go are growing faster. This reflects a maturation in who's building MCP tools: fewer ML researchers experimenting, more product engineers shipping production tooling.

Go is the fastest-growing language by share (+0.9pp in one quarter), driven by mark3labs/mcp-go reaching critical mass and Google shipping the official Go SDK. At the current trajectory, Go will reach 7-8% ecosystem share by end of 2026.

Rust holds steady at 2.6% but punches well above its weight in the score distribution. Rust MCP tools are more likely to be in the Elite tier (80+ score) than tools in any other language. Small community, high quality.

Freshness snapshot

One significant shift from Q4 2025: the percentage of repos updated in the last 30 days increased from 20.1% to 24.4%. More projects are actively being developed right now than at any prior point in the ecosystem's history, in absolute and relative terms.

The freshness signal is the most actionable number in this report if you're choosing a tool to depend on. The 4,532 new repos that entered the index in Q1 are almost all fresh — but 54% of the existing index hasn't seen a commit in 91–365 days. New repo count flatters ecosystem health. Commit velocity tells the true story of what's alive.

Q2 2026 predictions

1. A2A crosses 5% of the index

A2A (agent-to-agent) tools currently represent 3.2% of indexed repositories. The spec is maturing fast and Google's A2A launch created a second wave of ecosystem tooling. By the end of Q2 2026, we expect A2A tools to cross 5% of the index — roughly 1,500+ repositories. The benchmark: MCP crossed 5% of "AI tooling" GitHub search results in its third month post-launch. A2A is on a similar curve.

2. TypeScript overtakes Python as the dominant language

At Q1 2026 growth rates, TypeScript reaches Python's current share (~38%) by Q3 2026. The inflection point may come sooner. Vercel, Cloudflare, and the VS Code/Cursor ecosystem are all TypeScript-native, and the agent-tooling layer is increasingly built for deployment on edge runtimes, not local Python scripts.

3. Enterprise security category doubles

The Security & Compliance category is growing faster than any other vertical by repository count. Enterprise security teams are building MCP servers for SAST integration, secrets scanning, compliance audit, and cloud posture management. Expect the current 320 repos to approach 700 by end of Q2 2026. The SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compliance layer is coming to agent tooling.

4. Installation counts diverge further from star counts

The top 5 tools by Glama installs already account for more than 60% of total install volume. As MCP moves into production, installation concentration will increase — users default to known-good tools rather than experimenting. This means the mid-tier tools (score 40–60) will need a clear differentiation narrative to avoid being bypassed entirely.

5. Registry consolidation

There are currently 6+ MCP registries (Glama, skills.sh, Smithery, the official registry, npm tags, and aggregators like AgentRank). By Q3 2026, expect clear winners to emerge — likely 2–3 dominant registries with cross-listing support. The winner will be the one that AI coding tools use by default.