there are over 10,000 MCP servers listed across directories right now and most of them are weekend projects that break the first time you try them, I spent the last year vibecoding and kept only the ones that actually work are actively maintained and solve a real problem. if you dont know what MCP is its how you connect Claude to external tools like databases, browsers, APIs and basically anything. heres what survived sorted by what they do search and research: Tavily for AI optimized web search that returns clean content not just links, Exa for semantic search that finds pages by meaning, Context7 for live documentation so Claude stops hallucinating outdated APIs, Perplexity for synthesized answers with reasoning. web scraping: Firecrawl turns any URL to clean markdown in seconds and is the go to for RAG pipelines, Apify has 3000+ ready made scrapers for basically any website that exists, Crawl4AI is free open source with 61k GitHub stars. dev tools: GitHub MCP is the first one every developer should install for PRs issues and code search, Sentry gives you production errors with full stack traces, Linear for issue tracking without leaving Claude, Vercel for deploying and debugging failed builds. databases: Supabase for Postgres through prompts, MongoDB with 40+ tools for Atlas management, Neo4j for graph database queries and knowledge graphs. productivity: Notion for docs and wikis through prompts, Slack so you can actually say “summarize what the team discussed about the launch” and it works, Zapier to trigger workflows across 6000+ apps from one prompt. business: Stripe for payments and subscriptions, HubSpot for CRM without the HubSpot UI. design: Figma MCP reads design tokens and inspects components so the design to code gap basically disappears. I’ve also been experimenting with FuseAI as a layer on top of some of these for connecting multiple MCP workflows together which has been interesting for more complex automation chains. you dont need all of these, start with 3 to 5 that solve problems you actually have right now, if youre a dev go GitHub plus Sentry plus Context7, if you do research go Tavily plus Firecrawl plus Exa, if you manage projects go Linear plus Slack plus Notion, each server uses token context so more than 5 and youre burning tokens on tool descriptions before you even ask a question. happy to answer questions about any of these submitted by /u/iliatopuria17
Originally posted by u/iliatopuria17 on r/ClaudeCode