Top 7 MCP Clients for AI Tools: Enhance Your AI Tooling Experience

MCPs (Model Context Protocols) are quickly becoming the backbone of modern AI tooling. Major players like Hugging Face and Meta are currently hosting hackathons, encouraging participants to build innovative MCP servers, clients, and plugins. This trend illustrates just how significant this area is within the tech landscape today.

But what exactly are MCP servers and clients?

• MCP Servers: These are lightweight programs or APIs that connect real-world tools such as databases, file systems, or web services to AI models. Acting as bridges, they enable AI agents to interact with external systems securely and efficiently.
• MCP Clients: These applications—ranging from IDEs and chatbots to desktop apps—connect to MCP servers, providing users or AI agents access to a multitude of tools and services, all through a single interface.

In this article, we will explore the top 7 MCP clients that allow you to experience the vast landscape of open-source MCP servers. Even if you have no previous experience, the setup tends to be as simple as adding a line to your client’s configuration file.

1. Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop stands out for its user-friendly interface, making it simple to view and interact with code in dynamic ways. The integration of MCP servers enables efficient debugging and exploration of new topics. Personally, I find it remarkably accurate in identifying available tools and executing them to produce insightful responses.

One of the major advantages is its ability to work seamlessly with locally configured MCP servers. Upon launching the application, all your configured MCP servers automatically start, granting instant access to a rich toolkit directly from your desktop.

2. Cursor AI

Cursor AI is a game-changer for coding or editing tasks, as it supports the integration of multiple MCP servers. This feature enhances its functionalities, allowing effortless access to the web, databases, documentation, APIs, and other external services. While Cursor AI comes equipped with built-in agents and tools, the ability to add custom MCP servers and APIs elevates your development workflow by automating numerous tasks. Importantly, Cursor AI supports the SSE protocol, providing a more user-friendly experience when accessing and configuring hosted MCPs.

3. Claude Code

The moment I tried Claude Code with Claude Opus 4, I was impressed by how effectively it comprehended my requirements and code, delivering results that were nearly bug-free. Even when the occasional issue arose, Claude Code utilized its agent mode and integrated tools to resolve it. Its deep understanding of your codebase allows it to make changes across multiple files while aligning with your coding standards.

Like Cursor AI, Claude Code also supports MCP server integration, allowing automatic invocation as needed once configured.

4. Windsurf

Windsurf shares the same SSE protocol support as Cursor AI while offering an equally productive development experience. Unique to Windsurf is its built-in MCP Plugin Store, enabling you to easily search for, install, or even add your own MCP server plugins. If you can’t find the plugin you need, adding it manually is also feasible by editing the mcp_config.json file. Official MCP plugins are marked with a blue checkmark, indicating their credibility as they are produced by the parent service company. Among all the clients discussed, Windsurf has an array of features and settings while remaining more affordable than its counterparts.

5. Cline

Cline is a robust VS Code extension designed to serve as an autonomous coding agent. It provides code generation, debugging, and seamless MCP integration to enhance its functionalities. This tool is especially celebrated among users who wish to integrate OpenRouter to access free models, delivering a high-quality AI development experience without associated costs. With Cline, you can create and edit files, execute commands, use the browser, and even develop custom MCP tools tailored to your workflow directly from your IDE.

6. Continue

Continue acts as an open-source IDE extension usable with both VS Code and JetBrains. It offers features such as code generation, autocomplete, chat, and in-editor code editing, matching nearly everything found in top AI code editors like Cursor and Windsurf. The MCP integration can be added to hub Assistants using mcpServers blocks, enabling a high degree of customization. You can even create your assistants or connect to various models and plugins for a tailored development experience.

7. LibreChat

LibreChat is a free, open-source alternative to ChatGPT that connects you with a wide array of AI model providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and even local models via Ollama. This application supports MCP integration, allowing configuration of mcpServers which facilitates dynamic interaction with specialized tools and servers. Its modular setup makes it straightforward to extend LibreChat’s capabilities, simply by adding or modifying server configurations.

Adding MCP support transforms the interaction experience, especially with official servers from companies like Mem0, Anthropic, and Exa—these MCPs are crafted for reliability, security, and privacy. Excitingly, developing your custom MCP servers locally can be achieved with just a few lines of code, and they will function out of the box.

If you’re new to MCPs, I highly recommend starting your journey with Claude Desktop. It’s user-friendly and allows for simple integrations that don’t demand any API keys.

For more resources, check out my guides on building and integrating MCP servers:

Abid Ali Awan (@1abidaliawan) is a certified data science professional passionate about building machine learning models. Currently focused on content creation, Abid writes technical blogs on machine learning and data science technologies. He holds a Master’s in technology management and a bachelor’s in telecommunication engineering. Abid’s vision is to develop an AI product using graph neural networks tailored for students facing mental health challenges.