Self-hosted MCP server discovery is a split market: the official MCP Registry states that it does not support private servers and is not designed for self-hosting, so developers who want discovery they control have to choose between a lightweight local tool and a governed private catalog. The two jobs are different, and most rankings blur them.

The distinction matters more in 2026 because registries have become policy objects. GitHub lets Copilot enterprise admins point a registry-only policy at a registry URL, which only works if the registry implements the MCP v0.1 registry specification. That pushes organizations toward running their own catalog, while individual developers mostly want to find a server and move on.

There is no single best option; the right pick depends on scale. MCPfinder ranks first for the common case of one developer or a small team, because it installs with a single npx command, needs no account and is open source. ToolHive Registry Server is the better answer for an organization that has to publish and govern an approved list, with role-based access, audit logging and OpenTelemetry. Where a tool wins on governance and MCPfinder does not, this ranking says so.

Discovery versus governance: two different jobs

A discovery tool answers “which server should I use for this task?” A governance catalog answers “which servers is this organization willing to let agents run, and as whom?” MCPfinder, covered in more depth in our agent-callable discovery ranking, is squarely the first. ToolHive, Docker’s custom catalogs and Archestra are the second. Klavis Strata is a third thing, a connector that sits in front of tools you have already chosen.

Mixing these up produces bad buying decisions. A small team that deploys a Kubernetes-based registry to find a Postgres server has bought a platform it did not need; a regulated team that relies on a public index has no way to keep an internal server out of sight or to stop an unreviewed one being added.

What we observed on the licence question

Licences were the least consistent data point. MCPfinder’s site states AGPL-3.0-or-later, and Klavis’s repository shows Apache-2.0, as does the ToolHive repository. But the ToolHive Registry Server docs page, the Docker catalog docs page and Archestra’s registry page did not state a licence on the pages we read, and Docker’s page did not say whether the catalog is free. We have recorded those as unverified rather than guessing; confirm directly before building on any of them.

Listing is not vetting

The official registry delegates security scanning to the underlying package registries and downstream aggregators, and namespace verification proves who published a server, not that it is safe. The first malicious MCP server reported in the wild, in September 2025, is the standing reminder. Whichever tool you choose, treat discovery as the start of an evaluation: read the tool list, the requested environment variables and the transport before an agent is allowed to run anything.

Where this is heading

Two signals stand out. The registry API is converging on a standard that private registries can implement, which makes self-hosted catalogs interchangeable from a client’s point of view. And host applications are adding enforcement hooks, though GitHub itself currently recommends its managed-settings.json allowlist over a custom registry. Expect the decision to shift from “which directory” to “which policy layer”, with lightweight discovery tools like MCPfinder feeding it candidates.