Serena
Powerful MCP toolkit for coding. Provides semantic retrieval and editing capabilities, positioned as the IDE for the agent. 23,971 GitHub stars and 100 commits on main in the last 30 days.
“Powerful MCP toolkit for coding. Semantic retrieval and editing via LSP, positioned as the IDE for the agent. 23,971 stars and 100 commits on main in the last 30 days.”
INSTALL THIS SERVER
{
"mcpServers": {
"serena": {
"command": "python",
"args": [
"-m",
"serena_mcp"
]
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"serena": {
"command": "python",
"args": [
"-m",
"serena_mcp"
]
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"serena": {
"command": "python",
"args": [
"-m",
"serena_mcp"
]
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"serena": {
"command": "python",
"args": [
"-m",
"serena_mcp"
]
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"serena": {
"command": "python",
"args": [
"-m",
"serena_mcp"
]
}
}
}
7 TOOLS AVAILABLE
OUR ASSESSMENT
- 23,971 GitHub stars.
- 100 commits on main in the last 30 days. Top cadence for coding MCPs.
- MIT license.
- LSP-based semantic retrieval beats text-level grep.
- Refactoring tools (rename, edit-symbol) carry LSP correctness guarantees.
- Requires LSP support for the target language; Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java are first-class; less common languages may have limited diagnostics.
- Index build time on first run for large repos.
- Community-maintained.
Operates on local code; no remote auth required. Refactoring tools modify files; treat the agent flow as having full edit access to whatever directories the LSP server can read.
Long-context coding agents that benefit from LSP-aware navigation; refactoring flows that need rename safety; agent-IDE workflows where the agent operates the codebase as an IDE user would.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
ADOPTION METRICS
// Reading this23,971 stars on oraios/serena. 100 commits on main in the last 30 days.
// Reading thisPairs with Repomix, Claude Code MCP, OpenSpec, Context7, MCP Inspector for dev-tools coding infrastructure. Serena owns the LSP-aware-coding slot uniquely.
SOURCES & VERIFICATION
We don't take any single directory's word for it. Before scoring, we cross-reference 4 public MCP sources, install the server ourselves against the clients we cover, and record when we last re-verified.
The same server, 4 different lenses. We reconcile these signals into our editorial score, which is why our number sometimes diverges from a directory-aggregate star count.
| Source | Their rating | Their star count | Their downloads | Last synced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AutomationSwitch This page | 4.7editorial | 23,971 | — | MAY 8, 2026 |
| PulseMCP | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 8, 2026 |
| MCP.so | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 8, 2026 |
| Glama | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 8, 2026 |
| Smithery | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 8, 2026 |
// Counts are directory-reported; we don't adjust them. Discrepancies usually come from different snapshot times or star-caching.
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XcodeBuild MCP
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