Best OpenSearch MCP Server Alternatives 2026

The Apify MCP server gives AI agents access to 6,000+ ready-made cloud scrapers, crawlers, and automation tools on the Apify Store — no infrastructure required. Connect to Apify Actors that extract data from social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn), search engines (Google, Bing), e-commerce sites (Amazon, eBay), maps (Google Maps), and virtually any website. Each Actor runs in the cloud with managed proxies, browser fingerprinting, and anti-bot bypass built in. Use the Apify MCP server to query Actors by task, stream results directly into your AI context, run custom scraping Actors from your Apify account, and chain multiple data extraction steps in a single workflow. Supports tool filtering to expose only the Actors you need, and integrates with Apify's RAG web browser Actor for retrieval-augmented generation use cases.

The MCP server is free and open-source. Apify platform: Free tier with $5/mo platform credits. Starter: $49/mo. Scale: $499/mo. Enterprise: Custom pricing.

The Firecrawl MCP server gives your AI assistant the ability to crawl, scrape, and extract structured data from any website — turning raw HTML into clean, LLM-ready Markdown or JSON in seconds. Built by the Firecrawl team, it exposes tools for single-page scraping, deep site crawls (following internal links), and batch URL extraction, all with JavaScript rendering handled automatically so dynamic content is never missed. Developers use it to automate competitive research, build live knowledge bases, extract pricing tables, monitor documentation changes, or feed structured web data into RAG pipelines — all through natural-language prompts without writing a single scraper script. The Firecrawl MCP server handles rate limiting, retries, and proxy rotation behind the scenes. Authentication requires a Firecrawl API key (free tier available). Install with: npx firecrawl-mcp. Works with Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, and any MCP-compatible client. With Firecrawl, any public webpage becomes a structured data source your AI can reason over, compare, and act on — making it the go-to MCP server for web data extraction workflows.

The MCP server is free and open-source. Firecrawl: Free tier with 500 credits. Hobby: $16/mo (3,000 credits). Standard: $83/mo. Growth: $333/mo.

Exa's official MCP server connects AI assistants to a search engine purpose-built for AI, using neural embeddings to match on meaning rather than keywords so agents get clean, ready-to-use content instead of a page of blue links to re-parse. The default tool set covers web_search_exa for quick topical lookups and web_search_advanced_exa for full control over domains, date ranges, and content filters, plus specialized tools for code_search (searching real-world code and GitHub), company_research (building company profiles, competitor lists, and financials), crawling/web_fetch (pulling clean content from a specific URL), people_search and linkedin_search (public professional-profile lookups), and deep_researcher_start/check for long-running multi-step research tasks backed by Exa's Research API. The server is hosted at https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp — no local process to run — and connects via one-line setup in Cursor, VS Code, Claude Code, Claude Desktop (available as a native Connector), Codex, OpenCode, Windsurf, and Antigravity, authenticated with an EXA_API_KEY from the Exa dashboard. Tool exposure is tunable per client via a ?tools= query parameter on the endpoint URL, letting teams ship narrow, purpose-built configurations (e.g. company-research-only or LinkedIn-only agents) instead of exposing the full surface, and Exa ships ready-made Claude Skills/agent definitions for common patterns like company research and people search with built-in query-variation and token-isolation guidance.

The MCP server is free and open-source. Exa: Free tier with 1,000 searches/mo. Pro plans available for higher volume. See official pricing.

The Brave Search MCP Server is the official server from Brave that gives AI assistants privacy-first web search through the independent Brave Search API — no tracking, no profiling, and results drawn from Brave's own web index rather than Google or Bing. It exposes five distinct tools that map directly to the Brave Search API endpoints: brave_web_search for general queries with pagination, freshness filters, and safe-search controls; brave_local_search for businesses, restaurants, and points of interest with automatic location filtering; brave_news_search for recent articles and current events; brave_image_search for image discovery; and brave_video_search for finding videos across the web. Authentication uses a single BRAVE_API_KEY (free tier available at brave.com/search/api) or a mounted BRAVE_API_KEY_FILE for Docker-secret setups. Install in Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, or VS Code with one npx command and choose stdio or streamable-HTTP transport. Because Brave operates its own crawler and index, the Brave Search MCP server is a strong choice for developers who want an alternative to Google-dependent search tools, need reproducible non-personalized results, or care about data privacy in agent workflows — Claude can pull fresh web context, verify facts, and research topics without leaking queries to ad-tech pipelines.

The MCP server is free and open-source. Brave Search API: Free tier with 2,000 queries/mo. Paid plans for higher volume starting at $3/1000 queries.

The official MongoDB MCP server, `mongodb-js/mongodb-mcp-server`, maintained by MongoDB. Searchers find it as the MongoDB MCP server or the Mongo MCP server; both names refer to this one project, and there is no separate short-form server. It is really two tool surfaces in one process. The database tools connect to any MongoDB deployment over a connection string in `MDB_MCP_CONNECTION_STRING` — `find`, `aggregate`, `explain`, `collection-schema`, `collection-indexes`, `create-index`, `count`, `export`, `mongodb-logs` and the write tools — or, if no connection string is set, the model calls the `connect` tool at runtime and passes the returned `connectionId` to later calls. The Atlas tools are a separate control plane: listing and creating clusters, database users, IP access-list entries, stream processing resources and the performance advisor. They authenticate with Atlas Service Account credentials (`MDB_MCP_API_CLIENT_ID` / `MDB_MCP_API_CLIENT_SECRET`), not with a connection string, and they simply do not register when those are unset — the usual cause of a 'the Atlas tools are missing' report. Two defaults are worth knowing before you point it at production. `readOnly` is false, so every write tool including `drop-database` is registered unless you pass `--readOnly`, which is why MongoDB's own README uses that flag in every example. And confirmation-required tools rely on MCP elicitation, so on a client that does not support elicitation they execute without prompting — `--readOnly` or `--disabledTools` is the actual boundary. Other guardrails: `indexCheck` rejects queries that would do a collection scan, server-side JavaScript (`$where`, `$function`, `$accumulator`) is disabled by default, results are capped at 100 documents and 16 MB per call, and `--dryRun` prints the resolved config and enabled tool list without starting the server. Requires Node 22.13.0 or later (Node 20 is deprecated); also published as the `mongodb/mongodb-mcp-server` Docker image. Runs over stdio by default, with an optional HTTP transport and a separate monitoring listener for `/health` and Prometheus `/metrics`.

The MCP server is free and open-source. MongoDB Atlas: Free tier (512MB). Shared: from $9/mo. Dedicated: from $57/mo. Enterprise: Custom.

The PostgreSQL MCP server was the Model Context Protocol reference server for Postgres, and it is retired: the source now sits in modelcontextprotocol/servers-archived — a repository GitHub reports as archived, described as "Reference MCP servers that are no longer maintained" — and the npm package @modelcontextprotocol/server-postgres carries a deprecation notice reading "Package no longer supported." It still installs and still runs, which is why most third-party setup articles have not caught up. What it provides is deliberately small: a single tool, query, which executes read-only SQL inside a READ ONLY transaction, plus per-table schema information exposed as MCP resources at postgres://<host>/<table>/schema, with column names and data types discovered from database metadata. There is no index advice, no health check, no separate schema-listing tool, and no write mode. Install is npx @modelcontextprotocol/server-postgres with a postgres:// connection string as the argument. For active work against Postgres, the maintained alternative is Postgres MCP Pro (crystaldba/postgres-mcp), which exposes nine tools including index tuning against hypothetical indexes and a database health check, and has an explicit restricted access mode; if your database is hosted on Supabase or Neon, their platform servers add branching and logs that a raw Postgres connection cannot see. Reach for this archived server only when you want the smallest possible surface — one process, one read-only query tool, nothing else.

Free and open-source MCP server. PostgreSQL is free and open-source. Hosting costs depend on your infrastructure choice.

conversational read and write access to any SQLite database file, plus a running business-insights memo that accumulates what the analysis turns up. It is a Python server on PyPI, not a Node one, and the difference is the single most common reason setups fail here: `@modelcontextprotocol/server-sqlite` does not exist on npm, so every npx line for it 404s. The working invocation is `uvx mcp-server-sqlite --db-path /path/to/database.db` (PyPI package mcp-server-sqlite, v2025.4.25), or the equivalent `mcp/sqlite` Docker image with a volume mounted at /mcp. The --db-path argument is required and points at the .db file; the server will create it if it is not there yet. Six tools are exposed, deliberately split by risk: read_query for SELECT only, write_query for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE, create_table for DDL, list_tables and describe-table for schema introspection, and append_insight, which writes into a memo://insights resource that updates live as findings accumulate — that resource, not the SQL tools, is what makes this server different from a generic database connector. It also ships an mcp-demo prompt that takes a business topic, generates a plausible schema and sample data, and walks through an analysis end to end, which is the fastest way to see the memo behaviour without wiring up real data. One caveat to weigh before adopting it: this is an Anthropic reference implementation that now lives in modelcontextprotocol/servers-archived, archived on 2025-05-28. The published package still installs and runs, but it is frozen — no new features, no dependency updates, and no security patches.

Free and open-source MCP server. SQLite is public domain — completely free with no external service costs.

The Redis MCP Server (redis/mcp-redis) is Redis's own natural-language interface for agentic applications, letting an AI client read and write Redis data over the Model Context Protocol. Note which one you install: the server most tutorials still point at is Anthropic's reference implementation, which now lives in modelcontextprotocol/servers-archived, and its npm package @modelcontextprotocol/server-redis is explicitly marked "Package no longer supported" with a last publish of 2025-04-25. The maintained server is a Python package instead, run with uvx --from redis-mcp-server@latest, and it covers far more of Redis than the reference one did: string, hash, list, set and sorted-set tools; JSON document tools; pub/sub with stateful channel and pattern subscriptions; Streams tools including consumer-group create, read, acknowledge and destroy; vector index management and vector search through the query engine; a docs search tool; and a server-management tool for database info. Connection is a redis:// or rediss:// URL passed as --url, or the REDIS_HOST/REDIS_PORT/REDIS_PWD/REDIS_SSL environment variables, with Redis Cluster mode behind REDIS_CLUSTER_MODE and EntraID service-principal, managed-identity and default-credential auth flows for Azure Managed Redis. There is no --read-only flag: the documented way to stop an agent writing is a Redis ACL user (ACL SETUSER readonlyuser on >pw ~* +@read -@write). Ships as a PyPI package, a GitHub install via uvx, and an official mcp/redis Docker image; stdio transport only.

The MCP server is free and open-source. Redis Cloud: Free tier (30MB). Essentials: from $7/mo. Pro: Custom pricing. Self-hosted Redis is free.

Supabase MCP Server connects Cursor, Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Windsurf and other MCP clients to a Supabase project, and the first thing to know is that the personal access token setup most guides still describe is gone. Supabase now runs a hosted server at https://mcp.supabase.com/mcp using OAuth 2.1 with dynamic client registration — you add the URL, your client opens a browser, you pick the organization, and there is no PAT to mint or rotate. For Claude Code that is `claude mcp add --scope project --transport http supabase "https://mcp.supabase.com/mcp"` followed by `/mcp` in a plain terminal (not the IDE extension) to run the auth flow. Three URL query parameters do the real configuration work: `read_only=true` runs every statement as a read-only Postgres role, `project_ref=<id>` scopes the server to one project and drops the account-management tools entirely, and `features=` selects the tool groups. Those groups are database (list_tables, list_extensions, list_migrations, apply_migration, execute_sql), debugging (get_logs across API/Postgres/Edge Functions/Auth/Storage/Realtime, plus get_advisors for security and performance findings), development (get_project_url, get_publishable_keys, generate_typescript_types), Edge Functions (list, get, deploy), account management, docs search, experimental branching on paid plans, and storage — storage is the one group disabled by default. Running Supabase locally with the CLI exposes a reduced server at http://localhost:54321/mcp with no OAuth; self-hosted installs are similar. The npm package `@supabase/mcp-server-supabase` still exists for stdio clients and also exports `createToolSchemas()` so Vercel AI SDK users get typed tool inputs and outputs. Read Supabase's security best-practices page before pointing this at anything with production data — the mutating tools are real.

The MCP server is free and open-source. Supabase: Free tier (500MB, 50K monthly active users). Pro: $25/mo. Team: $599/mo. Enterprise: Custom.

The Neon MCP Server (neondatabase/mcp-server-neon) is Neon's official, open-source bridge between natural language and the Neon serverless Postgres platform. It translates conversational requests into Neon API and SQL calls, letting Claude, Cursor, VS Code, and other MCP clients create projects and branches, run queries, inspect schemas, and perform database migrations without hand-writing SQL or hitting the API directly. A standout capability is migration support built on Neon's branching: the server can spin up a branch, apply and test a schema change there, and only then merge it — so an assistant can safely run "add a created_at column to the users table" against an isolated copy first. The easiest setup is the remote hosted server at https://mcp.neon.tech/mcp, which supports both OAuth (no API key to manage) and API-key auth via the Authorization header; run `npx neon@latest init` for one-command configuration of Cursor, VS Code (Copilot), and Claude Code, or `npx add-mcp https://mcp.neon.tech/mcp` to register it across all detected editors. Requires Node.js 18+ and a free Neon account; if IP Allow is enabled, whitelist the mcp.neon.tech static IPs. Neon explicitly scopes this server to local development and IDE workflows — its README warns against production use since natural-language commands can execute powerful, irreversible database operations, so always review actions before authorizing them.

The MCP server is free and open-source. Neon: Free tier (0.5 GiB storage). Launch: $19/mo. Scale: $69/mo. Business: $700/mo.