I Wasted an Hour Picking an MCP Server and I'm Not Sure I Picked the Right One

I wanted to connect Claude to a Notion workspace. That was the whole thing. I thought it'd take fifteen, twenty minutes. Find the MCP server, drop it in the config, done.

I searched "Notion MCP server" and got fourteen results. I counted. There was one that looked official — it was under an org that sounded like it could be Notion's, but the README never actually said that. There were community ones. There were forks. Two of them were forks of the same repo but they'd gone different directions and I couldn't tell which one was "ahead." One had a really nice README, badges and a table of contents, very professional-looking, but the last commit was from November. Another one was updated two days ago but had like nine stars and no issues at all. No open issues, no closed issues. Just nothing.

I opened a lot of tabs. I started checking issues on each one — not how many, but whether the maintainer was actually responding. One popular one had issues going back weeks with no replies. Another had a bug filed about tokens expiring and the maintainer's response was basically "haven't figured that out yet, PRs welcome."

At some point I realized I'd been doing this for forty minutes and I still hadn't installed anything.

Not that long ago the MCP question was just "does a server for this exist." And usually the answer was no, or there was one and you used it. Now there are a bunch for anything popular and instead of "does this exist" the question is "which of these do I use." That's a different problem and I don't think anyone's really solved it yet. Or if they have I couldn't find it, which is sort of the point.

I looked at a few directory sites. They're lists. Server name, one-line description, star count. One of them had categories but the categories were stuff like "Productivity" and "Communication," which doesn't help when I already know I want Notion. Another one sorted by stars. Stars aren't great. A repo gets stars because the author tweeted about it, or because it was early, or because the README has screenshots. Stars don't tell you if it works with Claude Desktop, which is what I needed to know and couldn't figure out without actually trying to install each one.

I did try one that didn't work. It just didn't connect. No error. Nothing happened. I sat there for like fifteen minutes thinking I'd misconfigured something before I gave up and tried a different server. That one worked. Was the first one broken or was I doing something wrong? I still don't know.

I also remember almost picking one of the older repos just because the README was shorter and I was tired of opening tabs. That probably says more about the process than anything else.

After a while I realized I wasn't really looking for a bigger list. I was looking for some clue that someone had actually tried these and knew which ones were worth the trouble. If you want Notion and you're on Claude Desktop, use this one. If you need more features, try this other one but the auth is annoying. If you want something newer that handles databases, here's a third option, the maintainer seems active.

Somebody has to actually try the things and have opinions for that to exist. I think the reason it doesn't is that it's a lot of work and it makes you a target for people who disagree. Much easier to just scrape GitHub and make a big list and let the user figure it out. I'm not blaming anyone for this. But the big list doesn't really help me.

The trust part I keep thinking about and not landing on. These servers want my API tokens. My Notion key, or my GitHub token, or whatever. I'm giving those to code I haven't read, by people I've never heard of. The code is open source. I could read it. I didn't. Did you read yours? Probably not.

Someone told me that's just open source, you trust it or you don't. And that's fair for like, a utility library. But this is software that's specifically designed to handle your credentials and sit between your AI and your data. That feels different to me. Or it feels like it should feel different. I don't know if it actually is different in a meaningful way or if I'm just being weird about it. Nobody's doing audits. There's no verified badge. There's nothing. You just look at the stars and the README and you go with it.

I picked one. It works. Setup was maybe ten minutes once I'd actually decided. So the whole thing was about an hour and fifteen minutes, and an hour of that was just choosing.

Is there a better one in those fourteen? Maybe. I'll never check. I'm going to use this one until it breaks and then I'll open all the tabs again. Maybe by then there'll be twenty options. Maybe there'll be an official one that's good enough that the question stops mattering.

Anyway, I picked one and it's working. That's probably enough for now. I just didn't expect to spend most of the hour choosing it.