Frequently asked questions

MCPOrbit is a desktop client for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It connects to any MCP server, lets you browse the tools, prompts, and resources it exposes, and call them directly — without writing integration code or running a model in the loop.

Think of it as the “showroom” for MCP servers. The place you go to evaluate one before you wire it into production.

Anyone evaluating, debugging, or building MCP servers. That includes developers integrating MCP into agents, server authors testing their own implementations, and curious technical users who want to see what’s possible without standing up a full agent stack.

A chatbot wraps tool calls in conversation. MCPOrbit doesn’t. You see the tools, their input schemas, their raw outputs — the primitives, with no model interpreting them. That makes it the fastest way to understand exactly what a server does.

Model Context Protocol — an open specification for how language models and agents discover and call tools provided by external servers. Read the official spec at modelcontextprotocol.io.

macOS 14 (Sonoma) and later, on Apple silicon. MCPOrbit ships a single arm64 build, so it will not launch on an Intel Mac. Windows and Linux builds are on the roadmap.

Download the .dmg from the homepage, drag MCPOrbit to your Applications folder, and launch it. The build is notarized and stapled, so it opens on the first try with no Gatekeeper prompt.

No. There is no signup, no login, and no cloud component. MCPOrbit runs entirely on your machine.

Open MCPOrbit, press Add Connection at the bottom of the sidebar, and pick STDIO. The program and its arguments go in two separate fields. Put npx in Command, and put -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem ~/Documents in Arguments (space-separated). Type a Name yourself, because it does not fill itself in. Saving adds the connection to your sidebar; select it and press Connect to start the server and load its tools.

Yes. MCPOrbit supports both local stdio servers and remote HTTP/SSE endpoints. Paste a URL instead of a command and provide any auth headers your server requires.

Once per launch, to check for updates. That check is automatic and the current release has no setting that turns it off. It is also the only request MCPOrbit makes to us: there is no telemetry and no analytics. The App does reach other services when you ask it to — the MCP servers you connect to, the public registries you browse, and, if you configure the Agent panel with your own API key, the AI provider you picked — but none of that traffic comes to us. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what the update request contains.

Locally, in ~/Library/Application Support/MCPOrbit. Connection details, MCP server credentials and environment variable values are written there unencrypted, so treat that folder as sensitive. AI provider API keys are the exception: those are encrypted with Electron safeStorage, which is Keychain-backed on macOS. Nothing in either file is sent to us.

MCPOrbit is the client — it sees every request and response that flow through it, exactly like any MCP client would. MCPOrbit forwards none of it to us. MCPOrbit runs a local stdio server as a subprocess on your own machine, and reaches a remote HTTP or SSE server over the network — so requests to a remote server necessarily leave your machine, because that is what connecting to it means.

Tools are called only when you click Run. MCPOrbit never invokes them automatically. Some servers annotate tools as destructive in the spec — those show a warning chip in the UI before you confirm the call.

MCPOrbit is free to download and use, with no usage limits, no paid tiers, and no telemetry. It is proprietary software — free does not mean open source, and we don’t publish the source code.

Yes. The licence covers commercial use at no charge, on as many machines as you like, with no seat count and no sign-up. It does not cover redistributing or modifying the app itself.

The core client will remain free. Optional paid add-ons for teams (shared server libraries, audit trails, SSO) are on the long-term roadmap, but they’re not required to use MCPOrbit.

The server probably exposes prompts or resources instead of tools — switch the sidebar tab. If it’s genuinely empty, disconnect and connect again — when a server fails to return its tool list, MCPOrbit shows the reason above the Connect button.

A hanging call is usually the server waiting on a network call or an external process. MCPOrbit logs a call when it finishes, so a hang shows up as an entry that never arrives rather than one you can watch. Check the server’s own output, and give the server its own timeout so a stuck call returns an error instead of nothing.

Open an issue on the project tracker, or use Help → Report an issue from the menu bar — it captures your version, your OS, and a redacted log snippet for you.