Hacker News MCP vs Slack MCP Server

A side-by-side look at pricing, capabilities, pros, cons, and our editorial scores.

	Hacker News MCP MCP Servers	Slack MCP Server MCP Servers
Tagline	MCP server that lets Claude and other LLM clients read Hacker News stories, comments, users, and search results	Archived reference MCP server that lets Claude and other MCP clients read and post in a Slack workspace via a bot token.
Category	MCP Servers	MCP Servers
Pricing	Free· Free and open-source (MIT). No API keys or accounts required — hits the public Hacker News API and Algolia HN Search directly.	Free· Free / open-source (MIT). Requires a Slack workspace and a Slack bot token; Slack itself is free/paid.
Model	—	—
Editorial score	—	—
Use cases	Daily Hacker News front-page digest inside ClaudeSummarising the comment thread on a specific Show HN or Ask HNKeyword search across HN history from within an LLM chatProfiling a user's recent submissions and commentsChaining article fetch + comment analysis with a browser MCPTrend spotting across top / new / ask / show feedsReference implementation for building your own read-only MCP wrapper	Channel triage and summarisationAutomated thread digestsPosting AI-generated status updatesCross-channel search and reportingStandup and retro note postingOn-call escalation repliesUser and profile lookup for routingReaction-based workflow signallingMCP server reference implementation
Pros	Zero-config: no API key, no account, works against the public HN and Algolia endpoints out of the box Covers the four things people actually want from HN in an LLM context — front pages, comment threads, search, and user activity One-line install via Smithery, or a two-line `uvx` entry in any MCP client config Composes cleanly with other MCP servers (README shows a Puppeteer + HN chain for article + comments summaries) MIT-licensed and small enough to fork or self-host without ceremony Because it's local stdio, no HN data flows through a third-party relay	Official reference implementation from the modelcontextprotocol project — small, readable TypeScript that documents the MCP tool pattern well Covers the eight highest-value Slack primitives (list, post, reply, react, history, thread, users, profile) with minimal ceremony Ships as both an npx package and a Docker image, so it drops straight into Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP client with a JSON config snippet Standard Slack bot-token auth (xoxb-) with clearly scoped OAuth permissions — easy to reason about and to revoke Open-source under MIT, so forking or vendoring for internal hardening is straightforward Good starting point for learning how to write your own MCP server against a REST API
Cons	Read-only — no submit, upvote, flag, or comment actions (an intentional but real limitation) Small maintainer surface (single-author repo, sporadic updates) so bugs may sit No caching or pagination controls beyond what the underlying HN/Algolia APIs offer; large comment trees can blow out an LLM context window Only useful inside an MCP-capable client — not a standalone CLI or HTTP service Search quality is bounded by Algolia HN Search; nuanced semantic queries still miss things a human scroll would catch	Archived by the maintainer on 29 May 2025 — no upstream bug fixes, security patches, or Slack API compatibility updates Read-only surface for channels (public channels only by default) and no DM, private-channel, search, files, or canvas support out of the box No pagination helpers or rate-limit backoff beyond what the Slack SDK provides, so bulk history pulls in large workspaces can be fragile Requires a workspace admin to install a bot app and mint a token, which is a real blocker in locked-down enterprise Slack tenants Bot-token model means every action is attributed to the bot user, not the human operating the assistant, which complicates audit trails
Website	github.com	github.com

Pick Hacker News MCP if

✅ Zero-config: no API key, no account, works against the public HN and Algolia endpoints out of the box
✅ Covers the four things people actually want from HN in an LLM context — front pages, comment threads, search, and user activity
✅ One-line install via Smithery, or a two-line `uvx` entry in any MCP client config
✅ Composes cleanly with other MCP servers (README shows a Puppeteer + HN chain for article + comments summaries)

Pick Slack MCP Server if

✅ Official reference implementation from the modelcontextprotocol project — small, readable TypeScript that documents the MCP tool pattern well
✅ Covers the eight highest-value Slack primitives (list, post, reply, react, history, thread, users, profile) with minimal ceremony
✅ Ships as both an npx package and a Docker image, so it drops straight into Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP client with a JSON config snippet
✅ Standard Slack bot-token auth (xoxb-) with clearly scoped OAuth permissions — easy to reason about and to revoke

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