Integrations Overview
How MCP connectors work in Mate and what they enable.
Mate ships with a full library of integrations built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). These connectors let your AI agents interact with external services — GitHub, Slack, databases, cloud providers, and more — directly from agent chat.
What is MCP?
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to external tools. Each MCP connector runs as a local process that speaks a standardized protocol over stdin/stdout. The connector exposes "tools" that the AI agent can call — like creating a GitHub issue, querying a database, or sending a Slack message.
How connectors work in Mate
When you enable a connector in Mate:
- Mate stores your credentials locally (API keys, tokens) in encrypted storage on your device
- When you start an agent chat, Mate spawns the connector process and passes it to the CLI as an MCP server
- The AI agent discovers the connector's tools and can call them during the conversation
- The connector process runs locally on your machine — credentials never leave your device
Mate bundles its own Node.js runtime, so most connectors work out of the box without you needing to install Node.js separately. The bundled runtime handles npx commands that connectors use to start.
What connectors enable
With connectors, your AI agent can:
- Read and write code on GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket
- Manage projects in Linear, Jira, Asana, or Trello
- Query databases like Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, or Redis
- Search the web via Brave Search, Exa, or Tavily
- Send messages on Slack, Discord, or Telegram
- Manage infrastructure on AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, or Kubernetes
- Generate images with DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, or fal.ai
- And much more — see the full connector list
Transport types
Most connectors use stdio transport — Mate spawns a local process and communicates over stdin/stdout. A few built-in connectors (like Mate Canvas) are handled directly by the app without spawning a separate process.
Next steps
- Set up a connector — step-by-step guide
- Browse all connectors — full list by category
- Claude Code integration — detailed guide for the most popular CLI
- Custom connectors — add your own MCP servers