Since Anthropic shipped Skills, a question keeps surfacing: do Skills replace MCP servers? Some people have genuinely retired a few servers after adopting Skills — but the framing hides the real answer, because the two do different jobs. One teaches procedure; the other grants access. Get the distinction and you'll stop asking "which" and start asking "which for what".
The one-line split
A Skill answers "how do we do X here?" An MCP server answers "what is true right now over there?" Put another way: use MCP when Claude needs to reach an external system — GitHub, a database, a browser, an API. Use a Skill when Claude needs to know how to do something repeatably — your team's release process, a formatting convention, a multi-step review. Connectivity versus methodology.
What a Skill is
A Skill is a folder: a SKILL.md with instructions, plus optional scripts and reference files. It encodes know-how — the steps, the house style, the checklist — so Claude performs a task the way you want without you re-explaining each time. Crucially it doesn't connect to anything; it's guidance the model reads and follows.
What an MCP server is
An MCP server is a running program that speaks the Model Context Protocol and exposes tools. It gives Claude a capability it otherwise lacks: query this Postgres, open that pull request, search the web. Where a Skill is inert text, a server does real I/O against a live system. That's the line — a Skill can describe how to file a Linear issue, but it takes an MCP server to actually file one.
The token-budget difference
There's a practical cost angle. Skills use progressive disclosure — roughly a few dozen tokens each at startup, with the full body loading only when invoked, so teams run twenty or fifty of them without a measurable hit. MCP servers are heavier: a handful of servers can cost tens of thousands of tokens upfront unless you load tools on demand. So "prefer a Skill when a Skill suffices" is partly an economics argument, not just a conceptual one.
Use both: the working pattern
The teams that get this right don't choose — they layer. Pin one MCP server per external system you genuinely need (GitHub, Postgres, Sentry, Linear), then write thin Skills that orchestrate those tools into your actual workflows. MCP for the wiring; Skills for the recipes. Reaching for a server to encode a procedure, or a Skill to fake a live lookup, is how you end up fighting the tool.
Going further
We built an interactive breakdown at Skills vs MCP, and you can browse the Agent Skills directory directly. To pick servers, start with best MCP servers for developers and what is an MCP server.