Notion MCP vs Notion MCP Server

The Model Context Protocol or MCP for short is the de facto standard for using external services in your AI chat sessions.

Thankfully, Notion offers ready-made MCP solutions.

However, there are two different offerings, which can become a bit confusing:

• Notion MCP: Tools hosted by Notion
• Notion MCP Server: Official Notion repository with MCP server

Notion added a note to the Notion MCP repository directing users to the Notion MCP server hosted by them.

Usually, using a hosted version of a service is always the best idea - since that usually helps us to get going quickly and reduce maintenance headaches in the long run.

Unfortunately, I found the Notion MCP service fundamentally lacking.

Thus I would recommend you to put in the extra effort to use the open source server.

My reasons:

Lacking search function in Notion MCP

Notion MCP supports a 'search' tool, which allows to perform a full text search across your whole workspace.

This can be useful at times, but I find AI the most useful when you give it razor-sharp instructions.

In the context of Notion, this would mean a specific page, or a specific set of sub pages for a database.

For instance, I had a few entries in a database that were missing a title. The instructions to my agent where:

Create a short title for all entries missing a title https://www.notion.so/mxro/xxx?v=xxx

The Notion MCP server is not able to do this, since it doesn't have the capability to 'get all pages of a database' or 'get all pages for a database that match a specific filter.'.

Technically, you can provide a database ID as context, but since you are forced to provide a query text, it is not possible to retrieve all pages for a database using the search tool.

You would receive errors such as:

Error executing MCP tool:
MCP error -32602: MCP error -32602: Invalid arguments for tool search: [
  {
    "code": "invalid_type",
    "expected": "string",
    "received": "undefined",
    "path": [
      "query"
    ],
    "message": "Required"
  }
]

Or

Error executing MCP tool:
MCP error -32602: MCP error -32602: Invalid arguments for tool search: [
  {
    "code": "too_small",
    "minimum": 1,
    "type": "string",
    "inclusive": true,
    "exact": false,
    "message": "String must contain at least 1 character(s)",
    "path": [
      "query"
    ]
  }
]

The Notion MCP server, in contrast, handles this tasks without any problems.

Only Small Subset of Notion Features Available on Notion MCP

Further to the above only supports a fraction of the Notion functionality.

See the complete list here.

Notion MCP – Supported tools – How to use Notion MCP in your favorite AI tools

The document explains how AI assistants can utilize Notion MCP tools to efficiently create, search, and manage content within a Notion workspace by using prompts to combine various functions like searching, creating, updating, and moving pages or databases.

Notion API

Whereas the API easily covers twice as much of Notions' functionality:

Introduction

The reference is your key to a comprehensive understanding of the Notion API. Integrations use the API to access Notion’s pages, databases, and users. Integrations can connect services to Notion and build interactive experiences for users within Notion. Using the navigation on the left, you’ll find…

Notion API

Open Source Notion MCP Server Easy to Setup

Using the setup instructions on the Notion MCP Server GitHub page, it only took me around two minutes to have the Notion MCP server up and running in my environment (Cline extension for VSCode).

It actually took me longer to get the Notion MCP service running due to some confusion on my part about the server type.

Some Instability on Notion MCP

Looking at the GitHub issues for Notion MCP Server, a lot of users seem to use that forum to make known their issues with the Notion MCP server:

why has MCP not been fixed yet? It has been an ongoing issue for 3 weeks now!

401 using mcp.notion.com/mcp

MCP error -32000: Connection closed

Conclusion

I think combining Notion with your favorite LLM chat tool is an extremely powerful proposition.

I strongly recommend considering using the open source Notion MCP server for now (even though it may use more token).

I hope that Notion will improve their hosted MCP server and will be very happy to update this article when this happens.