arbor vs filesystem

Side-by-side comparison to help you pick between these two MCP servers.

	arbor by Anandb71	filesystem by modelcontextprotocol
Stars	★ 117	★ 85,748
30d uses	—	—
Score	49	77
Official	—	✓
Categories	Developer ToolsAI / LLM ToolsKnowledge Graph	File SystemDeveloper ToolsProductivity
Language	Rust	TypeScript
Last commit	this month	this month

arbor · Summary

A graph-native code intelligence tool with 10 MCP tools for analyzing code dependencies and impact.

filesystem · Summary

A feature-rich MCP server for filesystem operations with dynamic directory access control.

arbor · Use cases

Analyzing code impact before refactoring
Finding all callers and callees of a function
Blocking PRs with high architectural blast radius in CI/CD
Exploring code structure and dependencies visually

filesystem · Use cases

Enable AI models to read and write project files during development
Allow Claude or other MCP clients to browse and analyze codebases
Provide secure sandboxed access to specific directories for content generation

arbor · Install

Installation

CLI Installation

# Rust / Cargo
cargo install arbor-graph-cli

# Homebrew (macOS/Linux)
brew install Anandb71/tap/arbor

# Scoop (Windows)
scoop bucket add arbor https://github.com/Anandb71/arbor
scoop install arbor

# Docker
docker pull ghcr.io/anandb71/arbor:latest

MCP Integration

claude mcp add --transport stdio --scope project arbor -- arbor bridge
claude mcp list

Initialize a Project

cd your-project
arbor setup

Usage

# See what a function impacts
arbor refactor <symbol-name>

# Check impact of uncommitted changes
arbor diff

# Launch GUI
arbor gui

filesystem · Install

Installation

Using NPX

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "filesystem": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem",
        "/path/to/allowed/directory"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Using Docker

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "filesystem": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "--mount", "type=bind,src=/path/to/allowed/dir,dst=/projects/allowed/dir",
        "mcp/filesystem",
        "/projects"
      ]
    }
  }
}

VS Code Extension

Click the installation buttons in the README to install directly in VS Code.

Comparison generated from public README + GitHub signals. Last updated automatically.