Claude Desktop
Anthropic's native chat app for macOS and Windows, the original surface for installing local MCP servers.
Definition
Claude Desktop is the standalone app for chatting with Claude outside the browser. It was the first client to support MCP via local stdio servers configured in claude_desktop_config.json. Many MCP servers were designed against Claude Desktop's transport first; Claude Code and other MCP clients arrived later and adopted the same protocol.
When to use
See also
- Claude Code — Anthropic's official terminal-based coding agent, with MCP support and a plugin ecosystem.
- MCP — Anthropic's open standard for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources over JSON-RPC.