Claude Debugs For You vs Serena

A side-by-side comparison of two Developer Tools servers — tools, transport, auth, maintenance, and copy-paste config for each.

	Claude Debugs For You Let any LLM interactively debug your code in VS Code via breakpoints and expression evaluation. Unverified stdio (local) No auth TypeScript	Serena LSP-powered coding agent toolkit: semantic symbol search, references and structural edits. Verified stdio (local) No auth Python
Category	Developer Tools	Developer Tools
Language	TypeScript	Python
Transport	stdio (local)	stdio (local)
Auth	None	None
GitHub stars	509	12k
Last commit	6 months ago	15 days ago
Verified
Actively maintained
Install	—	`uvx --from git+https://github.com/oraios/serena serena start-mcp-server`
Repo	Open	Open

Verdict

Pick Claude Debugs For You if you prefer its approach (let any llm interactively debug your code in vs code via breakpoints and expression evaluation).

Pick Serena if you prefer the more popular, battle-tested option, and you need the broadest set of tools.

Add Claude Debugs For You

Paste into ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "claude-debugs-for-you": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": [
        "/path/to/mcp-debug.js"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Add Serena

Install / run

uvx --from git+https://github.com/oraios/serena serena start-mcp-server

Paste into ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "serena": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from",
        "git+https://github.com/oraios/serena",
        "serena",
        "start-mcp-server"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Requires `uv` (the Python package runner). Install it from https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ if `uvx` is not found.

FAQ

Claude Debugs For You or Serena — which is better?

Pick Claude Debugs For You if you prefer its approach (let any llm interactively debug your code in vs code via breakpoints and expression evaluation). Pick Serena if you prefer the more popular, battle-tested option, and you need the broadest set of tools.

Can I use both Claude Debugs For You and Serena?

Yes — MCP clients let you enable multiple servers at once. Add both configs to your client's mcpServers and use whichever tool fits the task.

Do Claude Debugs For You and Serena work with Claude, Cursor and Windsurf?

Both do. Copy the per-client config below into Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Windsurf.

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