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MCP servers in Astell chat

Give Astell chat live tools from GitHub, Linear, Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Notion through their MCP servers, with an approval card before every call.

Looking for the other direction, using Astell from inside Claude, ChatGPT, or another assistant? See Astell MCP.

What MCP servers add to chat

The tools you connect to Astell are indexed for Astell Search and used by Astell Actions. Several of them also publish an MCP server (Model Context Protocol), a live tool interface the vendor maintains. Link the integration to a workspace and Astell chat can call it for live reads and for operations Astell has no native action for yet: the issues assigned to you right now, a specific Gmail label, a Notion page by name.

Astell still prefers its own tools. It answers from your indexed workspace first, uses Astell Actions for the writes it supports, and reaches for an MCP server when you need something live or something those tools cannot do.

Supported servers

Astell talks only to these vendor-hosted servers. Custom MCP URLs are not supported.

Servers are on by default

MCP servers work per workspace, and every member manages their own. As soon as an integration is linked to a workspace, Astell verifies its MCP server with one safe read using the account linked there, and from your next chat turn in that workspace its tools are available to Astell. The same integration can be linked in another workspace with a different account, so a server's status can differ between workspaces.

Everything about a server lives on its integration card in Workspace settings → Integrations:

• The card's ⋯ menu has Pause MCP tools in chat. Choose it to keep that server out of your chats in this workspace; your integration keeps syncing as before, and Resume MCP tools in chat brings them back.
• MCP tools in the same menu lists every tool the server offers with its risk label, and Refresh MCP tools re-checks the server and reloads its tool list.
• A card shows a note when the server needs something from you: a separate sign-in for Notion (and for Linear if it rejects the shared token), a reconnect when the server rejected the integration's sign-in, or a retry after an error.
• Sign out of Notion, shown in the menu once Notion is signed in, deletes Astell's copy of that sign-in; your integration is not affected.

A card whose subtitle reads MCP tools paused in chat has the server paused in this workspace.

Statuses

Statuses appear in the MCP tools dialog.

• Connected: the server answered Astell's read with your account, and its tools are available in chat.
• Ready to enable: Astell listed the server's tools but could not complete the read yet. Choose Refresh MCP tools.
• Needs authentication: the server rejected the current sign-in. The card offers Reconnect for the integration or Sign in for Notion. Astell re-checks the server for you when you return.
• Unavailable: a platform requirement blocks calls, for example Google's preview program. The card shows no MCP entries until the vendor lifts it.
• Error: Astell could not reach the server or list its tools. The card offers Try again. A short outage during a background re-check does not switch a working server off; Astell keeps it and shows the error.

Approving a call

Astell asks before every MCP call, every time. The card shows the server, the tool, its description, and the exact arguments Astell wants to send. Approve to run that one call, or cancel. Lists of values, such as the fields a tool will return, show as chips so they are quick to scan.

Each tool carries a risk label taken from the server's own annotations:

• Read tools are available to every workspace member.
• Write tools follow the same rule as Astell Actions: members can use them unless an admin has limited write actions to admins.
• Destructive tools are limited to admins. A tool that does not declare its risk counts as destructive.

Approval is per call. Astell never remembers an approval for later calls, and a call is sent exactly once: if the connection drops before the server answers, Astell reports the error rather than sending the call again.

Tokens and limits

MCP calls run inside a normal Astell chat turn. Their results join the conversation like any other tool output and are covered by your chat tokens; there is no separate MCP charge. Astell caches each server's tool list for a day and gives each call up to a minute before it reports an error.