Am I right in thinking that connecting to DT4’s MCP from Claude Desktop allows you to search your DT4 database, whereas calling Claude from within DT4 does not? If so, I find this to be a strange situation. Why would one not be able to have even more access to the DT4 database via a call to Claude’s API versus access from an outside application?
Or am I misunderstanding something?
Stefan
In my understanding there is not much of a difference inside the DT4 context in both approaches. You can do DT4 stuff with both.
MCP gets interesting if you want to combine DT4 with other apps on your computer. Beside DT4, Claude Desktop can connect to other apps like mail, finder, etc.. Combining all those apps via Claude Desktop can give you more useful automations. I do not have an specific example though. I have not tried it myself.
The MCP server supports more tools than the chat assistant currently. The reason is simple: When using DEVONthink and its chat assistant, there are already many options to perform certain tasks via menu or toolbar items, keyboard shortcuts, smart rules, batch processing or AppleScript. These are not available when using the MCP server in e.g. the Claude.app, therefore the extended tool set.
That’s also true for AppleScript which we still recommend if the apps are also scriptable and AI is not really necessary or not the center of the workflow. AppleScript and JXA (JavaScript for Automation) are free, private (no data leaves your computer), reliable and work offline.
Makes sense. Thanks!