Claude Skills Marketplace: Where to Get Skills

There is no single "Claude Skills Marketplace" the way there is an Apple App Store or a Chrome Web Store. What actually exists is three very different places to get skills for Claude — Anthropic's own plugin directory, a sprawling and uneven GitHub ecosystem, and a handful of curated libraries that charge money to do the sorting for you. Each has a real tradeoff, and this guide walks through all three honestly so you pick the right one for how you actually work.

If you are new to the concept, start with our plain-English explainer on what Claude Skills are before you go shopping for them — knowing what a skill actually does makes every option below easier to evaluate.

There is no single Claude Skills marketplace — yet

Searching "claude skills marketplace" suggests a centralized storefront, but what you land on is closer to three parallel ecosystems: Anthropic's official, reviewed directory; an open GitHub landscape anyone can publish to; and independent creators packaging their own tested collections. None of them is wrong. They just serve different people at different stages of comfort with installing things onto their machine, and confusing them is how people end up either overpaying for something free or installing something they should not trust.

The distinction that matters most before you install anything: a skill is a folder containing a SKILL.mdinstruction file (plus optional scripts and resources) that Claude loads when it is relevant to your task. A plugin is a larger bundle that can include one or more skills, plus commands, agents, hooks, and MCP server connections. Most of what people call "skills" in casual conversation ships inside plugins — which is why the official directory is organized around plugins, not a flat list of skills.

That framing matters because it changes what you are actually searching for. If you want Claude to reliably format a proposal the same way every time, you want a skill. If you want Claude to also pull ticket data from Jira or push a commit to GitHub while it does that work, you want a plugin that bundles a skill with an MCP connection. Conflating the two is the fastest way to end up installing something far heavier than the job actually required.

Option 1: Anthropic's official plugin directory

The official marketplace, called claude-plugins-official, is automatically available the moment you open Claude Code — no setup required. Run /plugin and open the Discover tab, or browse the same catalog at claude.com. Anthropic reviews and curates every entry, covering categories like source control integrations (GitHub, GitLab), project management (Jira, Asana, Linear, Notion), design (Figma), infrastructure (Vercel, Firebase, Supabase), monitoring (Sentry), and development workflows like commit automation and PR review.

Sitting next to it is a separate, still-official public repository of Agent Skills that Anthropic maintains directly — a smaller, more focused set of example skills spanning creative tasks, testing workflows, and enterprise document work. It exists specifically to show what a well-built skill looks like, which makes it a good reference even if you end up writing your own.

There is also a community marketplace, claude-plugins-community, that Anthropic runs automated safety screening against before anything gets listed — but it is not editorially reviewed the way the official directory is. You add it with /plugin marketplace add rather than getting it by default, which is a deliberate signal that it carries more trust-at- your-own-risk than the official one.

The honest tradeoff with the official directory: it is small and skews toward developer-tool integrations. If you are a marketer, consultant, or operator looking for a skill that drafts SOWs or reformats meeting notes, you will not find much here yet. It is the safest source, not the deepest one.

Option 2: GitHub — the biggest source, and the messiest

GitHub is where the actual volume lives. Search for skill and plugin repositories and you will find community collections claiming hundreds or even thousands of individual skills, curated "awesome list" style repos that organize skills by category, and thousands of one-off skills built by individual developers for a narrow personal use case and shared publicly afterward.

The appeal is obvious: it is free, it is enormous, and if you know what to search for, you can usually find someone who already built the skill you need. The catch is equally obvious once you have spent an afternoon there. Quality is wildly inconsistent — a repo with a thousand skills often means a thousand different authors with a thousand different levels of care, no consistent testing, and no one accountable if a SKILL.md file quietly breaks after a Claude update. Duplication is rampant; the same idea gets rebuilt under five different names with five different bugs. And because anyone can publish a skill, you are trusting whatever instructions and scripts are bundled inside it — worth treating with real caution, especially anything that bundles executable scripts rather than plain markdown instructions.

GitHub is the right source when you have a specific, narrow need, you are comfortable reading through a SKILL.md file before you trust it, and you do not mind the time cost of evaluating five candidates to find one good one. It is the wrong source if what you want is a reliable set of skills for your actual job, ready today, with someone else having already done the quality control.

Before I install this, review it for me.

Here is the SKILL.md and any accompanying files from a skill I found
on GitHub:
"""
[paste the full SKILL.md content, plus any scripts it includes]
"""

Tell me:
1. In plain language, what does this skill actually do when Claude
   loads it?
2. Does it execute any scripts, call external URLs, or read/write
   files outside what it needs to do its stated job? Flag anything
   suspicious specifically.
3. Is the instruction quality good — clear, specific, testable — or
   vague and likely to produce inconsistent results?
4. Would you recommend installing this as-is, installing with
   modifications, or skipping it? Be direct.

Run that prompt before installing anything you did not write yourself. It takes two minutes and it is the single best habit for using the GitHub ecosystem safely.

Option 3: Curated paid libraries, and what you are actually paying for

The third option is a curated library — a smaller, deliberately limited set of skills and prompts, built and tested by one team, and sold or bundled rather than crowdsourced. This is where a resource like the Claude Vault sits: 550+ recipes organized by job function instead of alphabetically or by star count, with each one built to produce a finished output rather than a starting point you still have to shape.

What you are paying for is not access to something you could not find for free eventually — it is the removal of the sorting problem. Free sources are free at the point of download and expensive at the point of evaluation: every skill you install is time spent reading, testing, and often discarding. A curated paid library moves that cost from your afternoon to the person who built it, once, for everyone.

That trade is worth it for people whose time is worth more than the subscription cost, and worth skipping for people who enjoy the hunting and have the hours to spend on it. Neither is the "correct" choice in the abstract — it depends on what your hour is worth and how much you like sifting through GitHub search results on a Tuesday night.

Comparing all three sources honestly

Here is the comparison without the marketing gloss — cost, quality control, breadth, and who each option actually fits.

Pricing on Claude itself is a separate question from where you get skills — if you have not settled on a plan yet, our Claude pricing guide breaks down free vs Pro vs Max, since some skills and Projects features require a paid plan to use at all.

How to actually install a plugin once you have picked a source

Whichever source you choose, the mechanics in Claude Code are the same two-step process: add the marketplace, then install the specific plugin you want.

# The official marketplace is already available — no add step needed.
/plugin install github@claude-plugins-official

# Third-party marketplaces need to be added first.
/plugin marketplace add owner/repo-name
/plugin install plugin-name@repo-name

# After installing, activate changes without restarting:
/reload-plugins

A useful habit regardless of source: check a plugin's detail view before installing. Claude Code shows you exactly what commands, skills, agents, hooks, and MCP or LSP servers a plugin will add, plus a rough estimate of how much context it will cost you on every turn. Read that before you click install, not after.

Which source actually fits your situation

There is a version of this decision that has nothing to do with which source is objectively best and everything to do with what you are optimizing for this week: coverage, safety, or speed to a finished workflow. Picking based on habit — always GitHub, always the official directory — is how people end up either missing a perfectly good skill or wasting an afternoon vetting five broken ones when a tested option already existed.

If you are a developer integrating Claude Code into an existing toolchain — GitHub, Jira, Figma, Sentry — start with the official directory. It is free, reviewed, and covers exactly that use case well.

If you have a narrow, unusual need and enjoy digging, GitHub will eventually have something close to what you want — just run every candidate through the audit prompt above first, and budget real time for the search.

If you are a marketer, consultant, coach, or operator who wants skills that produce finished work — not a starting point you still have to shape — a curated library is the faster path. For a shortlist of specific skills worth having regardless of source, see our roundup of the best Claude Skills. And if what you actually need is reusable prompts rather than installable skills, our Claude prompt library covers that adjacent territory.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an official Claude Skills store?

Not a dedicated skills store specifically — Anthropic's official plugin directory, claude-plugins-official, covers skills as part of larger plugin bundles, and it ships automatically inside Claude Code. A separate, smaller public repository of example Agent Skills also exists directly from Anthropic for reference.

Are skills from GitHub safe to install?

Some are, many are fine, and a few are not worth the risk. Because anyone can publish a skill, treat every one you did not write yourself as untrusted until you have read the SKILL.md and any bundled scripts, or run it through an audit prompt like the one above. Prefer skills that are plain instructions over ones that bundle executable code you have not reviewed.

Is a paid skills library actually worth it over free options?

It depends on what your time is worth. Free sources cost you hours of evaluation before you find something reliable; a curated paid library shifts that cost to the people who built and tested it. If you would rather spend an afternoon working than searching, it is worth it. If you enjoy the search and have the time, it is not necessary.

Can I use skills without Claude Code?

Skills also work inside Claude's desktop and web apps and inside Cowork, not just the terminal CLI — the installation mechanics differ by surface, but the underlying skill format is the same everywhere.

Will an official, unified skills marketplace ever exist?

Possibly, and the pieces are already converging in that direction — the official directory has grown past 200 listed plugins, and the community marketplace now runs through the same automated review pipeline rather than sitting completely outside it. Until Anthropic merges discovery, review, and installation into one surface, though, the practical answer stays the same: know which of the three ecosystems you are pulling from before you install anything, because the trust level is not the same across all of them.