Claude Skills Marketplace: Where to Find and Install Skills

There is no single Claude skills marketplace. Skills are spread across a few places: Anthropic's own skills repository on GitHub, the plugin marketplaces built into Claude Code (one official, one community, plus any third-party catalog you add), community GitHub repos and curated lists, and app marketplaces such as Taku's that package skills into something you can run. Which one you use depends on where you run Claude and how much code you're willing to read before you install.

This guide is about where to find skills and how to get them in safely. If you want a list of specific skills worth installing, that's a different post: the best Claude skills and how to install them.

Claude skills marketplace options: where to find skills

Two things to notice. "Marketplace" in Claude Code means a catalog of plugins, and a plugin can carry skills, agents, hooks and MCP servers together. And the further down the table you go from Anthropic's own repos, the more of the checking falls on you.

Anthropic's official sources

The anthropics/skills repository

Start here even if you never install anything from it. The repo holds Anthropic's example skills (creative and design, development, enterprise and communication, and document skills), plus the Agent Skills spec and a template.

Two details matter. First, licensing is split: many skills are Apache 2.0, but the document skills (Word, PDF, PowerPoint and Excel) are source-available rather than open source. Second, the README says the skills are for demonstration and educational purposes, and that you should test them before relying on them.

To use the repo in Claude Code, you register it as a marketplace with /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills, then install document-skills or example-skills from the anthropic-agent-skills marketplace. On claude.ai you don't need to: the repo notes these example skills are already available there.

The Claude Code plugin marketplace

This is the closest thing to an official Claude skills marketplace. Anthropic's marketplace documentation describes three general-purpose catalogs:

• Official (claude-plugins-official): Claude Code registers it for you the first time you start an interactive session. Most of what it lists comes from partners and other authors; Anthropic maintains a smaller set of its own, such as commit-commands and code-review.
• Community (claude-community): third-party plugins that authors submitted to Anthropic. You add it with /plugin marketplace add anthropics/claude-plugins-community. Nearly every entry is pinned to a commit, and Claude Code refuses to install a different one.
• Demo (claude-code-plugins): a few example plugins in the anthropics/claude-code repo. Older tutorials point here, but most of them are also in the official marketplace.

Day to day: run /plugin in a session and the Discover tab lists every plugin from the marketplaces you've added; type to search. Or name it directly with /plugin install plugin-name@marketplace-name. Either way, Claude Code shows a details pane listing what the plugin will install (commands, agents, skills, hooks, MCP servers) before asking you to pick a scope: just you, everyone on this repository, or you in this repository only. The install guide covers the desktop app and VS Code versions.

If you'd rather browse in a browser, Claude Marketplace lists the plugin catalog on the web, marks some listings as Anthropic verified, and lets you filter by whether a plugin works with Claude or Claude Code.

Skills in claude.ai

If you use Claude in the browser or desktop chat rather than Claude Code, there's no /plugin command. Anthropic's pre-built document skills are already on, and the Help Center's guide to using skills explains how to toggle skills under Customize > Skills and upload your own as a ZIP. Code execution needs to be enabled for skills to work.

One catch: a skill uploaded to claude.ai isn't automatically on the API, and Claude Code's skills are files on your machine. Install a skill wherever you plan to use it.

Community marketplaces and directories

Third-party plugin marketplaces

Plenty of popular skill packs live in their authors' own GitHub repos, each with a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file that turns the repo into a marketplace. You add one with /plugin marketplace add owner/repo, and its plugins appear in the Discover tab next to the official ones.

Superpowers is the best-known example. It's a library of development skills (test-driven development, systematic debugging, brainstorming, planning, code review) that you can get two ways: from the official marketplace, or by adding the author's own obra/superpowers-marketplace. Its README also covers other coding agents.

The rule for every repo in this tier is the same, and Anthropic states it directly: it doesn't review third-party marketplaces. A marketplace's name tells you who publishes the catalog, not what each plugin does.

Curated lists

The "awesome" lists on GitHub are good for discovery. awesome-agent-skills is a large example: a README that indexes skills from official vendor teams and the community and links out to each one.

Use these lists as a directory. They don't host the skill files or install anything, and a link on a list means a maintainer thought it worth including, not that anyone read its scripts. Click through to the source repo and vet it there.

agentskills.io: the standard, not a store

People searching for a skills marketplace often land on agentskills.io and expect a catalog. It isn't one. It's the home of the Agent Skills format, which Anthropic developed and released as an open standard. The site has the specification, a quickstart, and a showcase of the many agent tools that read the same SKILL.md folders.

It's still useful while shopping. If a skill follows the spec (a folder with a SKILL.md that has a name and description, plus optional scripts/, references/ and assets/), it should work in Claude Code and in other skills-compatible agents. If it doesn't, expect friction. Claude.ai and the API are stricter than Claude Code about which frontmatter fields they accept, so a skill packed with Claude Code-only fields can fail to upload there.

Taku's marketplace: run a skill someone already got working

Everything above assumes you're comfortable in Claude Code. A lot of people searching for a Claude skills marketplace aren't there yet: they saw a skill demo on X, found the repo, and stalled at setup.

That's the gap the Taku marketplace is aimed at. Taku lists AI apps and skills that run inside its desktop workspace, so instead of installing a skill into your own configuration, you run a version someone already got working, then edit it and save your own copy. Listings are free or paid, and creators have public profiles. Creators publish to Taku from Codex, Claude Code or Cursor using the Taku Publisher plugin.

To be clear about what it is: the marketplace is early, and not every listing will fit your use case. The vetting advice below applies here too: read the listing and see what it bundles and what it needs from you before you run it. For how Taku compares with other kinds of AI stores, see our breakdown of the different types of AI marketplace.

How to vet a Claude skill before you install it

Anthropic's Agent Skills overview recommends using skills only from trusted sources, meaning ones you wrote yourself or got from Anthropic, and auditing anything else thoroughly. The reason: a skill is instructions plus code, and a malicious one can steer Claude into calling tools or running commands that don't match its stated purpose. A plugin goes further. Anthropic's plugin security page opens by warning that a plugin can execute arbitrary code on your machine with your user privileges.

Here's a practical checklist, in the order you'd do it.

1. Check who publishes it. Is it in the official or community marketplace, or a random repo? Claude Code only accepts official and community marketplace names from repos under github.com/anthropics/, so a third-party catalog can't pose as Anthropic's. Beyond that, look at the author, the repo's history, and whether issues get answered.

2. Read SKILL.md end to end. It's usually short. Look at the description (does it trigger on things you'd expect?) and the instructions (does it tell Claude to fetch URLs, send data anywhere, or touch files unrelated to the task?). Two frontmatter details deserve attention. allowed-tools pre-approves tools for the turn the skill runs, so you won't be asked. And Claude Code's skills documentation describes a ! command syntax that runs a shell command before Claude even sees the skill.

3. Open every script. Look in scripts/ and any other executable file. You don't need to be a developer to spot red flags: network calls to domains you don't recognise, reading files in your home directory, curl ... | sh, base64 blobs, or code that obviously does more than the skill claims.

4. For plugins, read the hooks and servers. The install pane tells you a hook exists, not what it runs. Check hooks/hooks.json, .mcp.json and anything in bin/. Hooks and MCP servers run outside Claude Code's permission rules and sandbox.

5. Watch for external fetches. Skills that pull instructions from a URL at runtime are risky even if the author is trustworthy, because whatever is at that URL can change after you reviewed it.

6. Think about updates. Anthropic's official marketplace auto-updates by default; community and third-party marketplaces don't. Auto-update is convenient, but the files you reviewed can change on disk. For anything with real access, pin a version or turn auto-update off for that marketplace and review changes yourself.

7. Start narrow. Install at local or project scope first rather than for every project, try it on a throwaway folder, and widen the scope once you trust it. If you stop trusting it, claude plugin uninstall removes it, and removing the whole marketplace uninstalls everything you got from it.

If all of this sounds like more work than writing the skill yourself, sometimes it is. A skill is just a folder, and building your own Claude skill is often quicker than auditing a large one you only need a fraction of.

FAQ

Is there an official Claude skills marketplace?

Yes, inside Claude Code. The official plugin marketplace, claude-plugins-official, is registered automatically, and you browse it from the Discover tab of /plugin or on the Claude Marketplace website. Skills reach you there bundled inside plugins. Anthropic's standalone skills live in the anthropics/skills repo.

How do I add a skills marketplace to Claude Code?

Run /plugin marketplace add followed by the source: a GitHub owner/repo, a full git URL, a local folder, or a URL to a hosted marketplace.json. Then install with /plugin install plugin-name@marketplace-name. Claude Code prints the marketplace's name once it's added.

Where can I find Claude skills without using the terminal?

On claude.ai, under Customize > Skills, where Anthropic's document skills are already available and you can upload a skill as a ZIP. The Claude Marketplace website lets you browse plugins in a browser. Desktop workspaces like Taku let you run packaged skills without configuring Claude Code at all.

Are Claude skills from GitHub safe?

Some are, some aren't, and the repo being popular doesn't tell you which. Anthropic doesn't review third-party marketplaces, and skills can run scripts. Read SKILL.md and every script before installing, and be wary of anything that fetches instructions from the internet.

What's the difference between a skill and a plugin?

A skill is one folder with a SKILL.md that teaches Claude a task. A plugin is Claude Code's packaging unit: it can bundle several skills along with agents, hooks and MCP servers. Claude Code marketplaces list plugins, which is why a "skills marketplace" in Claude Code is really a plugin catalog.

The short version

In Claude Code, start with the official plugin marketplace and anthropics/skills, add the community marketplace for more choice, and treat third-party repos and curated lists as discovery, not proof of safety. On claude.ai, Customize > Skills is your marketplace. Either way, read SKILL.md and the scripts before anything runs.

And if the install-and-audit loop is exactly where you keep stalling, Taku takes a different route: it mirrors an app or skill someone already got working into a desktop workspace, so you can run it, change it, and keep your own version. Taku is in Beta, and the Mac app is available now.