Is There a Claude Skills Marketplace? Where to Get Skills

You typed "claude skills marketplace" into Google expecting a storefront: categories, a search bar, an install button, the way you add a Chrome extension. What came back was a wall of near-identical domains, half of them registered this year, sitting next to a few GitHub repositories with names like anthropics/skills. No obvious front door.

The short version: Anthropic never shipped a consumer-style skills storefront. What exists instead is an open GitHub repo of official examples, a plugin system inside Claude Code with real marketplaces you add by URL, and a growing pile of community directories of wildly uneven quality. Telling those apart matters, because a "skill" can carry scripts Claude will run against your files.

So below is the real map, and the part every directory quietly skips over: a downloaded skill does not run itself.

Is there an official Claude Skills marketplace?

No, not in the App Store sense. As of 2026 there is no anthropic.com storefront where you browse skills by category and one-click install them. Anthropic distributes skills two ways instead.

The first is an open reference library. Anthropic publishes example skills in its skills GitHub repository, which is the canonical place to see how a real SKILL.md is structured and to copy one as a starting point. It is a repo, not a storefront. You clone or download, you do not "install with one click."

The second is the plugin system built into Claude Code, where skills ride inside installable plugins and get distributed through plugin marketplaces. That is the closest thing to a marketplace that officially exists, and it is worth understanding before you trust any of the third-party sites competing for this search.

If a skill matters to your operation, the mechanics of how you got it matter too. A skill is not passive text. If it bundles a script, Claude can execute that code, so where the file came from is a security question, not a convenience one.

How the Claude Code plugin marketplace actually works

A "marketplace" in Claude Code is a git-hosted catalog, not a website. It is a marketplace.json file that lists plugins and where to find each one, and a plugin is a bundle that can carry skills, MCP servers, slash commands, hooks, or agents as a single installable unit. Per Anthropic's plugin marketplace docs, a marketplace can point at plugins hosted on GitHub, a git URL, or a local path, and it gives you centralized discovery plus version tracking and updates.

The flow is two steps, and people conflate them constantly.

1. Register the marketplace: /plugin marketplace add <owner/repo> points Claude Code at a catalog. This makes its plugins discoverable. It installs nothing on its own.
2. Install a plugin from it: /plugin install <plugin-name>@<marketplace-name> pulls the plugin, and any skills bundled inside it, into your setup.

Skills usually travel inside a plugin rather than as standalone marketplace items. A plugin repo holds a skills/ directory of SKILL.md files alongside its other assets, and installing the plugin brings the skills with it. Anthropic's official marketplace is built into Claude Code and available the moment you start it, so the official plugins need no add step at all, per Anthropic's Claude Code plugins announcement.

That is the whole "marketplace." A JSON index in a git repo, two commands, and a trust decision every time you add a source you did not write. If you are new to what a skill even is, we broke it down in what Claude Skills are and how they differ from MCP.

The best places to get Claude Skills, ranked

Ordered by how much you can trust what you are installing, most trustworthy first.

1. Anthropic's own repos and built-in marketplace

Start here every time. The anthropics/skills repo holds the official example skills, and Anthropic's built-in Claude Code marketplace ships curated plugins you can install without adding a third-party source. Anthropic also publishes a set of knowledge-work plugins in its own GitHub org for common business tasks. The reason to lead with these is not brand loyalty. It is that the code is readable, maintained, and comes from the vendor whose tool it runs inside, so the security surface is as small as it gets.

For an ops team, this covers most of the real ground. The built-in document skills alone, the ones that build spreadsheets with real formulas and read fields out of a PDF, handle a large share of the busywork a lean team wants gone.

2. Curated community directories

The best known is ComposioHQ's awesome-claude-skills, a curated index that points you at skills across the ecosystem. Directories like this are genuinely useful for discovery, the way an "awesome" list on any topic is. The catch is that curation means "someone thought this was worth linking," not "someone audited the code." Read what a skill does before you install it, especially anything that touches files, credentials, or a paid API.

3. Claude Code community plugin marketplaces

Beyond Anthropic's own, community members host large plugin marketplaces you add with /plugin marketplace add <owner/repo>. Some advertise thousands of skills. The selection is enormous and the quality is uneven, and the headline counts these sites promote are self-reported, so treat them as a browsing surface rather than a stamp of approval. They are fine for finding an idea. They are not a reason to skip reading the code.

4. The skill you write yourself

The most valuable skill for your team is usually not in any directory. It is the SOP only your team runs: "draft a refund reply in our voice," "format this export as our board deck," "score this inbound lead the way we score it." Because SKILL.md is plain Markdown, a first version takes an afternoon. Copy a template from Anthropic's repo, drop in your instructions, done. We ranked the ones actually worth installing versus writing in the best Claude Skills for a lean ops team.

What every marketplace quietly leaves out

Here is the part no directory advertises. A marketplace hands you a SKILL.md. It does not hand you a workflow. Every skill you install, official or community, waits for a human to open Claude and ask. Install the slickest invoice-parsing skill on any list and nothing happens until someone remembers to run it.

The skill is the easy 20%. The workflow around it is the 80% that decides whether it holds up: pulling the closed deal out of your CRM, giving Claude live access to Stripe and Slack through MCP or an API, running it on a trigger instead of a person, and monitoring it so a silent failure at 2 a.m. does not surface as an angry client email a week later.

That build is what we do at bottta. Our AI Automation work turns a promising skill into a workflow that runs on its own, with the Integrations wired to your real tools and the monitoring that keeps it honest. Concretely: the built-in pdf skill reads the supplier invoice, an integration writes the extracted rows to your sheet, and a trigger runs the whole thing on every new email instead of when someone remembers. We take it two ways. A $3K per month retainer covers flexible hours, up to 3 active workflows at a time, and ongoing monitoring and fixes. A $4K fixed-scope project ships one defined workflow with integrations included and 30-day post-launch support. Both live on the pricing section. No free tier, because this is built work, not a button.

You can also stitch the wrapper together yourself in a tool like Zapier or n8n and call the Claude API from there. That holds for a simple two-step job. It tends to break the moment the logic gets real, and then you own a brittle chain nobody documented. The same trade-off applies to whether you should even build the automation yet, which we laid out in when to automate a task and when not to.

How to choose where to pull from

The decision is not "which marketplace is best." It is "how far does this skill need to go."

• A one-off you will run by hand. Grab a built-in skill or copy one from anthropics/skills. No marketplace hunting required.
• A repeatable job one person owns. Write a custom SOP skill and keep it in your Claude setup, or install a well-reviewed one from a curated directory after reading its code.
• A process that has to run without a person. This is where the marketplace stops helping. You need triggers, live data, error handling, and monitoring wrapped around the skill. That is a build.
• A whole function you keep re-explaining. Retainer territory, where ongoing hours beat scoping each workflow one at a time.

If you would rather not touch Claude directly at all, the broader landscape of AI tools for small business covers simpler cases without the skill layer. The rule holds across every option: the cheaper the tool, the more of the surrounding workflow you own and maintain yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an official Claude Skills marketplace? Not a storefront. Anthropic distributes skills through its open anthropics/skills GitHub repo and through the plugin system in Claude Code, which has a built-in official marketplace plus community-hosted ones you add manually. There is no consumer App Store where you browse and one-click install.

How do I install a Claude Skill? For the built-in document skills, you enable code execution and Claude uses them automatically. For plugin-packaged skills in Claude Code, you register a marketplace with /plugin marketplace add <owner/repo>, then run /plugin install <plugin>@<marketplace>. For a repo of raw skills, you copy the SKILL.md folder into your Claude skills directory.

Are third-party Claude Skills marketplaces safe? Treat them like any third-party code. A skill can bundle scripts Claude will run, so a source you did not write is a security decision. Stick to Anthropic's own repos and well-reviewed curated directories, and read what a skill does before installing anything that touches your files, credentials, or a paid account.

Do I need Claude Code to use a marketplace? The plugin marketplace flow is a Claude Code feature. The built-in document skills work in the Claude apps and the API with code execution enabled, no marketplace involved. The /plugin marketplace add catalog model is specific to Claude Code.

What is the difference between a skill and a plugin? A skill is a folder of instructions and scripts for one task. A plugin is a bundle that can carry several skills plus MCP servers, commands, and hooks, packaged as one installable unit. Marketplaces distribute plugins. The skills ride inside them.

The marketplace question has a boring answer and an interesting one. The boring answer is that you browse anthropics/skills and Claude Code's plugin marketplaces, and you read the code before you trust it. The interesting one is that the skill was never the hard part. When you want the workflow that makes a skill actually run, start a project with bottta.