Claude Skills Marketplace: Where to Find and Install Them

The first thing to know about the Claude skills marketplace surprises most people searching for it: there isn't one. Not in the App Store sense, anyway. What exists is a skills browser inside Claude itself, plus a growing set of community-run directories that have built up around it.

Knowing which is which matters more than it sounds. Installing a skill means letting Claude follow someone else's instructions.

So this post covers both. First the official way to browse and install skills, then what the independent directories offer once you look past their homepage numbers, and how to use them without picking up something you shouldn't.

The official way: Claude's built-in skills browser

In the Claude web or desktop app, go to Settings, open Capabilities, and you'll find Skills. From there (or from the + icon in any chat, then Skills) you can browse the skills Anthropic bundles, turn them on, or build your own with Create with Claude.

If you use Claude Code, the equivalent is the plugin marketplace system. You run /plugin marketplace add with a repository, then /plugin install for the skill you want. Anthropic keeps an official plugins repository that works this way. Community marketplaces use the same install path, just pointed at their own repos.

Either way, the skill itself is nothing exotic. It's a SKILL.md file with a short YAML header (what triggers it) and a body (what Claude does once it's triggered). That's the useful part to know before you install anything from outside Anthropic's list, because you can open the file and read exactly what you're agreeing to run.

The independent directories, and what separates them

Outside Claude, a growing set of sites catalogs community skills. They differ more than a quick look suggests, mostly in how they decide what gets listed:

AugmentClaude curates by hand. By its own count its catalog is in the low thousands, with author credit and license information on each listing. That's fewer skills than the aggregators below, in exchange for a person having looked at each one.
SkillsMP and MCP Market pull automatically from public GitHub repositories, searchable by category. Automated collection means wider coverage and much bigger numbers, but nobody reviews what gets swept in.
Smithery is closer to MCP infrastructure than a skills directory. It has a "verified" filter, though it doesn't publish exactly what verification checks.
The Claude Skills Market curates a smaller hand-picked set, and also lists paid or commissioned skills built for specific business workflows.
Awesome Claude Skills on GitHub is the informal, developer-run list a lot of the others pulled from in the first place.

The number a directory puts on its homepage tells you the least. Several of these sites lead with counts in the tens of thousands or higher. Those figures mostly reflect how hard a site scrapes GitHub, not how many of the skills are maintained, safe or even working. A directory with a few hundred reviewed entries and a stated license on each one is doing something a counter in the millions isn't.

Installing a skill: the steps

Once you've found a skill you want to try, the install is short:

Open the SKILL.md file on the directory or repo page before installing anything. It's plain markdown. Read what it claims to do and what access it expects.
Check the install command. Most community skills use the same pattern as Anthropic's plugin system, something like npx skills add <author>/<repo>, or a /plugin marketplace add command for Claude Code. If a site asks you to paste a long, unreadable script into your terminal instead, stop there.
Run the install and confirm it triggers. Ask Claude to do the task the skill is for, in your own words, and check that it picks up the skill instead of answering from scratch.
Look at Settings → Capabilities (or your plugin list) every so often. Installed skills sit there the way extensions sit in a browser, and they're easy to forget once they're in.

Uninstalling is the same path in reverse. Turn it off in Capabilities, or run the matching /plugin uninstall command in Claude Code. Nothing about trying a community skill is permanent, which makes the five-minute read of the SKILL.md beforehand an easy trade.

A worked example: installing one skill end to end

Say you've found a competitor-tracking skill in a directory, and you want to know it works before you build anything on top of it. Here's what that looks like in practice.

First, open the listing's SKILL.md directly instead of trusting the directory's summary. A competitor-tracking skill you can trust describes what it does step by step in its own instructions: take the URLs you give it, check them on a schedule or on request, and summarize what changed. If the file reads like a sales pitch instead of instructions for Claude, it was probably written to look good in a listing, not to run well.

Second, check the repo it comes from, not just the file. A skill in a repo with one commit and no other activity is a coin flip. One with a changelog, a few contributors and issues that get answered is a much safer bet.

Third, install it the way the listing says and run it once on a small, real example. Three or four competitor URLs, not fifty. Read the output before you trust it with more. If the skill says it checks pricing pages and you get a generic summary of the homepage, the install just told you it doesn't do what the listing claimed.

Fourth, once it works the way you expected, widen the input list or add it to a recurring workflow. Jumping straight to this step before the small case works is how a bad install turns into a wasted afternoon later instead of five minutes now.

What to check before installing a skill you didn't write

A skill can bundle scripts, reference files and instructions, and all of it runs with whatever access Claude already has in your account. That's a lot more than a prompt template. Before you install anything from a community directory, run through these.

Read the SKILL.md file itself, not just the listing description. It's plain markdown, so it takes two minutes, and it tells you what the skill does and what access it expects.

Check who published it and whether the repo has any history. A one-commit repo with no other activity is a bigger gamble than one that's maintained, has open issues people respond to, and more than one contributor.

Prefer skills that only touch what they claim to. If a "social caption generator" also wants file system access or asks for credentials, skip it and look elsewhere.

Don't take a directory's size claims at face value. A listing count is marketing for that site. It says nothing about the skill you're about to install.

None of this is unique to Claude. It's the same checking you'd do before installing a browser extension or a WordPress plugin from outside the official store, for the same reason: something a stranger built is now running with your access.

What's useful here for marketing work

Most of what ranks in these directories is built for developers: coding agents, git workflows, API scaffolding. The marketing slice is thinner. It mostly falls into three buckets:

content formatting for a specific platform (LinkedIn, a CMS, an email tool)
research and competitor-scan templates
brand voice or style guides packaged as a skill

The deepest single source for that slice is Corey Haines' marketing skills library. It's organized by job (conversion, copy, SEO, paid distribution, retention) instead of being mixed in with thousands of developer tools. I cover it in more detail in my list of the best Claude skills for marketers.

If you look through a directory and nothing fits how you work, that's normal. The directories lean technical. You can build the one skill you need yourself instead, which takes about fifteen minutes of conversation with Skill Creator.

FAQ

Is there one official Claude skills marketplace?

No single site holds that title. Anthropic's own skills live inside Claude under Settings → Capabilities, and in the Claude Code plugin system. Everything else is an independent directory built by the community, like AugmentClaude, SkillsMP, MCP Market, Smithery and The Claude Skills Market.

Are Claude skills free?

The Skills feature comes with Claude wherever it's turned on, at no separate cost. Most community skills in the directories are free and open source. A few sites, like The Claude Skills Market, also list paid or commissioned skills built for a specific business.

Can I use Claude skills without Claude Code?

Yes. Skills work in the Claude web and desktop apps through Settings → Capabilities, and through the + icon in a chat. Claude Code's plugin marketplace is one path to skills, not the only one.

Is it safe to install a skill from a random GitHub repo?

It's riskier than a skill Anthropic publishes, the same way a browser extension from an unknown developer is riskier than one from an official store. Read the SKILL.md before installing, and check the repo's history and upkeep instead of trusting a directory's size or ranking.

Why do these directories claim such different numbers of skills?

They count different things. A hand-curated site like AugmentClaude lists what a person has reviewed, which lands in the low thousands. An automated aggregator like SkillsMP or MCP Market scrapes public repos and reports whatever it finds, so the counts are much bigger with no review behind them. Neither number tells you whether the skill you want is any good.

Can I uninstall a skill once I've installed it?

Yes, and nothing breaks. Turn it off in Settings → Capabilities in the Claude web or desktop app, or run the matching plugin uninstall command in Claude Code. Trying a community skill doesn't lock you into keeping it.

What's the difference between a "verified" skill and a regular listing?

It depends on the directory, and most don't say what verification checks. Smithery has a verified filter without publishing its criteria in detail, and other sites use the word loosely. Treat "verified" as a reason to start reading the SKILL.md, not a reason to skip it.

Do I need to know how to code to install a skill from one of these directories?

For most of them, no. The usual install is a single command, npx skills add <author>/<repo> or a plugin marketplace command in Claude Code, that you paste in as-is. Reading the SKILL.md first makes sense whatever your background. Following plain instructions in a markdown file doesn't require writing code.