The Claude skills marketplace, explained in plain English

A skill is a small folder with a file called SKILL.md inside. The file tells an AI app how to do one kind of task: write a cold email, tidy a PDF, review a pull request. The app reads it only when your request matches, so it stays out of the way the rest of the time. If you have not met the idea yet, start with what a SKILL.md file is.

A skills marketplace is a website or built-in directory where many of those folders are listed, so you can find one instead of writing it yourself. Some are huge piles of everything on the internet. Some are small and picked by hand. The word marketplace suggests a shop, but most skills are free and open source. A few are paid.

There is no single official Claude skills marketplace that covers everything. Each app has its own way in. This is the picture as of October 2026, from the vendors' own documentation.

In the Claude app, the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF skills are built in. Other skills are added by uploading a .zip file under Settings > Features, which needs a Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise plan with code execution on. See our page on Claude. In Claude Code, skills live in a skills folder on your computer, and they can also arrive inside plugins from plugin marketplaces. ChatGPT gets skills through plugins, and the ChatGPT and Codex plugin directory is shared. Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI and others read skills from their own folders.

They tend to fall into four groups. Knowing which one you are looking at tells you how much to trust it.

• Vendor directories, such as the plugin lists Anthropic and OpenAI run. Small, checked by the vendor, tied to one app.
• Leaderboards, which rank skills by how many people installed them. Good for popularity, weaker for quality.
• Giant aggregators, which pull in skills from public code repositories. Huge numbers, little checking.
• Curated sites, which list a short set someone actually looked at. Smaller, and the point is the picking.

Skills are instructions plus, sometimes, scripts that run on your machine. That makes the source matter more than it does for a normal app. Before you install from anywhere, ask five questions.

• Can you read the skill in plain words before you install it? A page that explains what it does beats a bare file listing.
• Does it say who made it and under what licence? Some skills are free to use, some are not free to share.
• Does it say what the skill can touch: files, the web, scripts?
• Does it tell you how to install it in your app, not only in a developer tool?
• Is the list picked, or just piled up? Counting skills is easy. Choosing them is the work.

It is tempting to judge a marketplace by size. Big numbers sound like choice. In practice, public skills pile up in copies, forks and half-finished experiments, and you end up doing the sorting yourself. When you only need a way to polish a report or review some code, scrolling through thousands of near-identical entries is not a service.

A smaller list does a different job. Someone has already read the skills, thrown out the weak ones, and written a sentence or two about what each is good at. You still decide for yourself, but you start from a better pile. That is the thinking behind our approach, and it is why we say picked, not piled up.

Neither style is wrong. If you know exactly what you need, a huge searchable directory is hard to beat. If you do not, a curated list saves your time. See our honest comparisons with the big directories and the other large aggregator for when each one makes sense.

We are a curated site. We pick a limited set of skills and give each one its own page, written for ordinary people: what you get at the end, example prompts, and who it suits. Browse by category or by topic such as writing, marketing or design.

Install steps are written in words for each app, so you do not need a terminal to follow them. A good place to see the style is the page for Humanizer or Copywriting. We did not write these skills. Each page credits the people who did.

We are building Free and Premium tiers, and you can read the plan on the pricing page. Picked, not piled up.

Start with one skill for a job you already do every week. Read its page, install it, run it on something low stakes, and see whether the result is better than your usual prompt. If it is, keep it. If not, remove it. Skills are cheap to try and cheap to delete.

If you want to build your own later, the skill-creator skill helps you draft one from a description of your workflow.