Guide: Plugins

Claude Cowork · Feature primer

Overview

A plugin is a bundle. It packages capabilities that belong together — skills, slash commands, connectors, and sometimes agents — so you install them in one move instead of assembling them piece by piece. A “sales” plugin, for instance, might bring a handful of sales skills, a couple of slash commands, and the connector setup they expect.

If a skill is one capability on the shelf, a plugin is a labeled box that drops several related capabilities onto the shelf at once, already configured to work together.

What a Plugin Can Contain

• Skills — packaged know-how that triggers automatically when your request matches. See the Skills guide.
• Slash commands — named shortcuts you invoke directly, like /slop-check, for actions you want to run on demand.
• Connectors (MCPs) — pre-wired links to outside services the plugin’s skills rely on. See the Connectors guide.
• Agents — specialized sub-workers the plugin can hand focused tasks to. See the Agents guide.

A given plugin might include all of these or just one. The bundle is whatever its author decided belongs together.

Marketplaces

Plugins are distributed through marketplaces — collections you can browse and install from. A marketplace is just a source of plugins; adding one makes its plugins available to install. Some are public; some are private to an organization that wants its own internal tools in one place.

Installing a Plugin

Installing a plugin adds everything inside it to your environment at once. Its skills go on the shelf and start triggering when relevant; its slash commands become available to type; its connectors appear ready to authenticate.

After installing, it’s worth asking Claude what just arrived: “What did that plugin add — which skills and commands do I now have?” That tells you what’s newly possible without reading documentation.

Managing What You’ve Installed

More is not always better. Every installed plugin adds descriptions Claude has to consider, and overlapping plugins can offer two skills for the same job. A few habits keep it clean:

• Install for a role, not a whim. Add the plugins that match the work you actually do.
• Know what each one brought. If you can’t remember why a plugin is installed, that’s a sign to review it.
• Remove what you don’t use. Uninstalling is as reversible as installing.

Trust and Permissions

A plugin can carry connectors that touch your data and agents that act on your behalf, so treat installing one like adding a tool with access to your work. Install from sources you trust, the same way you’d think twice before granting an app access to your email or files. When a plugin’s connector asks you to authenticate, that’s the point where you’re granting it reach — read what it’s asking for before approving.

When to Reach for a Plugin

• You want a whole role’s worth of capability — sales, HR, finance, support — rather than one skill.
• You’d otherwise be installing several related skills and wiring up the same connectors by hand.
• You want a packaged way to share a working setup with the rest of your team, so everyone starts from the same toolkit.

For a single capability, a standalone skill is enough. For a coordinated set, a plugin is the unit that carries it.