Anthropic shipped the SKILL.md format in late 2025 and the whole ecosystem started building on top of it in early 2026. A skill is a small folder with a SKILL.md file that Claude Code, and any agent that supports the format, can load on demand. That created a natural marketplace shape. Someone had to be the shelf.
There are now several real Claude skills marketplaces plus one first-party option from Anthropic. This post compares them honestly, including the one I run. I have tried to keep my own site out of the "recommended by default" slot. If you want the biggest catalog, I will send you somewhere else. If you want the curated, verified catalog with a one-time price, that is where I want you.
What "Claude skills marketplace" actually means
Two kinds of thing get called a Claude skills marketplace and buyers should know the difference.
The first is a distribution channel. You browse, find a skill, drop it into ~/.claude/skills/<name>/, and Claude Code loads it on demand. Free or paid, verified or community, the endpoint is your local skills folder and a SKILL.md file that describes when the skill should be invoked.
The second is a directory. Someone curated a list of open-source repos, gave you a search bar, and links out to GitHub. There is no install button, no verification, no update pipeline. It is a bookmark manager that markets itself as a marketplace.
Most of what you will find in the wild is a mix. It is worth knowing which mix you are actually shopping.
Quick comparison table
| Marketplace | Skill count claimed | Verified vs community | Pricing | SKILL.md format | Update cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkillsMP | 2,000,000+ | Not specified on homepage | Free | Not confirmed on homepage | Not published |
| Claude Skills Market | 37+ | Community only | Free | Yes, SKILL.md workflows referenced | Not published |
| claudeskills.info (Claude Skills Hub) | 12,868+ | Mix, official partner collections plus community | Mostly free / OSS | Yes | Not published |
| GitHub topic:claude-skills | ~5,000 tagged repos | Per-maintainer | OSS / free | Per-repo | Per-repo |
| Anthropic's official directory | Small, growing | Anthropic-managed | Free | Yes, first-party | Anthropic-controlled |
| clskillshub.com/skills | 845 verified + 1,545 free community | Explicit split | $19 lifetime for verified, free community tier | Yes, enforced | Rolling additions |
Numbers in the count column are what each site claims on its homepage, not audited counts. Do not take them as gospel. I only trust the split on the last row because I built it and I check.
1. SkillsMP (skillsmp.com)
Site: https://skillsmp.com
What it is. The largest publicly claimed skills catalog online. The homepage advertises "2,000,000+" skills across "12 domains, 50+ categories." Access is free. There is a free API tier for agents that gives anonymous users 50 requests per day and authenticated users 500 per day.
Honest strength. If your workflow is "let the agent search a huge index for the closest match," SkillsMP is the biggest index. The free API tier is generous for prototyping and for embedding skill search inside your own agent.
Honest weakness. There is no visible verification pipeline for what "2,000,000+" means. When the catalog is that large without a curation layer, quality variance is enormous. The homepage does not name a founder or team. SKILL.md compliance is not explicitly documented on the homepage. If you want a small, trustworthy shelf, this is not it. If you want maximum surface area for an agent to search, it is.
2. Claude Skills Market (claudeskillsmarket.com)
Site: https://claudeskillsmarket.com
What it is. Positioned as "the independent Anthropic Claude skills marketplace." Homepage advertises 37+ free community skills plus courses, guides, use cases, a jobs board, and a browse experience. SKILL.md workflows are explicitly referenced in the site copy.
Honest strength. Scope is honest. Small catalog, community-attributed, no paid tier to over-promise. If you are learning skills and want a browseable set of examples with courses attached, this is a reasonable starting point for someone new to the format.
Honest weakness. 37+ skills is a small library and community-only means no verification stamp. Founder or team is not identified on the homepage. Not the right shelf for buyers who need a specific production skill today. This is a learning site with a marketplace facade more than a marketplace with a learning section.
3. claudeskills.info (Claude Skills Hub)
Site: https://claudeskills.info
What it is. Positioned on its homepage as "a third-party Claude Skills Marketplace" with 12,868+ skills organised into 20 categories, plus official partner collections. The homepage lists Anthropic (462 skills), Microsoft (338), and GitHub (210) as partner collections. Categories with real counts include Development Tools (2,401), Productivity (578), Security (781), Design and Styling (746), Testing (516), and Office and Documents (520). The site exposes an HTTP API so an agent can query the directory directly. The site itself says it is "not affiliated with Anthropic" and is a third-party project.
Pricing. Most skills are open source and free. Anthropic's first-party skills use Apache 2.0 or proprietary licenses depending on the skill.
Honest strength. Solid middle ground on catalog size. Organised by category with real counts you can browse. The agent-queryable API is a nice touch and one of the few places you can point an agent at a full catalog and let it do the retrieval. Official partner collections give it credibility.
Honest weakness. Update cadence is not published on the homepage. The specific organisation behind Claude Skills Hub is not named. Verified vs community lines blur since almost everything routes back to open-source repos and there is no explicit verification stamp on individual skills.
4. GitHub topic:claude-skills
Site: https://github.com/topics/claude-skills
What it is. The raw GitHub view. Roughly 5,000 public repos tagged with the claude-skills topic. You get metadata like star counts, last commit dates, and issue counts. What you see there is where every other marketplace on this list sources most of its catalog.
Honest strength. Ground truth. If you know what you want, going straight to the topic page is faster than going through a middleman. Real commit history, real maintainers, real transparency. Star counts and commit recency are honest signals of what is alive.
Honest weakness. Zero curation. You are going to open twenty repos before you find one that is maintained, documented, and installs cleanly. There is no install pipeline into ~/.claude/skills/ for you. You have to know the SKILL.md structure and copy files by hand. Great for engineers. Rough for anyone else.
5. Anthropic's official directory
Sites: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official and https://claude.com/skills
What it is. Anthropic's own managed directory of Claude Code plugins and skills. The catalog is small, first-party, and controlled by Anthropic. Note that Anthropic also runs the enterprise-focused Claude Marketplace at https://claude.com/platform/marketplace, which is a partner marketplace for Claude-powered tools from GitLab, Harvey, Lovable, Replit, Rogo, and Snowflake. That is a different product for enterprise procurement, not a per-skill marketplace, and buyers routinely conflate the two.
Honest strength. First-party. If Anthropic ships a skill or plugin here, it is the safest thing you can install. No third-party trust question. Format compliance is not just enforced, it is defined here.
Honest weakness. Small catalog by design. Anthropic is not trying to be your only source. They are trying to be the trusted reference. For breadth, you need one of the community catalogs above. Update cadence is Anthropic-paced, not community-paced, so niche skills you want may never land here.
6. clskillshub.com/skills
Site: https://clskillshub.com/skills
What it is. 845 verified Claude Code skills behind a $19 lifetime paywall, plus a free tier of 1,545 community-attributed skills. Verified means I tested each skill against the SKILL.md format spec, checked it installs into ~/.claude/skills/, ran it end-to-end, and confirmed it did what its description said. The free tier is what you would get if you crawled public repos, cleaned them up, and indexed them.
Pricing. $19 one-time for the verified tier, forever. Community tier is free. There is no subscription.
Honest strength. Explicit verified vs community split, which is the criterion I think matters most and which most competitors do not publish. Every verified skill has been end-to-end tested, not just imported from a public index. One-time price means you own it. SKILL.md compliance is enforced on the verified tier.
Honest weakness. Smaller catalog than SkillsMP or claudeskills.info. Younger domain, smaller community, less inbound organic traffic than the two established indexes. If you want the biggest possible index, this is not it. If you want to filter down to only skills that a human has actually run against a real Claude Code session, that is what the $19 tier is.
Criteria we scored each option against
Six criteria, in the order they matter for a buyer.
- Total skill count, actual not claimed. What is on the shelf you can install today.
- Verified vs community-attributed. Is there a verification stamp with meaning behind it, or is everything sourced from public repos without testing.
- Pricing model. Free, freemium, one-time, subscription.
- SKILL.md format compliance. Does the marketplace enforce the format or accept anything.
- Category depth. Are categories real slices with meaningful counts, or repeating tags that overlap.
- Updates cadence. How often the catalog changes and whether that is visible from the outside.
The three that separate real marketplaces from repackaged directories are verification, format compliance, and updates cadence. If none of those are documented, you are looking at a directory pretending to be a marketplace, and the SEO on the word "marketplace" is doing a lot of the work for the operator.
Which one you should pick
If you want the biggest possible index and are happy to filter yourself, or you want to point your own agent at a huge search surface, pick SkillsMP.
If you want a middle-ground catalog with real categories, meaningful counts per category, and an agent-queryable API, pick claudeskills.info.
If you want first-party skills only and are okay with a small catalog, pick Anthropic's official directory. Nothing beats it on trust. If you are an enterprise buyer looking for procurement-friendly Claude-powered tools, look at claude.com/platform/marketplace instead. Different product.
If you are a technical buyer who prefers reading commit history to reading marketing copy, go straight to GitHub topic:claude-skills. Save yourself the middle layer.
If you are new to skills, want to learn, and are okay with 37+ community examples plus courses, Claude Skills Market is a friendly starting point.
If you want a verified tier where every skill has been end-to-end tested, want to pay once and own it, and can live with a smaller catalog than the biggest indexes, pick clskillshub.com/skills. That is who I built it for. If you want breadth over verification, pick one of the others. I would rather send you somewhere else than sell you a mismatch.
What I would do next
- Install one skill from each of the top three shelves above, run it against your own repo, and see which one you actually reach for a week later. That is the only benchmark that matters.
- Read the SKILL.md spec once from Anthropic's docs. Every marketplace on this list is downstream of that spec, and if you understand it you can evaluate any new marketplace on your own.
- Watch this space for the next ninety days. Anthropic's own directory is small today and probably will not stay that way. When it grows, most of the third-party marketplaces will need a new reason to exist.