Where to Find Claude Skills: 5 Directories Compared by Size, Freshness and Install

Summary

Looking for a Claude skill? Here is my advice. For the biggest pool, search skills.sh or SkillsMP. For a shorter list where someone has already read each entry, use a reviewed directory such as Claude Marketplaces or AgentCraft. Wherever you find a skill, open its SKILL.md before you install it.

The reason is simple. The five places people point you to differ in size by a factor of about two hundred thousand, from 19 skills in Anthropic’s own repo to 4.1 million files on SkillsMP. A bigger pool finds more, and it also hands you more copies, demos and forks to sort through.

So which one fits your search? Mostly it depends on whether you already know the skill’s name.

Search for best claude skills or a claude code skills directory and you mostly get personal lists of favorites. This post puts the directories side by side instead: size, update speed, categories and install, with every number read on November 14, 2026.

How we tested

On November 14, 2026 we opened each directory’s home page, category pages and a few skill pages in a regular desktop browser, and wrote down the counts each site shows about itself.

For Anthropic we counted the skill folders in the anthropics/skills repo and the plugin entries in the claude-plugins-official marketplace file through the GitHub API. For AgentCraft the counts come from our own catalog.

Each site counts its own unit. skills.sh counts skills on its install leaderboard, SkillsMP counts SKILL.md files it collected from GitHub, and Claude Marketplaces counts listings. Read the table as a guide to scale.

Results

Directory	Size	Updates	Browse by	Install
skills.sh (Vercel)	1,376,470 skills on the all time leaderboard	Live install counts, with Trending (24h) and Hot lists	8 topics holding 96 picked skills, plus a page per agent	npx skills add owner/repo
SkillsMP	4,136,129 collected SKILL.md files	A fixed snapshot, refreshed with each site release	12 domains with subcategories, plus occupations	Link to the GitHub source; REST API and MCP server for agents
Claude Marketplaces	23,400 skills, 8,462 MCP servers, 3,638 plugin marketplaces	Crawled daily from skills.sh and GitHub; an editor reviews new and borderline listings	34 skill categories, with separate MCP and marketplace categories	Copy button with an npx -y skills add command
Anthropic	19 skills in anthropics/skills; 317 plugins in claude-plugins-official	With each commit to the repos	The folder list in each repo	/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
AgentCraft	5,087 skills, each SKILL.md read before listing	Installs and stars weekly; a monthly review (November: 465 added, 317 dropped)	13 categories with counts	npx skills add for every skill, plus /plugin for Anthropic’s sets

skills.sh

Vercel’s skills.sh is where most people start, and its CLI is the install command most other directories hand you. The home page ranks 1,376,470 skills by installs, so you see at once what other developers use. find-skills from vercel-labs leads with 4.4 million installs, and the Trending (24h) and Hot tabs show what is rising now.

It suits you when you roughly know what you want and want the popular version. The most useful page on the site is Official. It lists repos from the companies that make the product: 605 skills across 18 repos of the anthropics GitHub organization, 138 from Cloudflare, 302 from Sentry. When two skills share a name, the one listed there comes from the vendor.

The CLI supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and 75 more agents:

npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill tdd -a claude-code

SkillsMP

SkillsMP is the largest pool, with 4,136,129 SKILL.md files collected from GitHub. Its categories page sorts them into 12 domains, from Tools (956,028) and Business (763,673) down to Blockchain, and one skill can sit in several. You can also browse by occupation.

The size has a cost. SkillsMP counts files, so a popular skill copied into many repos can appear many times. The counts come from a fixed snapshot that refreshes when the site ships a release. The site itself calls its categories and star counts organizing signals and asks you to inspect the source before use.

Use it to see everything that exists in a niche. Then follow the GitHub link and find the original repo.

Claude Marketplaces

Claude Marketplaces covers the widest range of Claude Code extensions: 23,400 skills, 8,462 MCP servers and 3,638 plugin marketplaces. Its about page says crawlers read skills.sh, GitHub and the MCP registries on a schedule, an editor, Mert Düzgün, reviews new and borderline listings, and recurring sweeps remove spam and adult listings. Search engines see the skills people actually search for, and the long tail stays browsable on the site.

Each skill page shows skills.sh installs, GitHub stars, the last update and how often the install command was copied there in the last 90 days. Then it gives a ready command, with a choice of project or global:

npx -y skills add vercel-labs/skills --skill find-skills --agent claude-code

It is the best place on this list when you want skills, MCP servers and plugins in one search. Sponsors fund it, and the sponsored slots are labeled.

Anthropic’s own repos

Anthropic publishes two sources. anthropics/skills holds 19 skills, including the document skills for PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and has about 194,000 stars. claude-plugins-official is the marketplace you browse with /plugin in Claude Code. It lists 317 plugins, from Anthropic’s team and from outside authors, and its README asks you to trust a plugin before you install it, since the external ones come from their own authors.

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

Start here for anything Anthropic maintains. The list is short, and each skill in it is a good model of how to write one.

AgentCraft

AgentCraft, the site you are reading, is the smallest reviewed directory here: 5,087 skills in 13 categories, each with its count. Every skill was read before it went in. In November we reviewed 783 skills that were new to us and dropped 317, and the reasons are in our November review. Installs and stars refresh weekly.

Each entry in the skills directory has a copy button for npx skills add, and Anthropic’s sets also get their /plugin commands. The pool comes from the most starred skill repos on GitHub, so for a rare skill the bigger directories are the better search.

Our picks

Pick by what you already know:

1. You know the name. Search skills.sh, then check its Official page for the vendor’s own version.
2. You know the job. Browse categories on Claude Marketplaces or AgentCraft, where someone has already filtered the list.
3. You want everything in a niche. Search SkillsMP, then trace each hit back to its original repo.
4. You want Anthropic’s own. Add anthropics/skills as a marketplace.

Then, wherever you found it, run four checks before you install:

• Who owns the repo. The vendor or the original author beats a copy.
• Stars and the last commit. A recent commit shows someone maintains it. Stars show popularity, and our November review found that popular repos also carry demos and templates.
• What SKILL.md asks the agent to do. Concrete steps are a good sign. A one line stub is a placeholder.
• Where the scripts send data. On November 7 we removed the analysis skill from KylinMountain/TradingAgents-AShare after we found it sends each query, with a token, to a third party server at api.510168.xyz. Search a skill’s files for URLs before you run it.

The full list of checks is in our Claude Code safety checklist.

What to ignore

Set the headline totals aside when you compare directories. 4.1 million collected files, 1.4 million leaderboard entries and 23,400 listings count three different things. What matters is how fast you reach one good skill for your job.

Treat install counts the same way. They measure popularity, and a popular skill can still be a demo.

FAQ

Which Claude skills directory is the biggest?

By raw count, SkillsMP, with 4,136,129 collected SKILL.md files, followed by skills.sh with 1,376,470 skills on its all time leaderboard. Claude Marketplaces lists 23,400 skills, AgentCraft 5,087 reviewed ones, and Anthropic’s repos 19 skills and 317 plugins. Each site counts a different unit, so use the size column for scale and the other columns to choose.

Where do skills go after I install them?

In Claude Code, a skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file. Put it in ~/.claude/skills/ to use it in every project, or in .claude/skills/ inside one project. Claude Code reads each skill’s one line description at startup and loads the rest when a task calls for it.

What is the difference between a plugin and a skill?

A skill is one folder that teaches one job. A plugin is a package you install from a marketplace with /plugin, and it can bundle several skills along with slash commands, subagents, hooks and MCP servers. Anthropic’s document-skills plugin, for example, installs its PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint skills in one step.

Do Claude skills work in Codex and Cursor?

Yes. SKILL.md is an open format, and Codex and Cursor both read it. With the skills CLI, add -a codex or -a cursor, and it writes the skill to .agents/skills/ in your project, the folder both agents read.

Limitations

Every count here is what each site reported about itself on November 14, 2026, and these numbers move daily. The five sites count different units, so use the table to compare scale.

AgentCraft is our own directory. We described it with the same kinds of facts we used for the other four.

Sources

1. skills.sh: all time install leaderboard · official
2. skills.sh: official skills by vendor · official
3. vercel-labs/skills: supported agents and folders · official
4. SkillsMP: categories · official
5. Claude Marketplaces: how the directory is maintained · official
6. anthropics/skills · official
7. anthropics/claude-plugins-official · official
8. Claude Code docs: skills · official