Plugins

What it is

A plugin is a pre-built bundle of skills, connectors and sub-agents for one kind of work — sales, finance, legal, marketing, HR, engineering, design, operations. Install it and you have a working setup from the first message, instead of adding each piece by hand.

Plugins are file-based — Markdown and JSON — so adapting one needs no code and no infrastructure. Anthropic’s own are on GitHub at anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.

They’re available on all paid plans: Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise.

Where to find it

On desktop

Sidebar → Customize → Plugins. Yours lists what you’ve installed; Discover is the directory.
+ menu in any composer → Plugins ›.

On the web

claude.ai/customize, then the Plugins tab.
The same + menu → Plugins › in the composer.

How to use it

Install one

Customize → Plugins → Discover.
Add the plugin you want.
Its skills and connectors are available straight away — from / in the composer, or the + menu.

Add a marketplace

Use Add on the Plugins tab to sync a marketplace from a GitHub repository or git URL. Its plugins then show up alongside the rest.

Build or adapt one

Use the Plugin Create plugin, or fork one of Anthropic’s templates. The plugin reference lives in the Claude Code documentation.

Example: the financial services marketplace

Anthropic publishes a finance marketplace at github.com/anthropics/financial-services. Financial analysis is the core plugin — comps, DCF, LBO and three-statement models — and the rest sit on top of it: Investment banking (CIMs, teasers, process letters, merger models, buyer lists), Equity research (earnings updates, initiations, catalyst tracking), Private equity (sourcing, due diligence, IC memos, portfolio monitoring) and Wealth management (client-meeting prep, financial plans, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting). LSEG and S&P Global are partner-built and bring each provider’s data into Cowork.

Once installed, the skills answer to names: /comps, /dcf, /earnings, /one-pager, /ic-memo, /source, /client-review. The core plugin also carries connector scaffolding for Daloopa, Morningstar, S&P Global, FactSet, Moody’s, MT Newswires, Aiera, LSEG, PitchBook, Chronograph and Egnyte — most need your own subscription or API key.

Good to know

Installing a plugin installs its parts. Its skills land in Customize → Skills and its connectors in Customize → Connectors, and you can turn individual pieces off.
Execution support differs. The current plugin guide says hooks and sub-agents run in Cowork and Claude Code, not legacy chat. The unified rollout carries installed plugins forward.
Local MCP warning. A plugin may include local MCP servers that run on your computer with the same permissions as any other program you run. Only install plugins from sources you trust.
Admin controls (Team and Enterprise). Owners can distribute plugins across an organisation through plugin marketplaces, and Enterprise admins can decide which plugins each group sees — so your catalogue may not match a colleague’s.
Custom connectors reach your server from Anthropic’s cloud, not from your machine. A plugin pointing at an MCP server behind your firewall won’t reach it.
AI-generated financial analysis should always be reviewed by a qualified professional before it is used to make a decision — Anthropic’s own caveat on the finance bundle.

What’s changed recently

2026-09-13 — Plugins are not desktop-only. Anthropic’s help centre lists them as working in web chat as well as the desktop app and Cowork, and claude.ai/customize carries a Plugins tab; platforms.web.status moves from not-available to covered. The manager is a tab of the full Customize page with Yours and Discover views, so the old “Cowork tab → Customize → Browse plugins” path is gone, and the marketplace flow is now an Add menu on that tab. Updated the financial-services tutorial link, which moved to academy.claude.com, and its repository, now anthropics/financial-services.
2026-04-18 — Cross-referenced with official help-center articles; added sources. Promoted page from stub to stable.