Skills vs Connectors vs Plugins: Extending Claude (2026)

If you’ve opened Claude’s Directory recently you’ve seen three tabs that all sound vaguely similar: Skills, Connectors, and Plugins. They each extend what Claude can do, but they extend it in different ways — and most people pick the wrong one for their use case because the labels overlap. This guide pulls together what Anthropic publishes about each, when to use which, and lists every connector you can install right now.

All of this lives in one place. As of March 31, 2026, Anthropic unified Skills, Connectors, and Plugins into a single Directory at claude.ai/directory. Three tabs, three different ways to make Claude more useful for you.

The Mental Model: What Each One Actually Does

The simplest way to remember the difference:

• Skills teach Claude how to do a task — they’re like a how-to manual Claude reads when needed.
• Connectors give Claude access to your apps and data — like granting OAuth permission to a co-worker.
• Plugins are bundles — they package multiple Skills, MCP servers, and tools into a single installable download.

All three are built on the same underlying plumbing — the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard Anthropic released in November 2024. MCP is “a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol.” You don’t need to know how MCP works as a user, but knowing it’s the shared layer explains why Skills, Connectors, and Plugins can interoperate.

Skills — Teaching Claude New Capabilities

Per Anthropic’s developer docs, “Agent Skills are modular capabilities that extend Claude’s functionality. Each Skill packages instructions, metadata, and optional resources (scripts, templates) that Claude uses automatically when relevant.” The launch announcement calls them “custom onboarding materials that let you package expertise, making Claude a specialist on what matters most to you.”

The key word is automatic. You don’t trigger a Skill manually — Claude reads metadata from every available Skill and decides which (if any) is relevant to your request. This is “progressive disclosure” in Anthropic’s framing: a small chunk of metadata loads up front; the full Skill body only loads when triggered; bundled scripts and resources load only when referenced.

Anthropic ships four built-in Skills today, all aimed at file generation:

• PowerPoint (pptx) — create presentations, edit slides, generate native charts
• Excel (xlsx) — create spreadsheets, analyze data, generate reports with charts
• Word (docx) — create documents, edit content, format text
• PDF (pdf) — generate formatted PDF documents and reports

You can also build your own Skills and upload them — the open-source examples and templates are at github.com/anthropics/skills. Per Anthropic’s support article, “Skills are available for users on Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans” — but require the “Code execution and file creation” capability to be enabled in Settings. Our Claude Skills guide walks through building one from scratch.

Connectors — Granting Claude Access to Your Tools

Per Anthropic’s support documentation, “Connectors let Claude access your apps and services, retrieve your data, and take actions within connected services.” Concretely: a Connector is a remote MCP server (run by the partner — Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, etc.) that Claude calls on your behalf, after you authorize it via OAuth.

Owners can scope what each Connector is allowed to do. Anthropic’s example: you can configure Gmail to “allow Claude to search and summarize email, but prevent it from sending messages.” Same pattern for Google Drive, Microsoft 365, and the rest. This matters — it’s the difference between giving Claude a passive read-pass and giving it write access to a system of record.

Anthropic also distinguishes “interactive connectors,” which can render live UI components inside the conversation rather than just returning text. Today these include Amplitude, Asana, Box, Canva, Clay, Datadog, Figma, Hex, and Slack — when you ask Claude to find issues in Datadog or autofill a Canva design, the tool’s interface renders right in the chat.

Every Connector Available Today

As of May 2026, the Anthropic & Partners section of the Directory includes the following. Popularity rankings are pulled from the live Directory; the full list grows continuously, so consider this a snapshot:

Productivity & Files

• Google Drive (Most popular) — search, read, and upload files instantly
• Gmail (#2 popular) — draft replies, summarize threads, search inbox
• Google Calendar (#3 popular) — manage schedule, coordinate meetings
• Microsoft 365 (#9 popular) — SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Teams in one connector (Team and Enterprise plans)
• Microsoft Learn — search trusted Microsoft documentation
• Microsoft Clarity — fetch web-analytics data via MCP
• Box — enterprise file storage (interactive)

Design & Creative

• Canva (#4 popular) — search, create, autofill, and export designs
• Figma (#5 popular) — generate diagrams and code from Figma context

Engineering & Developer Tools

• GitHub — repo browsing, issue creation, PR review
• GitLab
• Datadog (New, Interactive) — debug and resolve issues using telemetry
• Sentry — error tracking
• Linear — issue tracking
• Cloudflare — infrastructure

Project Management

• Atlassian Rovo (#7 popular) — Jira and Confluence
• Asana — project tracking (interactive)
• Slack — channel and DM access (interactive)
• Intercom — customer messaging

Business & Commerce

• Shopify (New, Trending) — build, manage, and analyze your store
• Stripe — payments
• PayPal — payments
• Square — payments + commerce
• Plaid — financial data
• Zapier — automation glue across thousands of other apps

Analytics & Research

• Amplitude — product analytics (interactive)
• Hex — data notebooks (interactive)
• Clay — go-to-market data (interactive)

Travel & Lifestyle

• Expedia (New, Trending) — plan trips, flights, and hotels
• Grain — meeting notes and insights

Office Apps (By Anthropic)

• Word (By Anthropic) — control Microsoft Word with AppleScript automation (in Cowork)
• PowerPoint (By Anthropic) — control Microsoft PowerPoint with AppleScript automation (in Cowork)

New connectors ship continuously — Anthropic’s May 2025 integrations launch began with 10 partners; the catalog has tripled since. The “New” badges in the Directory are the most reliable signal of recent additions. As of this writing, Datadog, Shopify, and Expedia all carry New badges.

Plugins — Bundles That Pack Multiple Tools Together

Per Anthropic’s plugins page, “Plugins bundle multiple MCPs, skills, and tools into a single download.” Where a Skill is one capability and a Connector is one external service, a Plugin can include several of each — packaged so installing a single plugin gives you everything that ships with it.

Plugins originated as a Claude Code marketplace concept (the .claude-plugin/ standard) and now surface in the unified Directory on claude.ai. The official marketplace is at github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official; Anthropic also operates an “Anthropic Verified” badge for plugins that pass additional quality and safety review.

A sample of plugins available today: Frontend Design, Superpowers, Context7, Code Review, GitHub, Playwright, Figma, Vercel, Slack, Firebase, Supabase, TypeScript LSP, Rust Analyzer LSP. Many wrap a popular MCP server plus a few opinionated Skills — meaning installing the GitHub plugin (for example) gives you the GitHub MCP server plus code-review Skills plus issue-management tooling, all in one click.

Side-by-Side: When to Use Which

• Reach for a Skill when you want Claude to be a specialist at a task — generating PowerPoints in your brand template, formatting financial reports, building PDFs to a specific spec.
• Reach for a Connector when you want Claude to read or act on data from another service — your Gmail, your Jira, your Datadog logs, your Google Drive.
• Reach for a Plugin when you want a complete capability bundle — installing the Frontend Design plugin gets you everything you’d otherwise wire up by hand for UI work.

In practice, most people end up using all three at once. A consultant might enable the PowerPoint Skill (to generate decks), the Microsoft 365 Connector (to pull source content from SharePoint), and a Code Review plugin (for client codebases). They compose.

How to Enable Each One

Skills

On Free, Pro, or Max: Settings → Capabilities → enable “Code execution and file creation,” then Customize → Skills and toggle the ones you want. Team and Enterprise admins enable both at the org level under Organization settings → Skills before members can use them.

Connectors

Customize → Connectors, or click the “+” in the chat composer and choose Manage connectors. Pick a connector, follow the OAuth prompts to authenticate, then optionally restrict actions. Most connectors work on every plan, with a 1-connector cap for custom (DIY) connectors on Free.

Plugins

Open the Plugins tab at claude.ai/directory and click Install on a card. The Plugins tab also surfaces any private marketplaces your organization has distributed. In Claude Code, the equivalent is the /plugin slash command — Discover and Installed tabs.

A Quick Plan-Availability Cheat Sheet

• Skills — All plans (Free, Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise). Requires Code execution toggle on. Note that custom Skills uploaded on claude.ai are per-user, not org-wide — admins can’t centrally manage them today.
• Prebuilt Connectors — All plans.
• Custom (DIY) Connectors — 1 max on Free; unlimited on Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise.
• Microsoft 365 org-wide connector (SharePoint/OneDrive/Outlook/Teams) — Team and Enterprise only, requires a Microsoft Entra Global Admin to install.
• Plugins — Browse and install on all paid plans; org-distributed marketplaces require Team or Enterprise.

Where This Is Headed

The bet behind unifying Skills, Connectors, and Plugins into one Directory is that most useful Claude work involves more than one of them. A 2-hour Cowork session that builds a slide deck might invoke the PowerPoint Skill, the Microsoft 365 Connector, and a research plugin in the same run. The shared MCP plumbing is what makes that composition possible without each integration needing custom glue.

If you’re new to all this, the high-leverage move is to enable the four built-in file Skills, then add one or two Connectors that match the apps where your daily data lives — Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, or Microsoft 365 are the most common starting points. Plugins are a power-user move: useful when you want a turn-key bundle for a specific job rather than wiring components yourself.

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