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Every Claude Plugin Marketplace, Ranked (2026)

Eight Claude Code plugin and skill marketplaces exist in May 2026. Each has a different trust model, distribution mechanism, and creator-economy posture. This is the comparison nobody else has written.

Eight marketplaces matter for Claude Code plugin and skill distribution in May 2026. They have different trust models, different distribution mechanics, and different relationships to the creator economy. None of them have written a head-to-head comparison, which is why this page exists.

The category started in October 2025 when Anthropic launched plugin support and a Hacker News commenter named joesaunderson wrote the line that turned out to be prescient:

"Distribution is going to be key here... plugin maintainers do not want to have to build a marketplace as well as a plugin."

That has been true. Plugin authors build the plugin; someone else needs to handle discovery, install, trust, and revenue. Eight someones now compete for that job. Here they are.

The contenders

1. anthropics/claude-plugins-official

Distribution: Anthropic's official GitHub repo. Manual review. Submissions via PR. Plugin count: Under 40 as of May 2026. Monetization: None. Free distribution only. Trust: Highest in the ecosystem — every plugin is Anthropic-reviewed before merge. Where it fails: Tiny list. Submission throughput is slow. Many high-quality community plugins never apply because the review queue is months long.

If trust is your top priority and you only need 30-ish plugins, this is the canonical channel. The bar is real.

2. anthropics/skills

Distribution: Anthropic's official skills repo. 7 reference skills (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, code-review, and two utility skills). Skill count: 7. Monetization: None. Trust: Same as above — official. Where it fails: Not a marketplace, a reference. Use it as a quality template, not as a discovery layer.

3. claudemarketplaces.com

Distribution: Aggregator-style. Crawls public GitHub for plugins; lists by install count, stars, votes. Plugin count: 4,200+ skills, including duplicates. Monetization: Currently none for creators. Trust: Low to medium. No publish-time security scan. Community reports drive takedowns. ToxicSkills (Snyk Feb 2026) found 13.4% of public skills have critical security findings; claudemarketplaces.com indexes the same pool. Traffic: ~140k monthly visits per third-party analytics. The largest aggregator by traffic. Where it fails: Quality unclear. No creator payouts. Discovery is by raw popularity, which the ecosystem has shown does not correlate with safety.

4. claude-plugins.dev

Distribution: Plugin registry plus CLI installer. Community-curated. Plugin count: Several hundred. Monetization: None. Trust: Medium. Less polished UI than claudemarketplaces.com but tighter curation. Where it fails: Smaller audience. CLI-first UX excludes some users.

5. ClawHub

Distribution: Free single-tool hub for Claude Code skills. Plugin count: Estimated 1,500-2,500 active. Monetization: None. Trust: Hit hard by the February 2026 coordinated malware campaign documented in Snyk's ToxicSkills report — first major typo-squatting attack against Claude Code users distributed through ClawHub before takedown. Where it fails: Single-tool focus (Claude Code only), no creator economy, post-incident trust recovery is ongoing. The infrastructure that enabled the attack — silent push of new versions to existing installs — has not been replaced.

6. Agent37

Distribution: Paid skill platform with hosted-access model. Skills run on Agent37's infrastructure; users call them via API. Plugin count: Curated; under 100. Monetization: 80/20 creator/platform split. Stripe-integrated. Trust: Medium-high. Hosted execution prevents IP leakage but also means creators trust Agent37's infra. Where it fails: Single-tool focus. Hosted-only — no local-install option. Skills cannot use Bash or filesystem access from outside Agent37's sandbox.

7. Agensi

Distribution: Paid skill platform with installable artifacts. Plugin count: Curated; under 50. Monetization: Creator-favorable split (specific terms vary). Trust: Medium. Smaller scale, more hand-curated. Where it fails: Limited catalog depth. Discovery problem — not enough volume to drive organic traffic.

8. RuleSell (this site)

Distribution: Multi-tool paid marketplace. Artifacts (skills, MCP servers, cursor rules, AGENTS.md templates) distributed with one-click install for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Aider, and other agents from the same listing. Plugin count: Curated; growing. Monetization: 85/15 creator/platform split with creator KYC and Stripe payouts. Trust: Static security analysis at publish time (derived from Snyk's ToxicSkills methodology), permissions lock-in on update, quality score per listing. Where we fit: Different lane from ClawHub (free single-tool) and claudemarketplaces.com (aggregator with limited quality gates). We distribute multi-tool artifacts with creator payouts — the combination is currently unique.

The unofficial 9th: hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code

The traditional GitHub "awesome list" — 43,500 stars — is the de facto discovery surface for power users. Currently being reorganized as of May 2026. It's a curated index, not a marketplace, but it deserves mention because it drives substantial traffic in the absence of polished alternatives.

How to choose

NeedBest fit
Free, highest-trust, fewest pluginsanthropics/claude-plugins-official
Free, broad catalog, accept some quality riskclaudemarketplaces.com
Paid distribution as a creator, hosted executionAgent37
Paid distribution as a creator, multi-tool reachRuleSell
Plugin discovery via curated awesome listhesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code
Reference implementations to learn fromanthropics/skills
MCP server directory (different artifact class)Glama, PulseMCP, Smithery — see /topic/best-mcp-servers-2026

The trust signals that matter

When evaluating any marketplace, three things separate the trustworthy from the lottery:

1. Publish-time security scan. Does the marketplace run static analysis against SKILL.md, scripts/, references/ before listing? Catches the 42% of malicious skills with prompt-injection patterns in the description body and the 18% with malware in scripts (per ToxicSkills classifications). 2. Permission lock on update. When a creator pushes v1.1 of a skill, does the allowed-tools declaration get re-reviewed if it broadened? Without this, the silent-update attack is unmitigated. 3. Creator KYC for paid platforms. Verified payment account, verified identity, plumbing that makes typo-squatting hard. Free platforms can skip this; paid platforms cannot if they want trust.

In May 2026, the official Anthropic channels have manual review (replacing automated scanning). Most aggregators have neither. The paid platforms with KYC (Agent37, Agensi, RuleSell) have the strongest enforcement; the free aggregators rely on community reporting.

Where the category is going

Three forces are reshaping the marketplace landscape in 2026:

Consolidation pressure. Promptfoo was acquired by OpenAI in March 2026; Langfuse by ClickHouse in January 2026. The pattern — successful AI tooling companies absorbed into larger vendors — is reaching marketplaces. Expect 1-2 of the eight names above to be acquired or shut down inside 12 months. Quality-gate arms race. ToxicSkills made publish-time scanning the table-stakes. Marketplaces without scanning will lose trust. Marketplaces with scanning will compete on the scan's quality. Multi-tool distribution. The artifact formats are converging — AGENTS.md works across Cursor, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Aider, Zed, and more. A skill that works in one Claude-Code-only marketplace is a skill that's missing the other 80% of its potential audience. The multi-tool marketplace category is the bet RuleSell is making.

Where this fails

Numbers shift. Plugin counts above are May 2026 snapshots. The cadence of new plugins (per Bloomberry's MCP study, 301 new servers per month by Feb 2026) means counts move fast. Re-check before quoting. Trust is post-hoc. Every marketplace looks trusted until a campaign hits. ClawHub looked fine until February 2026; the official Anthropic filesystem server looked fine until EscapeRoute. Treat trust as a probabilistic prior, not a guarantee. Discovery is broken everywhere. None of these marketplaces have solved discoverability — there's no equivalent of npm install-counts or cargo weekly-download metrics that's both visible and hard to game. The "best skills" SERPs are dominated by Medium listicles for this reason. RuleSell's listings here are not exhaustive. Smaller and niche marketplaces (claudeskillshq, mcp-marketplace.io, mcp-awesome.com) exist and are growing. The eight above are the ones we'd point a serious creator or installer at first.

What to read next

Sources

Frequently asked

Which marketplace has the most Claude Code plugins?
By raw count, claudemarketplaces.com lists 4,200+ skills with about 140k monthly visits. Glama claims 23,451 MCP servers (a related but distinct category). Smithery hosts around 6,000. By curated count after quality filtering, the active sets are much smaller — PulseMCP curates 8,013 servers, and the official anthropics/claude-plugins-official repo lists fewer than 40 plugins.
Are there paid Claude Code skill marketplaces?
Yes. Anthropic's official marketplace is free-only as of May 2026. Third-party platforms enabling paid distribution include Agent37 (hosted-access model, 80/20 creator split with Stripe integration), Agensi, ClaudeSkillsHQ, and RuleSell (multi-tool, 85/15 creator split). The hosted-access model is the only one that scales — selling raw SKILL.md files gives away the IP on first download.
What makes a marketplace 'trusted' in this ecosystem?
Three signals: (1) static security analysis at publish time, (2) creator KYC for paid platforms, (3) re-approval flow when permissions broaden. Trend Micro and Snyk's 2026 audits found most public skill distribution lacks all three. Anthropic's official channel has manual review; most aggregators rely on community reports.
Can I publish a plugin to multiple marketplaces?
Yes, the SKILL.md / plugin.json format is portable across marketplaces. Several creators publish to anthropics/claude-plugins-official (free, high trust) for visibility plus a paid channel (RuleSell, Agent37) for revenue. The format is the same; the distribution and economics differ.
What's the difference between a Claude plugin marketplace and an MCP server directory?
Different artifact categories. Claude plugin marketplaces distribute SKILL.md folders and plugin.json bundles that run inside Claude Code itself. MCP server directories (Glama, Smithery, mcp.so) catalog Model Context Protocol servers — external processes that Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, and other clients connect to. Some marketplaces (RuleSell, claudemarketplaces.com) cover both.
How does RuleSell position against ClawHub or claudemarketplaces.com?
ClawHub is a free single-tool hub focused on Claude Code specifically. claudemarketplaces.com is a free aggregator with broad coverage and limited quality gating. RuleSell is a multi-tool paid marketplace — we distribute artifacts that work in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, and other agents, with creator payouts, KYC, and a quality score at publish time. Different lanes.

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