By Dan Donovan, @askdandonovan
Anthropic runs its own plugin marketplace inside Claude. There are 93 plugins in it and most people have never opened the menu. Here's what's in there, what each one connects to, and the three worth installing if you're not an engineer.
A plugin bundles two things you've been supplying by hand: the instructions for a whole job, and the app connections that job needs. So Claude arrives already knowing the workflow, and it brings the connections that job needs with it. You still approve each connection yourself, but you are no longer the one hunting them down.
That's the difference between a plugin and a saved prompt. A prompt tells Claude what to say. A plugin gives it the job and the keys.
If you read nothing else on this page: open Customize, go to Plugins, click Browse plugins, install Productivity, connect Gmail and Google Calendar when it asks, then paste this.
Set up my productivity system. Read my calendar and my inbox from the last two weeks, work out what I am actually working on, and build me a task list from it. Ask me about anything you cannot work out from context, especially any shorthand or project names you do not recognise.The part worth watching is the questions it asks you back. That's it building the memory of your work, which is the bit a saved prompt can never do.
Before you start: you need a paid plan. Anthropic's help centre is blunt about it. Plugins are available on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. The free plan does not include them, and Pro starts at around $20 a month.
If you're on free, nothing below will appear in your menu, and that's the reason, not a bug.
Where plugins work: chat on the web, the Chat tab in Claude Desktop, and Claude Cowork. The skills inside a plugin work in all three. Hooks and sub-agents run only in Cowork, so they appear greyed out in chat. Cowork is on every paid tier, including Pro.
It's four clicks and most people have never made them.
In Cowork, open the Cowork tab first, then Customize.
One, not three. The plugin you install and use beats the three you install and forget. Pick whichever matches how you actually spend your week.
Manages tasks, plans your day, and builds up a memory of the context around your work. It syncs with your calendar, email and chat so things stop falling through. The memory is the part that matters: it keeps a running picture of what you're working on, so you stop opening a chat and explaining your own job to it.
Start with Gmail and Google Calendar if you're not sure which connections to approve. Those two alone fix the Monday morning problem.
Contract review, NDA triage and compliance work. It reads a document, flags the risky clauses, and helps you understand what you're agreeing to before you agree to it.
Worth knowing: Anthropic wrote this one for in-house legal teams and says so in the description. It works perfectly well on the contract a client just emailed you, or a lease, or a supplier agreement. You're borrowing a tool built for a lawyer, which is fine as long as you remember it isn't one. It flags things for you to look at. It isn't legal advice, and neither is this page.
Opens a PDF in a viewer you can actually see, fills in form fields, places signatures, stamps approvals and marks up documents. Then you download the annotated copy. There's no connector to approve, so there's nothing to set up.
One thing Anthropic doesn't publish: this plugin runs a PDF server locally on your computer rather than through a cloud connector, and the help centre doesn't say which surfaces support that. Try it in Claude Desktop first. If it's greyed out or it won't open a file where you are, that's why, and the other two plugins on this page use cloud connectors so they work anywhere plugins do.
A plugin does nothing until you give it a job. Here's the first thing to ask each one, written so you can paste it straight in.
Set up my productivity system. Read my calendar and my inbox from the last two weeks, work out what I am actually working on, and build me a task list from it. Ask me about anything you cannot work out from context, especially any shorthand or project names you do not recognise.Read the attached contract as if you were reviewing it for me before I sign. List every clause that could cost me money or lock me in, in plain English, with the clause number next to each one. Then tell me the three I should push back on first, and what to ask for instead.Open this PDF, fill in the fields with the details I give you, and put my signature in the signature box. Show me the filled version before you finalise it, then give me the signed copy to download.These are the plugins that ship in Anthropic's own repository. The connector list is taken from each plugin's own configuration file, so this is what it will offer to hook up when you install it, not a guess.
| Plugin | What it's for | Connects to |
|---|---|---|
| Productivity | Tasks, calendar, daily planning, memory of your work | Slack, Notion, Asana, Linear, Atlassian, Monday, ClickUp, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| PDF Viewer | View, annotate, fill and sign PDFs | Nothing |
| Legal | Contract review, NDA triage, compliance | Docusign, Box, Egnyte, Atlassian, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Small Business | Payroll planning, month-end close, weekly briefs, campaigns | QuickBooks, PayPal, Stripe, Square, HubSpot, Docusign, Canva, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive |
| Marketing | Content, campaigns, brand voice, competitors, reporting | Canva, Figma, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, Amplitude, Supermetrics, Notion, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Sales | Prospecting, outreach, call prep, pipeline, battlecards | HubSpot, Close, Clay, ZoomInfo, Apollo, Outreach, Fireflies, SimilarWeb, Notion, Atlassian, Monday, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Enterprise Search | One query across your email, chat, docs and wikis | Slack, Notion, Guru, Atlassian, Asana, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Customer Support | Ticket triage, drafting replies, escalations, knowledge base | Intercom, HubSpot, Guru, Atlassian, Notion, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Human Resources | Recruiting, onboarding, reviews, compensation | Slack, Notion, Atlassian, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Operations | Vendor management, process docs, change management | Slack, Notion, Atlassian, Asana, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Product Management | Specs, roadmaps, user research, stakeholder updates | Linear, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Atlassian, Notion, Figma, Amplitude, Pendo, Intercom, Fireflies, SimilarWeb, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Design | Critique, design systems, UX writing, accessibility | Figma, Linear, Asana, Atlassian, Notion, Intercom, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Engineering | Standups, code review, architecture, incidents | GitHub, Linear, Asana, Atlassian, Notion, PagerDuty, Datadog, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Finance | Journal entries, reconciliation, statements, close, audit prep | Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar |
| Data | SQL, dataset exploration, dashboards, statistical work | Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Hex, Amplitude, Definite, Atlassian |
| Bio Research | Literature search, genomics, target prioritisation | PubMed, bioRxiv, Benchling, BioRender, Consensus, ChEMBL, ClinicalTrials, Synapse, Wiley, Owkin, Open Targets |
| Brand Voice | Works out your brand voice from your own documents | Nothing |
| Plugin Management | Build or customise your own plugins | Nothing |
| Slack | Search messages, send, manage canvases | Slack |
| Apollo | Prospecting, lead enrichment, outreach sequences | Apollo.io |
| Common Room | Account and contact research for go-to-market | Common Room |
| Zoom | Building and debugging Zoom integrations | Zoom |
On a phone, swipe the table sideways to see the connector column.
The last four are built by those companies rather than by Anthropic, and they ship in the same repository. The other 71 plugins in the marketplace are published by outside companies: Canva, Figma, Dropbox, Airtable, Zapier, Box, Monday, Twilio, Wix and a long tail of developer tools.
Question one: what do I do most days that involves other people's documents or other people's apps?
That names your plugin. If the answer is "chase my own week", it's Productivity. If it's "read things before I agree to them", it's Legal. If it's "run a small business on QuickBooks and Stripe", it's Small Business.
Question two: which of those apps do I actually pay for?
Run your eye down the connector column and find the row with the most apps you already use. A plugin whose connectors you don't have is a plugin that will sit there looking useful.