A single skill teaches Claude one job. Claude Cowork plugins teach Claude a whole role.
That is the cleanest way I have found to hold the difference in your head. A skill is a workflow, the kind of thing you trigger with a slash command like /monthly-close. A plugin is the box that holds several of those workflows together, plus the tools they need and the helpers that run them. If you have spent any time in Cowork handing tasks to Claude and watching it work, the plugin is the next rung up. It is the moment you stop teaching one task and start teaching how your team operates.
Anthropic shipped the enterprise version of this on February 24, 2026, and it changed what "customizing Claude" means for a team. So let me walk through what a Cowork plugin is, how it differs from a lone skill, how the marketplace works, and the one question that tells you which one you actually want.
What a Claude Cowork plugin is
A plugin bundles three things into one portable folder.
The first is skills. These are the workflows, the encoded knowledge and step-by-step methods, usually triggered by a slash command. A skill can be two lines about how you like reports formatted, or it can be a detailed close process with reference docs attached. Skills chain, and they can run on a schedule.
The second is connectors. A connector links Claude to your actual tools and data, things like Gmail, Notion, HubSpot, and Google Drive, so Claude can pull the numbers mid-task and write the result back without you uploading anything by hand. Under the hood these are MCP servers, though you do not need to know that to use one. In Cowork they show up as Claude Cowork connectors you grant access to, folder by folder, tool by tool.
The third is sub-agents. These are specialized helpers Claude spins up for the heavier parts of a job, each with its own context window, working in parallel or in sequence. One pulls data while another drafts. You rarely interact with them directly, and that is the point. They keep the bigger plugins from feeling like one assistant juggling everything at once.
Anthropic's own framing is that plugins "customize how Claude works for your role, team, and company," and the build process backs that up. In Cowork you describe the plugin you want in a sentence, then Claude asks questions to tailor the skills, commands, and connectors to your company before it writes the files.
How a plugin differs from a single skill
Think about month-end.
A single skill is the close checklist. It knows the eleven steps, the order, the format you want the summary in. That is useful, but it cannot reach your accounting tool on its own, and it has no helper to fetch last quarter's numbers while it writes this quarter's. You are still wiring those pieces together each time you run it.
A plugin is that close skill plus the connector to your finance system plus a sub-agent that gathers the supporting data, all packaged so a teammate can install the whole thing in one move. The skill is a recipe. The plugin hands over the recipe, the stocked pantry, and a prep cook as a single unit.
There is a naming detail worth knowing here. Plugin skills are namespaced, so a skill called hello inside a plugin named my-tool runs as /my-tool:hello. That stops two plugins from fighting over the same command name once you have more than a couple installed.
The Claude Cowork plugin marketplace, including private ones
Plugins live on your machine by default. They do not sync across your devices or out to your coworkers on their own. To share one, you have a few routes. You can zip it and send it. You can host it on GitHub so installs pull updates automatically. Or, if you are on a team, you can have an admin provision it for everyone.
That last route is the February 2026 release, and it is the one that changes how teams operate. Admins can now build private plugin marketplaces and distribute plugins across an organization, with org-specific marketplaces, private GitHub repositories as plugin sources (in private beta at launch), per-user provisioning, and auto-install. A "Customize" menu pulls plugins, skills, and connectors into one place so an admin can manage what the whole team can reach. The same announcement shipped thirteen new connectors spanning Google Workspace, DocuSign, Apollo, WordPress, and others.
What makes this matter is ownership. Anthropic describes plugins as "simple, portable file systems that you own," and they run anywhere built on the Claude Agent SDK, not only inside Cowork. A marketplace is just a controlled way to hand those folders to the right people. Your legal team gets the contract-review plugin. Sales gets the pipeline one. Nobody gets a tool they were not provisioned.
How to install Claude Cowork plugins
For a shared plugin, the path depends on how it reached you. If an admin set up a private marketplace and provisioned it to you, it can auto-install and simply appear in your Customize menu. If a coworker sent you a zip or pointed you at a GitHub repo, you add that source and install from it. To browse what is already available, Anthropic lists plugins at claude.com/plugins.
Building your own is the same conversation as building a skill, only wider. You describe what you want, Claude asks about your workflow, your tools, your standards, and your edge cases, and it writes the plugin files. Then you test it, and when it holds up, you share it however your team distributes things.
When you want a plugin instead of a lone skill
Reach for a single skill when the job is yours and it is one workflow. Maybe you want Claude to format your weekly digest a certain way, or run a specific analysis you do often. No new tool access, no helpers, nobody else needs it. A skill is faster to make and faster to change.
Reach for a plugin when at least one of these is true: the job needs to touch an outside tool through a connector, it is complex enough to want sub-agents, or somebody other than you needs to run it the same way every time. The third reason is the loudest one, I think. The moment "how I do this" becomes "how we do this," you want a plugin, because a plugin is the unit you can hand to a teammate without also handing over a setup guide.
Most people start with skills and graduate to plugins when a skill earns its keep and the team wants it too. That is the honest progression, and it is the one Anthropic's own docs nudge you toward: build the small thing first, then package it when it is ready to share.
If you would rather skip the slash commands and YAML entirely and just answer a few questions to get a working SKILL.md you can drop into Cowork, Knack does exactly that. Start with one good skill. You will know when it is time for the plugin.
For the broader picture of how plugins fit across every Claude surface, the Claude plugins explainer covers the parts that are not Cowork-specific.