Claude Marketplace: How to Add a Claude Code Plugin Marketplace (and Which One You Actually Mean)

Search for Claude Marketplace and you get several different things wearing the same name, and only one of them is the developer feature most people are after. If you have started Claude Code in a terminal even once, you already have that one. Claude Code adds Anthropic's official plugin marketplace, claude-plugins-official, automatically the first time you start an interactive terminal session. That single fact explains why so many people go hunting for setup instructions for something they are already holding.

The name collision is the real problem here. Claude Marketplace is also the name of Anthropic's website at claude.com/marketplace, which sells partner software to enterprises and lists connectors and plugins for the Claude apps. This guide sorts out which Claude Marketplace is which. Then it covers the part the documentation spreads across a dozen pages: how to add someone else's marketplace, which ones are worth adding, and how to manage them once they pile up. It ends on the question that actually matters, which is what to check before you let a stranger's code run on your machine.

The Key Takeaways

• You already have one: Claude Code adds claude-plugins-official automatically on your first interactive terminal session. Nothing to install.
• Three things share the name: Anthropic's Claude Marketplace website, Claude Code plugin marketplaces, and a separate AWS listing. Only the middle one is the feature you add in the terminal.
• Adding takes one line: /plugin marketplace add owner/repo works for GitHub, and git URLs, local folders and hosted JSON files all work too.
• Removing is destructive: removing a marketplace uninstalls every plugin you installed from it.
• Anthropic's own warning is blunt: a plugin you install "can execute arbitrary code on your machine with your user privileges".

What Is a Claude Code Plugin Marketplace?

A Claude Code plugin marketplace is a catalog of plugins, and Anthropic's own definition is short. It is a directory or repository with a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file that lists the plugins and where to fetch each one. You push that directory to a git host, and anyone with access registers it in Claude Code with one command.

When you add a marketplace, Claude Code reads that catalog so you can browse it. Nothing is installed at that point. Adding and installing are deliberately two separate steps, which is the detail most guides skip and the reason people think an add command has silently failed.

Plugins, Skills and MCP Servers Are Not the Same Thing

Plugins, skills and MCP servers get used interchangeably and they should not be. A skill is a single instruction file that teaches Claude how to do one job. A plugin is a bundle that can contain skills, commands, agents, hooks, MCP servers and LSP servers together. A marketplace is the catalog that distributes plugins.

If what you want is individual skills rather than bundles, that is a different job. We cover it separately in our roundup of the best Claude Code skills picked by use case. If you want to write one yourself, start with creating your own Claude Code skills. This guide stays on plugins, marketplaces and distribution.

Three Different Things Are Called a Claude Marketplace

Three unrelated things answer to the name Claude Marketplace, and the first of them has three sections of its own. That is why search results for the term are such a mess. Anthropic's website covers buying partner software and browsing plugins, the Claude Code CLI has its own git-based marketplaces, and Amazon sells Claude through a listing of its own.

What Is on the Claude Marketplace Website

The Claude Marketplace website at claude.com/marketplace has three sections: Agents and products, Connectors and plugins, and Service partners. If you arrived here after reading a September 2026 headline about Anthropic launching a marketplace, that was this website. Service partners lists consulting firms that help companies roll Claude out. The Agents and products section listed fifteen products when we checked it on 24 September 2026 and 31 products on 9 November 2026, filtered under headings like Code, Data, Legal, Financial Services and Security. You cannot add that section to Claude Code and it will not give you plugins.

The Connectors and plugins section is closer to the terminal, but it is still a website, not a marketplace you register. On 9 November 2026 it listed 1,096 connectors and 529 plugins. It is the place to read about a plugin before you install it. The install itself still happens in Claude Code, from one of the git catalogs below. A fourth catalog, Anthropic's directory on claude.ai, is where you add plugins to your claude.ai account. Plugins added there reach Claude Code through account sync and show up under the ID <name>@synced.

You Probably Already Have a Claude Marketplace Installed

Yes, if you have opened Claude Code in a terminal, the official marketplace is already there. Anthropic's documentation states that Claude Code adds claude-plugins-official for you the first time you start an interactive terminal session. You did not have to do anything, and there is no setup step you missed.

To see what is in it, run /plugin and open the Discover tab, or browse Anthropic's public plugin catalog on the web. Installing from it uses the marketplace name as a suffix:

/plugin install github@claude-plugins-official

Inside a session that command does not install straight away. It opens the plugin's details in the /plugin panel, where you review what it adds and choose a scope: just you, everyone on the repository, or just you in this repository. For plugins in the official marketplace, the details pane also estimates the tokens the plugin adds to every turn.

If the Official Marketplace Is Missing

The official marketplace is missing when Claude Code never got to register it. That happens if you have only used Claude Code through the VS Code extension, if a managed policy blocks the source, if the CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_OFFICIAL_MARKETPLACE_AUTOINSTALL variable is set, or after a failed attempt that is waiting to retry. The claude plugin shell commands never register it for you. The fix is to add it by hand, at which point it behaves like any other marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/claude-plugins-official

If an install fails with Marketplace "claude-plugins-official" not found, that is the exact situation, and the command above resolves it. A different error, Plugin "<name>" not found in marketplace, means the marketplace is fine and the plugin name is wrong or your copy of the catalog is stale. Copy the name from the Discover tab, or refresh with /plugin marketplace update <marketplace>.

When the /plugin Command Does Not Exist

The /plugin panel only runs in a Claude Code terminal session. If Claude replies /plugin isn't available in this environment, you are somewhere without a terminal to draw it in: claude -p, the Agent SDK, the desktop app's Code tab, the VS Code panel or claude.ai/code. In the Claude desktop app you click + next to the prompt box and choose Add plugins. In the VS Code extension you type /plugins to open the Manage plugins dialog. Cloud sessions have no plugin browser at all and do not load the plugins installed on your own machine. The documented route for plugins there is your organization's managed settings.

If the command should exist and does not, check your version with claude --version and update. Homebrew users run brew upgrade claude-code, and npm users run npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code@latest. Restart the terminal afterwards.

How to Add a Claude Code Plugin Marketplace

You add a Claude Code plugin marketplace with /plugin marketplace add, and every route uses that same command with a different kind of argument. The one sentence worth memorising is that adding registers a catalog and installs nothing, so you always run a second command afterwards.

Anthropic's own account put the barrier to entry plainly when the feature launched, which is why so many small marketplaces exist:

Anyone can host a marketplace or make a plugin.

All you need is a git repo with a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file.

Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-code-plugins

— Claude (@claudeai) October 9, 2025

From GitHub

The short form takes an owner and repository name, with no protocol and no URL. Append # and a tag or branch to pin it:

/plugin marketplace add owner/repo
/plugin marketplace add owner/repo#v1.2.0

From Another Git Host

GitLab, Bitbucket, GitHub Enterprise Server and self-hosted servers all work. Pass the full repository URL including https:// (or use the git@host:path form for SSH), and pin to a tag or branch by appending it after a hash:

/plugin marketplace add https://gitlab.com/company/plugins.git
/plugin marketplace add https://gitlab.com/company/plugins.git#v1.0.0

From a Local Folder

A local folder is useful while you are building your own. Point at the directory that contains the .claude-plugin folder, or at a marketplace file directly. Start the path with ./, because Claude Code reads a bare name/name as a GitHub repository:

/plugin marketplace add ./my-marketplace
/plugin marketplace add ./path/to/marketplace.json

From a Remote URL

You can add a marketplace.json file served over HTTPS directly. The catch is that Claude Code then downloads only that one file, so any plugin entry whose source is a relative path inside the repository fails at install. Prefer a git host when you have the choice:

/plugin marketplace add https://example.com/marketplace.json

Add and Install in One Command

Recent versions collapse the two steps. The --marketplace flag names a source you have not added yet. Inside a session it requires Claude Code v2.1.275 or later and asks you to confirm the source first. From your shell it requires v2.1.292 or later, released on 6 October 2026, and adds the marketplace without asking:

/plugin install quality-review-plugin --marketplace your-org/plugins
claude plugin install quality-review-plugin --marketplace your-org/plugins

Which Claude Code Plugin Marketplaces Are Worth Adding

The official and community marketplaces are the two worth knowing by name, and the difference between them is who vouches for the contents. Directory sites rank plugins by install count and GitHub stars, which measures popularity rather than judgement.

Those counts come from reading each marketplace's own marketplace.json on 9 November 2026, not from a directory site. At the start of 24 September 2026 the same files listed 311 and 2,282. The gap between them is the whole story: the official catalog is roughly a seventh the size of the community one, because one is curated and the other is screened.

One nuance catches people out. Installs from the community catalog use @claude-community as the suffix, not the repository name, because the catalog declares itself under that shorter name. And the older demo marketplace in anthropics/claude-code, named claude-code-plugins, is now deprecated. Anthropic's documentation says to skip any tutorial step that adds it and to install from claude-plugins-official instead.

Anthropic does not review third-party marketplaces. A marketplace outside Anthropic's is only as trustworthy as the person hosting it, which is the same calculation you make before adding any dependency to a project.

Managing, Updating and Removing Marketplaces

You manage marketplaces from the Marketplaces tab in /plugin, or with three direct commands:

/plugin marketplace list
/plugin marketplace update marketplace-name
/plugin marketplace remove marketplace-name

Read that last one carefully before you run it. Removing a marketplace uninstalls every plugin you installed from it and removes their entries from your settings files. The Marketplaces tab names those plugins before it asks you to confirm. If you only want to stop using one plugin, uninstall the plugin instead, optionally scoped to a single project:

/plugin uninstall plugin-name@marketplace-name
claude plugin uninstall formatter@your-org --scope project

The Installed tab also groups plugins you installed yourself and have not used recently under a Not used recently header, which is the quickest way to find the ones still adding startup and context cost.

Auto-Update Defaults Are Not Uniform

Auto-update is on by default only for Anthropic's official marketplace names and for marketplaces added from your claude.ai account. Two official names, knowledge-work-plugins and first-party-plugins, are exceptions and start with it off. Every other marketplace starts with auto-update off, including the community marketplace, third-party marketplaces and local development marketplaces. So a plugin you installed from a colleague's repository, or from the community catalog, will quietly go stale unless you enable updates or refresh it yourself.

To change it, open the Marketplaces tab in /plugin, select the marketplace and choose Enable auto-update. The default is reasonable rather than an oversight, because auto-updating code from an unvetted source is exactly the thing you would not want happening silently. It does mean that a plugin quietly going out of date usually has a one-word explanation.

Build Your Own Marketplace

The minimum viable marketplace is three required fields: name, owner and plugins. Create .claude-plugin/marketplace.json in a repository root:

{
  "name": "my-plugins",
  "owner": { "name": "Your Name" },
  "plugins": [
    {
      "name": "quality-review-plugin",
      "source": "./plugins/quality-review-plugin",
      "description": "Adds a quality-review skill for quick code reviews"
    }
  ]
}

Run claude plugin validate . before you push. Then anyone can add it with /plugin marketplace add owner/repo. Plugin sources are not limited to folders in the same repository. Claude Code accepts relative paths, GitHub repositories, plain git URLs, subdirectories inside a monorepo, npm packages, zip archives and the output of a local command.

Teams can skip the manual step entirely. Run claude plugin marketplace add your-org/your-marketplace --scope project once in the repository and commit the .claude/settings.json it writes, which declares the marketplace under extraKnownMarketplaces. The marketplace then registers for each team member who trusts the repository folder.

Three Gotchas That Are Easy to Hit

Reserved names. Nineteen marketplace names are reserved for Anthropic unless they come from a repository under github.com/anthropics/: fourteen official names, three community names and two plugin directory names. They include claude-code-plugins, claude-plugins-official, claude-community, anthropic-marketplace, agent-skills, healthcare and life-sciences. Names that impersonate official ones, such as official-claude-plugins, are blocked too, as are package-manager names like npm and cargo. A marketplace registered under a name before it became reserved stops loading and reports itself as registered from an untrusted source.

Git LFS silently breaks things. When Claude Code clones a marketplace or a git-based plugin, the clone never downloads Git LFS content, so LFS-tracked files arrive as pointer files. Keep anything your plugins actually need out of LFS.

Version floors on newer fields. Several conveniences are recent. metadata.pluginRoot needs v2.1.239, adding a marketplace from your claude.ai account needs v2.1.273, the --marketplace install flag needs v2.1.275 in a session and v2.1.292 in the shell, and fetching only the git submodules that hold plugin files needs v2.1.295. If a documented field appears to do nothing, check claude --version before debugging the JSON. The full schema lives in Anthropic's marketplace reference.

Are Claude Code Plugins Safe?

Claude Code plugins are as safe as their author, and Anthropic does not soften this. Its documentation states that a plugin you install can execute arbitrary code on your machine with your user privileges. The warning shown before every install adds that Anthropic does not control what MCP servers, files, or other software are included in plugins and cannot verify that they will work as intended. Anthropic tells you to review a plugin before you install it, whichever marketplace it comes from.

That is the correct framing. Installing a plugin is closer to running an install script from a stranger's repository than to enabling a browser extension. A plugin's hooks, background monitors and MCP and LSP servers run outside Claude Code's sandbox with your full user permissions. The practical checks are the ordinary ones. Read the plugin's hooks/hooks.json, .mcp.json and bin/ folder, prefer marketplaces where something screened the contents, and pin to a tag rather than tracking a branch. Then keep an eye on what a plugin's tools are allowed to do without asking, which is governed by Claude Code's permission settings.

The risk is not hypothetical. Skill and plugin directories for AI coding tools have already shipped malicious entries, a pattern we track in our running log of AI safety incidents. Organisations that want a hard boundary can allowlist or blocklist marketplace sources and force-enable plugins through managed settings.

Is Any of This Worth the Setup?

For most people the official marketplace is enough, and the value of the wider system only appears when you have a team. The developer reaction when the feature shipped captured what it is actually good at:

💡 Claude Code now has a plugin marketplace!

Makes it so much easier to discover plugins, share them with the community or your team, and keep them updated. Teams can also set up their own internal marketplaces!

— Lydia Hallie ✨ (@lydiahallie) December 16, 2025

That is the real use case. A solo developer installing two plugins from the official catalog barely needs to know marketplaces exist. A team that wants everyone on the same hooks, the same review skill and the same MCP servers gets a genuine distribution mechanism, with version pinning and a single place to push an update. The cost worth watching is context, not a fee: every enabled plugin adds tokens to your sessions, and claude plugin details <name> shows how many. That matters if you are still weighing what Claude Code actually costs or whether the free tier covers your usage. And when the question is not about code at all, and Claude's answer looks off, Fello AI lets you ask ChatGPT or Gemini the same thing in the same window, without a second subscription.

The setup cost is one command. The thing worth spending actual attention on is not installation, it is the trust question, because a marketplace is a distribution channel for code that runs as you. Add the official one, add the community one if you want range, and treat anything else the way you would treat an unfamiliar dependency. Anthropic's install and discovery documentation is the reference to keep open while you do it.

Frequently Asked Questions

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