Claude Cowork Plugins: All 11 Official Plugins
A Claude plugin is a pre-packed setup for one kind of work. Anthropic’s description: “Each plugin bundles skills, connectors, and sub-agents into a single package, so you get a ready-to-go setup from your first conversation instead of configuring each piece yourself.” The Cowork release adds slash commands and hooks to that list. The point is that you stop assembling the pieces yourself.
If you’re still deciding whether Cowork is for you, What Is Claude Cowork and the Cowork review cover that. This page is the plugin layer: what ships officially, what’s actually inside one, where each component runs, and where the whole model stops.
The 11 official plugins
Anthropic released these on January 30, 2026, open source, described as “built and used by our own team”:
| Plugin | What it’s packed for |
|---|---|
| Productivity | Tasks, calendars, daily workflows, and personal context |
| Enterprise search | Finding information across your company’s tools and docs |
| Plugin Create/Customize | Building and customizing new plugins from scratch |
| Sales | Researching prospects, prepping deals, following your sales process |
| Finance | Analyzing financials, building models, tracking key metrics |
| Data | Querying, visualizing, and interpreting datasets |
| Legal | Reviewing documents, flagging risks, tracking compliance |
| Marketing | Drafting content, planning campaigns, managing launches |
| Customer support | Triaging issues, drafting responses, surfacing solutions |
| Product management | Writing specs, prioritizing roadmaps, tracking progress |
| Biology research | Searching literature, analyzing results, planning experiments |
Plugin Create is the odd one out and the most interesting: a plugin whose job is helping you build plugins. Anthropic’s own suggestion is to treat the other ten as starting points and customize them with Claude rather than using them as shipped.
What’s inside one
Five component types, all file-based, which is why Anthropic describes them as “easy to build, edit, and share”:
- Skills are the domain knowledge. Claude draws on them automatically when relevant, with no explicit trigger. Claude Skills covers the
SKILL.mdformat if you want to write your own. - Connectors are the reach. A plugin can bundle the MCP connectors a workflow needs, so you aren’t hooking up Slack, Notion, and Jira one at a time.
- Slash commands are the explicit actions you fire deliberately.
- Sub-agents hand parts of a task to a separate context.
- Hooks run logic at defined points in the flow.
Because everything is a file, forking a plugin and rewriting the parts that don’t match your process is an ordinary editing job rather than a development project.
Where each piece actually runs
This is the detail that causes the most confusion, and it comes straight from Anthropic’s help documentation.
Plugins work in three places: chat on the web, the Chat tab in Claude Desktop, and Claude Cowork. But they don’t behave identically across all three. “Hooks and sub-agents run only in Cowork, so they appear grayed out in chat.”
So the same installed plugin is a fuller thing in Cowork than in chat. If you install the Sales plugin in web chat and wonder why part of it looks disabled, that’s the reason, not a bug.
Plugins are available to paid subscribers. They arrived as a research preview, and at launch Anthropic noted that “plugins are currently saved locally to your machine,” with better support for org-wide sharing and private plugin marketplaces flagged as coming. Worth confirming the current state of team distribution before you plan a rollout around it.
Installing one
Open the Customize menu in the left sidebar, go to the Plugins tab, click Browse plugins, and hit Install on the one you want. Anthropic’s collection is also browsable on its website and available on GitHub for developers who’d rather read the files first.
Plugin, skill, connector: which is which
Three words that get swapped around constantly:
- A skill teaches Claude a procedure. It supplies knowledge, not access.
- A connector gives Claude reach into an app. It supplies access, not knowledge.
- A plugin is the box both arrive in, alongside commands, sub-agents, and hooks.
Installing the Sales plugin doesn’t give Claude your CRM. It gives Claude your sales process, plus the connectors that would need authorizing to reach the CRM. Knowledge and access are separate problems, and a plugin just ships them together.
Different vendor, same convergence: OpenAI made the same move in the other direction, folding its app directory into a plugin directory in July 2026. Both now use “plugin” for the package and something else for the connection underneath.
No plugin supplies the trigger
Look at the eleven again and notice they’re all shaped the same way. Each one makes Claude better at a category of work once you’ve asked. Sales makes deal prep sharper. Finance makes a model faster to build. Customer support makes a triage response better.
The unattended-work gap closed in 2026: ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks and Claude Cowork both run on their own. The remaining gap is what starts them. These run on a timer, not in response to an event in your apps, so "when this happens, do that" is still outside what they do.
Cowork will do unattended work on a timer, which is real progress and more than most assistants offer. What no plugin adds is a reason to start that isn’t the clock or you. A plugin doesn’t watch your CRM, your inbox, or your ticket queue. The known Cowork limitations cover the rest of that picture.
Which means the Sales plugin, however well tuned, doesn’t do anything at 4pm on a Friday when a deal actually closes.
What runs on the event instead
Carly is built on the other half. It connects natively to roughly 260 apps, plus anything else with a public API through your own key on the integrations dashboard, and every workflow starts on an event or a schedule:
- When a deal is marked won in your CRM, create the onboarding doc, post it to the right Slack channel, and schedule the kickoff call.
- Every Monday at 8am, pull last week’s numbers from Analytics and Stripe into a Sheet and send the summary.
- When a support ticket goes four hours without a reply, escalate it, notify the owner, and log it.
Carly is free for Zapier-style workflows, with AI agents from $35/month.
Cowork plugins are the right tool for making Claude good at your kind of work. Carly is the right tool for making that work happen without anyone opening Claude. If you’re comparing more broadly, Claude Cowork alternatives has the field.
FAQ
Are Cowork plugins free? Plugins themselves are open source and free to install, but they’re available to paid Claude subscribers, so the underlying subscription is the cost. The eleven official ones are published openly and can be forked and edited.
Can I use plugins in Claude chat, or only in Cowork? Both, plus the Chat tab in Claude Desktop. The difference is that hooks and sub-agents run only in Cowork and appear grayed out in chat, so a plugin using either is partly inert outside Cowork.
What’s the difference between a plugin and a skill? A skill is one component: procedural knowledge Claude loads when relevant. A plugin is a package that can contain several skills alongside connectors, slash commands, sub-agents, and hooks. Every plugin can contain skills; a skill is not a plugin.
Can I build my own plugin? Yes, and Anthropic ships Plugin Create for exactly that. Components are file-based, so the practical path is usually forking one of the official plugins and rewriting the parts that don’t match how you work.
Can a Cowork plugin react to something happening in one of my apps? No. Plugins configure how Claude works when you ask it to do something, and Cowork’s unattended work runs on a timer rather than on an event. For work that starts the moment a record changes, you need an automation layer such as Carly.
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