skills.sh vs Claude Code plugins
Two ways to distribute skills without copying anything by hand. One installs a skill from a public registry, the other a bundle from a marketplace. They answer different questions.
skills.sh wins on discovery and reach: a public catalog, one command, around twenty agents. Plugins win on coherence and control: a complete bundle, and an organization that can push its own marketplace. Neither tells you what actually runs on the machines, and neither puts a review step before a new version applies.
Last updated: August 30, 2026
At a glance
| Criterion | skills.sh | Claude Code plugins | Hubskillz |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit installed | A skill: one SKILL.md folder | A bundle: skills, commands, subagents, hooks, MCP | A skill, in its approved version |
| Discovery | A public registry, searched by keyword | An official, community or private marketplace, inside /plugin | Your organization’s directory |
| Command | npx skills add owner/repo | /plugin marketplace add, then /plugin install | hubskillz sync --all |
| Agents supported | Around twenty, from Cursor to Codex, Copilot and Windsurf | Claude Code | Claude Code through the CLI, claude.ai through a ZIP export |
| Version | Frozen at the content of the day you installed | One version per bundle, bumped by the author | One version per skill, with its history |
| Updates | npx skills update, run by hand | Marketplace auto-update, on or off | After a maintainer reads the diff and approves |
| Team control | None: everyone installs what they like | Marketplaces and enabled plugins, set by the repo or the organization | Roles, review, required and recommended lists per team |
| Machine state | Not tracked | Never reported back | Synced, outdated, customized or missing, per machine and per project |
| Skills written in house | A separate Git repo, private or public | A private marketplace to create and maintain | The same directory, with the same review |
| Price | Free | Free | Free for one person. Team: 9 € per person per month, opening soon |
What both of them solve
Both kill the copy and paste. A useful skill written elsewhere reaches your machine in one command, without a zip file in a Slack thread. That is the day one problem, and both settle it.
Where they diverge
The unit. skills.sh ships one skill, so you pick precisely. A plugin ships a coherent set: the skill, the command that calls it, the hook that triggers it and the MCP server it depends on. Fixing one sentence in a skill bumps the version of the whole bundle.
The reach. skills.sh installs for around twenty agents: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot and the rest. Plugins are a Claude Code mechanism.
The control. On skills.sh, installing is a personal choice. With plugins, a repo declares its marketplaces in .claude/settings.json and a Team or Enterprise organization pre-enables plugins for its members.
Which one to pick
Take skills.sh to discover and try, especially if your team works across several agents. It is the shortest path between a skill that exists and your machine.
Take plugins to ship a complete internal tool to developers who live inside Claude Code, or when your organization has to set what is available.
The third option
Both answer “how does it reach my machine”. Neither answers “who has it, in which version, and who reviewed the change”. That is the question Hubskillz handles.
A skill installed from skills.sh is pinned at its installed version. An upstream update becomes a draft carrying the diff and the Snyk and Socket audits, and nothing moves until a maintainer approves. The CLI then reports, machine by machine and project by project, what is synced, outdated, customized or missing.
Plugins keep shipping the team’s commands, hooks and MCP servers alongside: the two are not fighting over the same ground.
Frequently asked questions
Can we use both at once?
Yes, and many teams do. A skill installed from skills.sh lives in ~/.claude/skills, a plugin skill arrives under the plugin name. They coexist, at the risk of holding the same skill twice under two names.
Which one should a team standardize on?
The version matters more than the channel. Pick whichever channel suits you, then fix one approved version per skill and check what the machines actually load. That is exactly what Hubskillz does, on top of either one.
Next steps
Other comparisons
- A Git repo of skills, or HubskillzVersion the skills in a repo, copy them onto each machine by hand.
- Claude Code plugins, or HubskillzBundle the skills into a plugin, let everyone install it from a marketplace.
- A skills.sh alternative, or a companionInstall public skills from a registry, one machine at a time.
- Hubskillz alternatives