Best Claude Code Plugins & Marketplaces (2026)

If you’ve installed Claude Code and stopped there, you’re leaving most of its range on the table. Plugins are how you extend it — a language server that gives it real type-checking, a docs feed that stops it citing dead APIs, a memory layer that survives between sessions. This is a working shortlist of the best Claude Code plugins worth installing in 2026, where to get them, and — because it matters and most roundups skip it — the license on each one.

Last updated: July 23, 2026.

How Claude Code plugins and marketplaces work

A plugin is a package. It bundles some mix of slash commands, subagents, hooks, MCP servers, and skills into one installable unit, so you switch on a whole workflow instead of wiring the pieces up by hand. Claude Code plugins launched on October 9, 2025, and the ecosystem around them has grown fast since. If you want the full breakdown of what’s inside a plugin and how it differs from a skill or an MCP server, we covered that in What Are Claude Plugins? — this post is the follow-up roundup it promised.

Two commands do almost everything. Run /plugin on its own to open the plugin manager, browse what’s available, and install with a keystroke. To pull in a marketplace that isn’t loaded yet, run /plugin marketplace add <owner>/<repo> — a marketplace is just a git repo — then /plugin install <name>@<marketplace>. If you don’t see the /plugin command at all, update Claude Code; it’s on older builds that it goes missing.

One correction worth making up front, because Google’s AI answer gets it wrong: a plugin is not the same thing as an MCP server. An MCP server is one of the things a plugin can carry. Some of the picks below are pure MCP servers distributed as plugins; others bundle skills, hooks, or a language server instead. The label on the tin is “plugin”; what’s inside varies.

Best Claude Code plugins at a glance

Here’s the shortlist with the one detail every other list drops — the license — so you know what you’re actually installing before you run it.

Official plugins worth installing first

The safest starting point is Anthropic’s own marketplace, anthropics/claude-plugins-official — a curated, Anthropic-managed directory that lists more than 200 plugins as of July 2026, roughly twenty of them built by Anthropic directly. Add it with /plugin marketplace add anthropics/claude-plugins-official.

security-guidance earns the first slot for most people. It works close to the edit loop, watching for the kinds of mistakes that turn into vulnerabilities — leaked secrets, unsafe input handling, sketchy shell calls — and flags them while you’re still writing rather than at review time. If you install one official plugin, make it this one.

code-review is the companion to it. Point it at a diff and it reads the change the way a careful teammate would, calling out logic gaps and regressions before the PR goes up. It’s a subagent, so it runs its pass without derailing your main session.

TypeScript LSP (one of the official language-server plugins) is the fix for Claude guessing at types. It wires a real Language Server Protocol connection — the same tech behind VS Code’s code intelligence — into Claude Code, so the model can jump to definitions, find references, and see type errors immediately after an edit instead of inferring and hoping. There are sibling language servers for other stacks; grab the one that matches yours.

Playwright is the pick when your work touches the browser. It gives Claude Code driving control of a real browser for end-to-end tests and UI automation across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Playwright itself is Microsoft’s open-source framework (Apache-2.0); the plugin is the official integration that hands Claude the wheel.

Community plugins that pull their weight

Outside Anthropic’s marketplace, four community plugins come up again and again — and unlike a lot of the hype list, these are ones you can read before you trust.

Context7 (upstash/context7, MIT) solves the stalest problem in AI coding: outdated documentation. It injects up-to-date, version-specific docs for whatever library you’re using straight into Claude’s context, so you stop getting confidently wrong API calls from a framework that changed six months ago. It works without an API key at basic rate limits, and it’s one of the most-installed MCP servers going for a reason.

Firecrawl (firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server, MIT) is web context done reliably. When Claude needs to read a page, crawl a site, or search the live web as part of a task, Firecrawl handles the scraping and returns clean, structured content instead of raw HTML soup. The official MCP server is MIT-licensed; note that Firecrawl’s core API repo carries a different (AGPL) license, so if you self-host the whole stack, check that separately.

claude-mem (thedotmack/claude-mem, Apache-2.0) gives Claude memory that outlives a single session. It captures what happened during a session, compresses it, and feeds the relevant bits back into future ones — so your preferences, decisions, and project context carry over instead of getting re-explained every morning. It works with Claude Code and several other agents.

Superpowers (obra/superpowers, MIT) is the heavyweight of the set: an agentic skills framework from Jesse Vincent that bundles a large, opinionated library of development skills and a methodology to go with them. It ships its own marketplace (obra/superpowers-marketplace), so it’s also a good entry point if you want to browse curated community work rather than install one thing at a time.

Best Claude Code plugin marketplaces

A marketplace is any git repo with a marketplace.json in it, which is why there are so many. These are the ones worth knowing.

• anthropics/claude-plugins-official — the official, Anthropic-managed directory. Curated, vetted, and where you should look first. Add it and you have 200+ plugins one command away.
• obra/superpowers-marketplace — a well-kept curated marketplace built around the Superpowers ecosystem; broader than just Superpowers itself.
• Claude Code Templates (aitmpl.com) — a browsable directory indexing 20+ plugin marketplaces, skill collections, and component registries on GitHub. Good for discovery when you don’t know what you’re looking for yet.
• BuildWithClaude (buildwithclaude.com) — another searchable web directory of community plugins, sortable by job.
• jeremylongshore/claude-code-plugins-plus-skills — a large community marketplace (hundreds of plugins and thousands of skills) backed by the ccpi CLI package manager, for people who want to manage installs from the terminal.
• quemsah/awesome-claude-plugins — an awesome-list style index of top plugin repos, handy as a reading list rather than an installer.

The two Anthropic marketplaces are the ones I’d trust by default. The rest are useful for discovery, but treat anything you find through them the way you’d treat any code off the internet — which brings us to the part most listicles skip.

How to vet a plugin before you install it

Plugins can bundle local MCP servers that run on your machine with the same permissions as any program you launch. That’s real access, and it’s worth granting on purpose rather than by reflex. A quick checklist before you enable a community plugin:

1. Open the repo and read it. A plugin is a folder with a manifest — .claude-plugin/plugin.json plus its components. You can see exactly what it ships. If you can’t find the source, don’t install it.
2. Check for a LICENSE file. No license means all-rights-reserved, not “free.” Prefer MIT, Apache-2.0, or BSD, and note the license (this post does, for every pick).
3. Look at what MCP servers it configures. Anything in a .mcp.json will run locally. Confirm you recognize it and want it running.
4. Favor curated marketplaces for anything you can’t fully vet. The official Anthropic directory exists so you don’t have to audit everything yourself.
5. On Enterprise plans, let admins set the guardrails. Admins can restrict which plugins are installable or switch off local MCP servers entirely.

None of this is heavy — it’s five minutes — and the folder-and-manifest structure is what makes it possible at all. You can read a Claude Code plugin before you trust it, so do.

Which plugins should you actually install?

If you write TypeScript or JavaScript and want one sensible starter set: security-guidance and code-review from the official marketplace, TypeScript LSP so Claude stops guessing types, and Context7 so it stops citing dead docs. Add claude-mem if you’re tired of re-explaining your project every session, Playwright if your work hits the browser, and Firecrawl if tasks need live web content. That covers the jobs the best Claude Code plugins are genuinely good at without turning your setup into a junk drawer.

For the conceptual groundwork — what a plugin actually bundles, and how skills and MCP servers fit inside — start with What Are Claude Plugins?, then the deeper pieces on Claude Skills and what an MCP server is.

FAQ

What are the best Claude Code plugins right now?
For most developers: security-guidance and code-review from Anthropic’s official marketplace, a language-server plugin like TypeScript LSP, and Context7 for live documentation. Add claude-mem for cross-session memory, Playwright for browser testing, and Firecrawl for web context. Start with the official ones and add community plugins as you hit specific needs.

Are Claude Code plugins free?
The plugin system and the Anthropic-built official plugins are free to install; you need a paid Claude Code plan to use Claude Code itself. Community plugins set their own terms — most of the ones here are MIT or Apache-2.0 — so check each project’s license before you rely on it.

How do I add a Claude Code plugin marketplace?
Run /plugin marketplace add <owner>/<repo> with the marketplace’s GitHub path — for example /plugin marketplace add anthropics/claude-plugins-official. Then run /plugin to browse it or /plugin install <name>@<marketplace> to install a specific plugin.

Where can I find Claude Code plugins on GitHub?
The official directory is anthropics/claude-plugins-official. Community indexes include quemsah/awesome-claude-plugins, jeremylongshore/claude-code-plugins-plus-skills, and web directories like aitmpl.com and buildwithclaude.com.

What’s the difference between a Claude Code plugin and a skill?
A skill is a single Markdown instruction file that teaches Claude one method. A plugin is a package that can hold many skills, plus MCP servers, hooks, subagents, and slash commands. You can use a skill without a plugin; the plugin just distributes a set of them together. Our plugins explainer goes deeper on the distinction.

Is Superpowers a good Claude Code plugin?
Superpowers (obra/superpowers, MIT) is a large agentic skills framework with its own curated marketplace. It’s worth a look if you want an opinionated, batteries-included set of development skills rather than installing one small plugin at a time — just expect more surface area than a single-purpose tool.