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

Search for Claude Marketplace and you get three different products wearing the same name, only one of which is the developer feature most people are after. If you have started Claude Code interactively even once, you already have that one. Anthropic adds the official plugin marketplace, claude-plugins-official, automatically the first time the tool runs. 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, and nothing on the first page of results untangles it. This guide sorts out which Claude Marketplace is which. Then it covers the part the documentation buries: 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 first interactive start. Nothing to install.
• Three things share the name: the enterprise Claude Marketplace, Claude Code plugin marketplaces, and a separate AWS listing. Only the middle one is this feature.
• Adding takes one line: /plugin marketplace add owner/repo works for GitHub, and git URLs, local folders and remote JSON files all work too.
• Removing is destructive: removing a marketplace uninstalls every plugin you installed from it.
• Anthropic's own warning is blunt: plugins "can execute arbitrary code on your machine with your user privileges".

What Is a Claude Code Plugin Marketplace?

Anthropic's own definition is short. A plugin marketplace is a catalog that lets you distribute plugins to others, and marketplaces provide centralized discovery, version tracking, automatic updates, and support for multiple source types including git repositories and local paths.

In practice it is a git repository with one extra file in it. That file, .claude-plugin/marketplace.json, lists the plugins the repository offers and where each one lives. 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

These three words 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, 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

This is the part no competing page explains, and it is the reason search results for the term are such a mess. Anthropic uses the word for at least three unrelated products, and a fourth listing on AWS adds to the pile.

If you arrived here after reading a September 2026 headline about Anthropic launching a marketplace, that was the first row, and it has nothing to do with your terminal. It is a sales catalog that listed fifteen products when we checked it on 24 September 2026, organised under headings like Code, Data, Legal, Financial Services and Security. You cannot add it to Claude Code and it will not give you plugins.

You Probably Already Have a Claude Marketplace Installed

Anthropic's documentation states that Claude Code adds the official Anthropic marketplace, claude-plugins-official, automatically the first time you start it interactively. 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 view the catalog in a browser at Anthropic's public plugin catalog. Installing from it uses the marketplace name as a suffix:

/plugin install github@claude-plugins-official

If the Official Marketplace Is Missing

It can fail to arrive if your network blocked the download or a marketplace policy blocked an earlier attempt. 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, The plugin is not found in the marketplace, means the marketplace is fine and the plugin name is wrong.

When the /plugin Command Does Not Exist

The /plugin panel is a terminal CLI feature. If Claude replies that the command is not available in your environment, you are not in the CLI, and there are three other routes. In the Claude desktop app you use the plugin browser. In the VS Code extension you install from the Manage plugins dialog. In cloud sessions you enable the plugin for your account so Claude Code loads it as a synced plugin.

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

Every route uses the 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:

/plugin marketplace add owner/repo

From Another Git Host

GitLab, Bitbucket and self-hosted servers all work. Pass the full repository URL, 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

Useful while you are building your own. Point at the directory that contains the .claude-plugin folder, or at a marketplace file directly:

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

From a Remote URL

You can add a marketplace file served over HTTPS directly. Anthropic notes that URL-based marketplaces have some limitations compared to git-based ones, so 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, and it requires Claude Code v2.1.275 or later:

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

Which Claude Code Plugin Marketplaces Are Worth Adding

Directory sites rank plugins by install count and GitHub stars, which measures popularity rather than judgement. Three marketplaces are worth knowing by name, and the differences between them are about who vouches for the contents.

Those counts come from reading each marketplace's own marketplace.json on 24 September 2026, not from a directory site. The gap between them is the whole story: the official catalog is roughly an eighth the size of the community one, because one is curated and the other is screened.

One nuance that catches people out: the in-app submission forms add plugins to the community marketplace, not the official one. A plugin being "in the marketplace" therefore says very different things depending on which marketplace is meant. Installs from the community catalog use @claude-community as the suffix, not the repository name, because the catalog declares itself under that shorter name.

Beyond these, a marketplace 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

Run /plugin and open the Marketplaces tab for the interactive view, or use the 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 any plugins you installed from it. 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

Auto-Update Defaults Are Not Uniform

This trips up teams. The official marketplace, most other official Anthropic marketplaces and marketplaces added from your account have auto-update enabled by default. Other third-party marketplaces and local development marketplaces have it disabled by default. So a plugin you installed from a colleague's repository will quietly go stale unless you enable updates or refresh it yourself.

The behaviour is a reasonable default 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. 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"
    }
  ]
}

Push it to GitHub and 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 by adding extraKnownMarketplaces to a project's .claude/settings.json, so the marketplace registers once a team member trusts the repository folder.

Three Gotchas That Are Easy to Hit

Reserved names. Seventeen marketplace names are reserved for Anthropic, including 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 coming 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. The renames field needs v2.1.193 or later, metadata.pluginRoot needs v2.1.239, adding a marketplace from your account needs v2.1.273, and the --marketplace install flag needs v2.1.275. 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?

Anthropic does not soften this. Its documentation states that plugins and marketplaces are highly trusted components that can execute arbitrary code on your machine with your user privileges. It adds that you should only install plugins and add marketplaces from sources you trust. Elsewhere it adds that Anthropic does not control what MCP servers, files, or other software are included in plugins and cannot verify that they work as intended.

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. The practical checks are the ordinary ones. Read the plugin's source, 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 is 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 restrict which marketplaces users are allowed to add through managed settings.

Is Any of This Worth the Setup?

For most people the honest answer is that 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. None of it costs anything on top of your existing plan, which is worth knowing if you are still weighing what Claude Code actually costs or whether the free tier covers your usage. What none of it touches is everything that happens outside the terminal, which is where a multi-model app like Fello AI covers the other half of the desk.

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