The Best AI Agent Skills Marketplaces in 2026 — Honest Comparison

The agent skills ecosystem grew from one registry in December 2025 to eight major marketplaces by Q2 2026. This growth created an obvious problem: developers now spend more time comparing marketplaces than they spend finding skills.

This guide cuts through that. Every major AI agent skills marketplace compared on the five things that actually matter: catalog size, curation, security review, creator payments, and MCP support.

The current marketplace landscape

There are eight marketplaces worth knowing about in April 2026. Each is built on a different assumption about what developers want.

Skills.sh — Vercel-backed, launched January 2026. Positioned as the npm-style package manager for skills. Install with npx skills add <name>. The primary draw is the one-command CLI installer that works across Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, and OpenClaw. Community-driven, no formal review. Quality varies.

SkillsMP — Indexes 800,000+ skills scraped from public GitHub repositories. Large catalog, minimal curation. Filters skills with at least 2 GitHub stars. Good for discovery but every skill requires your own audit before installing.

LobeHub — 169K+ skills aggregated alongside LobeHub's broader AI tooling. LobeHub-focused ecosystem, so skills work best if you're already in that stack. Web UI is polished, developer experience is good.

ClaudeSkills.info — 658+ free skills, community-contributed. No paid tier, no subscriptions. Includes official Anthropic skills (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, frontend design, MCP builder) plus community submissions. Good starting point for beginners who want free skills only.

MCP Market — Primarily an MCP server directory that has added skill discovery. Useful if you're looking for skills that connect to MCP servers specifically (web scraping, database access, cloud APIs).

Anthropic official directory — Small, manually curated collection from Anthropic. Ships with Claude Code. Limited but every skill is verified by Anthropic.

Claude Code plugin marketplaces — 2,500+ GitHub-based marketplaces registered at claudemarketplaces.com. Individual creators or teams publish their own marketplace repos. Quality ranges from excellent (Trail of Bits, Vercel Labs) to abandoned.

Agensi — What we built. Curated, security-scanned marketplace with creator payments and MCP live access. Smaller catalog than the scrapers, but every skill is reviewed before listing.

Comparison table

What the numbers hide

Catalog size is the most misleading metric in this category. SkillsMP's 800,000 number sounds impressive until you realize it's indexed public GitHub repos with no quality filter beyond "has 2 stars." A lot of those skills are abandoned experiments, half-finished tests, or duplicates.

The catalog size that actually matters is how many skills work well enough that other developers use them repeatedly. On every marketplace, that number is much smaller than the top-line catalog count.

This matters for a specific reason: a security audit of 22,511 skills across skills.sh, ClawHub, GitHub, and Tessl found 140,963 issues. That's 6.3 issues per skill on average. Some were benign (formatting, missing fields), but Snyk's ToxicSkills research found prompt injection in 36% of skills tested.

Large catalogs compound this problem. The more skills on a platform with no review, the higher the odds your agent pulls down something it shouldn't.

How to choose based on what you're actually doing

If you want the biggest catalog for free browsing: Skills.sh or SkillsMP. Accept that you need to audit every skill yourself before installing.

If you want free, community-vetted skills for Claude Code specifically: ClaudeSkills.info covers most common workflows and the skills are generally higher quality than the scraped catalogs.

If you want MCP servers alongside skills: MCP Market has the best integration between MCP servers and skills that use them.

If you want skills that Anthropic has personally reviewed: Use the official directory baked into Claude Code. Small but trusted.

If you want security-reviewed, paid skills with creator accountability: Agensi. Every skill is scanned against an 8-point checklist (prompt injection, data exfiltration, secret detection, dangerous commands, obfuscation, external fetches, credential access, privilege escalation) before it goes live. Creators earn 80% of sales, so there's an incentive to publish skills that actually work. Skills are accessed via one-time purchase or through Agensi Pro, which exposes the full catalog over MCP for $9/month. The MCP tier means your agent discovers, evaluates, and loads skills automatically without downloads.

The MCP access shift

The biggest change in the marketplace category in 2026 isn't catalog size. It's how skills are delivered.

Most marketplaces still work like npm: you install, the skill lives on your disk, you update manually. This is fine for stable workflows but creates maintenance overhead. Every time a skill updates, you re-download. Every time a new skill is published, you miss it unless you check.

MCP-based access changes that. Your agent connects to a marketplace's MCP server once, and from then on it can search the full live catalog, load skills on demand, and automatically see new skills as they publish. No downloads, no version management, no manual updates.

Agensi Pro is currently the only marketplace running this model end-to-end with creator payments attached. A few others have announced MCP support but not shipped it as of April 2026.

We think this becomes the default within 12 months. Download-based skill distribution still works, but the operational overhead gets heavy once you pass 20 or 30 installed skills. MCP-based access scales to thousands without any local footprint.

What to watch in the next six months

Three things are likely to change the marketplace landscape by Q4 2026.

Payments become table stakes. Only one major marketplace offers creator payments today. This will not last. Expect at least two of the current free-only platforms to add paid tiers, probably with similar revenue splits (70–80% to creators).

Security scanning becomes a selling point. After ToxicSkills and ClawHavoc, buyers now ask about security review before installing. Marketplaces without automated scanning will lose ground to those that have it.

Consolidation starts. Eight major marketplaces is too many for a category this size. Expect acquisitions, shutdowns, and cross-listings to reduce the active set to three or four dominant platforms within a year.

Bottom line

For most developers in April 2026, the right strategy is to use two marketplaces: one for free browsing (ClaudeSkills.info or skills.sh) and one for vetted paid skills (Agensi). Skip the massive scraped catalogs unless you have a specific skill you're looking for and the time to audit it yourself.

The category is going to look very different by the end of 2026. What matters today is trust, curation, and whether the marketplace pays its creators. By next year, MCP-based access will matter as much as any of those.

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Agensi is a curated marketplace for SKILL.md skills. Every skill is security-scanned before listing, creators keep 80% of revenue, and Pro subscribers get live MCP access to the full catalog for $9/month. Browse skills or learn how the MCP integration works.