Claude Plugins now available in Web
Plugins bring skills and connectors together
If you've been using Claude for a while, you've probably used skills. At its simplest level, Claude can produce prompts (SKILL.md) that allow it to use the same set of instructions for repeated workflows. The best part: Claude can decide when to use them, not just the user. At higher levels of complexity, skills can manage multiple processes and workflows. These complex skills (just .zip files with some requirements and a modified .skill extension) package together folders and layers of resources, with 'progressive disclosure' allowing Claude to discover and utilize a number of different workflows at once. Skills like this are great, but they have a couple of key problems:
Skills have to be edited manually by the user or recreated entirely from scratch by Claude. That makes maintenance and enhancements a total pain.
The skills exist independently of related MCP connectors, so users have to reference connectors directly in the skill instead of natively including an allowed or suggested list.
Skills have no version control or binding to GitHub, which means there's no easy way for a large team or organization with many different contributors to maintain them.
Plugins solve those problems
Plugins are packages made to be maintained remotely and installed by users. They bundle everything a workflow needs — instructions, MCP connections, agents, hooks, background monitors, settings — into a single deployable package. You add it once. It works everywhere it's supposed to.
The difference matters more than it sounds. Skills are great for personal workflows and repeatable tasks you've built yourself. Plugins are built to be shared, versioned, and maintained. That's a meaningful shift for teams and for anyone who wants to use AI tooling that keeps up with how their business actually operates.
Anthropic and their partners have produced a number of plugins for Claude, with some of the most popular being those for Legal and for Small Business, both of which I've found useful in my work. You can also build your own plugins. But today, the Anthropic / Partner plugins are the only ones treated as first-class, maintainable packages — the custom ones you and I create still require some manual work. But in the future, plugins will be the way to securely and easily maintain and organization's workflows and processes for each team.
If you want to try it today, Claude has its own workflow on the web to help you build one. Go to Customize > See Plugins > Click the "+" > Create with Claude. Custom plugins offer a way for teams across industries — marketing, finance, consulting, legal, and more — to combine the value of skills and connectors into more easily-managed packages.
If you want to talk through what a plugin could do for your team, let's chat!
Mosaic Solutions helps small and mid-sized businesses implement AI that actually works. mosaicsolutions.tech
