When Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in January 2026, it already felt like a significant leap forward for AI-assisted work. Then, on January 30, 2026, they added something that changed the conversation entirely: plugins.
The reaction was immediate. Industry analysts dubbed it the “SaaSpocalypse” — a signal that AI was no longer just assisting with business workflows but beginning to replace the specialized SaaS tools built around them. Shares of legal research platforms dropped roughly 14–16% in the days following the announcement. The reason was simple: Cowork plugins don’t just help you do your job. With the right plugin installed, Claude effectively becomes a specialist in your job.
This guide walks you through every one of the 11 official open-source plugins Anthropic has built and open-sourced, explains how each one works in practice, and then shows you exactly how to build a custom plugin from scratch using the Plugin Creator tool — no coding required.
What Are Cowork Plugins, Exactly?
Before diving into the individual plugins, it’s worth understanding what a plugin actually is — because it’s more than just a preset or a template.
Each plugin is a modular package that bundles four types of components together:
Skills are the domain knowledge Claude draws on automatically. Think of them as detailed briefing documents that teach Claude how a particular field works — its best practices, standard workflows, common terminology, and the step-by-step logic behind routine tasks. When a relevant skill exists, Claude reads it before executing anything in that domain. You don’t trigger it manually; Claude reaches for it on its own when it determines the context warrants it.
Slash commands are explicit actions you invoke yourself. Type /sales:call-prep and Claude runs a complete pre-call research and preparation workflow. Type /data:write-query and it generates a database query based on what you’re trying to find out. Commands are precise, predictable, and repeatable — useful for any high-frequency task you want to standardize across your workflow.
Connectors link Claude to your external tools. A productivity plugin connects to Slack, Notion, Asana, Jira, or Microsoft 365. A finance plugin connects to your financial data sources. Rather than Claude working only with local files, connectors extend its reach into the apps your team already uses every day.
Sub-agents let Claude spin up specialized workers to handle parallel tasks within a larger workflow. A complex research synthesis might have one sub-agent reviewing documents while another structures the outline and a third handles citation tracking — all coordinating to deliver the finished product faster.
All of this is file-based, built on Markdown and JSON. That means plugins are easy to read, edit, and share. You don’t need to understand code to customize one — and with the Plugin Creator, you don’t even need to understand the file structure to build one from scratch.
The 11 official plugins are free, open-source, and available on GitHub at anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins. Using them requires any paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise) and the Claude Desktop app.
The 11 Official Plugins, One by One
1. Productivity
The Productivity plugin is the broadest of the 11 and arguably the one with the widest appeal. Its purpose is to manage tasks, calendars, daily workflows, and personal context so you spend less time repeating yourself and more time doing the actual work.
It connects to the tools most knowledge workers already live in: Slack, Notion, Asana, Linear, Jira, Monday, ClickUp, and Microsoft 365. Once installed and connected, Claude can pull your open tasks from Asana, check your calendar for the week, review your Notion notes from last week’s project, and synthesize all of that into a daily priorities briefing — automatically, every morning if you want.
Where the Productivity plugin really earns its keep is in eliminating the overhead between tools. Instead of manually checking three or four apps and reconciling what’s due, what’s changed, and what needs your attention, you describe what you want and Claude assembles the picture. It’s a practical answer to the fragmentation that makes most people’s workdays feel busier than they actually are.
2. Enterprise Search
The Enterprise Search plugin addresses one of the most persistent frustrations in large organizations: information exists, but finding it is painful. Documents are buried in shared drives, conversations are scattered across Slack threads, and tribal knowledge lives exclusively in someone’s memory.
This plugin connects Claude to your company’s tools and document repositories, making it possible to ask natural-language questions and get relevant results from across your entire knowledge base. Where did we land on the Q3 pricing discussion? What was the conclusion from last month’s product review? Who owns the onboarding process for enterprise accounts? Questions like these — which normally mean tracking down the right person or digging through search results — become answerable in seconds.
For larger teams and enterprises, this is arguably the highest-ROI plugin in the collection, because it puts institutional knowledge within reach for everyone on the team, not just the people who’ve been around long enough to know where things are.
3. Sales
The Sales plugin is built around the reality that most salespeople spend too much of their time on research, preparation, and follow-up — and not enough time in actual selling conversations.
The plugin teaches Claude the mechanics of a solid sales process: how to research a prospect, how to frame a discovery conversation, how to prep for a specific call based on the account’s history and context, and how to write high-quality follow-up communications that move deals forward.
In practice, the /sales:call-prep command is a standout. Point Claude at a company name and your CRM data for that account, trigger the command, and you get a comprehensive pre-call briefing: company background, recent news, key contacts, open deal context, conversation angles, and suggested questions. The kind of prep that used to take 30–45 minutes of manual research happens in under two minutes.
The plugin can also connect to your CRM directly, pulling deal history and account context without requiring you to manually provide the information each time. As you train it on your company’s specific sales process — your qualification criteria, your competitive positioning, your follow-up cadence — it becomes an increasingly precise reflection of how your team actually sells.
4. Finance
The Finance plugin brings analytical capability to anyone who works with financial data, without requiring them to be an Excel power user or a financial modeling expert.
Its core capabilities include analyzing financial statements, building and modifying models, tracking key metrics, and generating narrative summaries that explain what the numbers actually mean. The /finance:analyze command can process a P&L or balance sheet and return a structured analysis with trend observations, ratio calculations, and plain-language commentary — the kind of output a junior analyst might spend hours producing.
For finance professionals, the plugin’s value is in compression: it handles the mechanical work of building out model structures, formatting tables, and drafting the summary sections, freeing up time for the judgment-intensive work that actually requires expertise. For non-finance professionals who need to understand financial data — founders reviewing their own metrics, department heads managing budgets, investors doing due diligence — it provides fluency without requiring deep technical knowledge.
5. Legal
The Legal plugin generated the most industry attention at launch, and for good reason. It turns Claude into a capable document reviewer and legal workflow assistant — at a fraction of the cost of traditional legal research platforms.
The plugin can review contracts and flag potential risks, cross-reference documents against compliance checklists, summarize lengthy legal filings in plain language, track key terms and obligations across a set of agreements, and draft standard legal communications from templates. The /legal:review-contract command runs a structured review of an uploaded agreement, surfacing unusual clauses, missing standard protections, and potential liability exposure in a prioritized format.
One important note the plugin itself includes: it’s a support tool, not a replacement for qualified legal counsel. It accelerates review, surfaces issues worth examining, and handles the mechanical parts of document analysis — but final legal decisions must always involve a professional with appropriate expertise and licensure. Used correctly, it makes legal work faster and more thorough; it doesn’t make it autonomous.
6. Marketing
The Marketing plugin covers the full content and campaign lifecycle — from ideation through creation, distribution planning, and performance tracking. It’s the most versatile of the 11 plugins for content-heavy roles, and for many users, it’s the most frequently used.
Skills within the plugin cover SEO fundamentals, copywriting best practices, content strategy, campaign planning frameworks, and audience targeting. The /marketing:seo-audit command analyzes a page or piece of content against SEO best practices and returns a prioritized list of improvements. Other commands handle content calendar planning, campaign brief generation, and social copy drafts optimized for specific platforms.
What makes the Marketing plugin particularly powerful is the combination of Claude’s writing ability with structured workflow logic. You’re not just getting AI-generated copy; you’re getting copy produced according to a defined content strategy, calibrated to your brand voice (once you’ve added that context), and organized into production-ready formats.
7. Customer Support
The Customer Support plugin is designed to help support teams handle volume without sacrificing quality — and to help individual agents produce more consistent, professional responses across a higher number of tickets.
Its skills cover issue triage, response drafting, escalation logic, and solution lookup. Claude can read an incoming support ticket, identify the issue category, locate the relevant resolution from a connected knowledge base, and draft a response — all in one pass. For common issues with established resolutions, this compresses the time from ticket open to response dramatically.
The plugin also handles escalation logic: identifying tickets that indicate high customer frustration, complex technical issues, or potential churn risk, and flagging them for human review with a structured summary rather than routing them through the standard queue. For support leaders, this means agents can focus their attention where judgment matters most, rather than on the mechanical work of drafting standard responses.
8. Data
The Data plugin extends Cowork’s spreadsheet capabilities into proper data analysis territory — including database querying, dataset visualization, and statistical interpretation.
The /data:write-query command lets you describe what you want to know in plain language, and Claude writes the SQL or query logic to retrieve it. If you have a connected database or data warehouse, this makes structured data accessible to anyone on your team, not just analysts who know how to write queries.
For local data work, the plugin’s skills cover exploratory analysis, chart and visualization generation, data cleaning, and summary reporting. A dataset that arrives messy and inconsistent can be cleaned, standardized, and analyzed in a single Cowork session — with a written summary of findings delivered alongside the cleaned spreadsheet.
9. Product Management
The Product Management plugin is built for the documentation and planning overhead that consumes a significant chunk of every PM’s week: writing specs, maintaining roadmaps, synthesizing user research, and communicating priorities across teams.
Skills cover product requirements documents, user story writing, prioritization frameworks, and stakeholder communication. Commands like /pm:write-prd take a high-level feature description and produce a structured product requirements document — with background, objectives, user stories, success metrics, and open questions — in a format ready for engineering review.
The plugin is particularly useful for translating messy inputs — customer feedback, research notes, Slack discussions about a feature — into clean, structured product documentation. That translation work is time-consuming and mentally draining; the plugin handles it in minutes.
10. Biology Research
The Biology Research plugin is the most specialized of the 11, purpose-built for researchers in life sciences who need to work across scientific literature, experimental data, and research planning.
Its skills cover literature search strategies, research design frameworks, experimental protocol review, and scientific writing conventions. Commands help with PubMed searches, data interpretation, and drafting sections of research papers or grant applications.
For biology researchers, this plugin addresses a genuine pain point: the volume of relevant literature is enormous, synthesizing it is slow, and writing up findings takes time that could be better spent on the science itself. The plugin handles the synthesis and writing scaffolding, giving researchers a faster path from raw data to communicable findings.
11. Plugin Create / Customize
The eleventh plugin is the meta-plugin — the one that lets you build all the others. Plugin Create is Anthropic’s answer to the question every power user eventually asks: “This is great, but how do I make it work exactly the way I need it to?”
It deserves its own extended discussion below.
Building Custom Plugins with Plugin Creator
Plugin Create is what separates Cowork from a sophisticated but fixed tool and makes it an genuinely extensible platform. With it, you can build a plugin for any role, workflow, or company-specific process that the 11 official plugins don’t cover — and you can do it without writing a single line of code.
How Plugin Creator Works
When you trigger Plugin Create in Cowork, Claude walks you through a structured conversation to understand what you’re trying to build. It asks about your role, the tasks you want to automate or standardize, the tools you want to connect, and the workflows that matter most. Based on your answers, it generates the file structure, skill documents, and slash command definitions for a fully functional plugin.
The resulting plugin follows the same architecture as the 11 official ones: a plugin.json manifest, skill files in Markdown, command files, and connector configuration. Everything is human-readable, so you can review what Claude built, make manual edits, and continue refining through conversation.
A Practical Example
Imagine you’re a freelance consultant who does regular client check-ins. You want a plugin that pulls active project statuses from your Notion workspace, reviews notes from recent meetings in a client folder, drafts a status update for each active client using your communication style, and drops the drafts into a folder ready for review.
Describe that workflow to Plugin Create, answer its follow-up questions, and it builds you a plugin with a /clients:send-updates command that does exactly that. You run the command, Claude handles the multi-step workflow, and you review the finished drafts rather than writing each one from scratch. That’s a workflow that might have taken two hours done manually; with the plugin in place, it takes ten minutes.
The Structure Behind Every Plugin
Understanding how plugins are built helps you customize them more effectively, even if you’re not building from scratch. The key files in any plugin are the skill documents in the skills/ folder. These are plain Markdown files that describe how Claude should approach a given task — what to consider, what best practices to follow, what format to use for outputs. Editing them is as simple as opening a text editor.
The most powerful customization is making skill files specific to your organization. Adding your company’s terminology to the sales plugin so Claude uses your internal deal stages instead of generic ones. Updating the marketing plugin’s content style guide with your brand voice. Inserting your firm’s contract review checklist into the legal plugin’s review skill. These additions don’t require a technical background — they just require knowing your business well enough to write down how things are done.
Sharing and Distributing Plugins
Currently, plugins are saved locally on your machine. To share a custom plugin with your team, you export it as a ZIP file and send it for manual installation on each team member’s device. Anthropic has announced that organization-wide plugin provisioning is coming in a future update — which will make deploying a custom plugin across an entire team or company a one-step process for admins.
For developers and teams comfortable with GitHub, the official plugin repository is available at anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning you can fork it, modify it, and distribute your own versions freely.
Getting the Most Out of Plugins: A Few Practical Tips
Install only the plugins you’ll actually use. Each plugin adds skills that Claude draws on automatically in relevant contexts. If you install all 11 but only use three of them regularly, you risk Claude occasionally invoking context from a domain you’re not working in. Start with the two or three plugins most relevant to your work and expand from there.
Customize before you rely on them. The official plugins are well-built starting points, but they’re generic by design. Spending 30 minutes adding your company’s tools, terminology, and process specifics to the skill files pays dividends across every session afterward.
Use the Customize button. Every installed plugin has a Customize option in Cowork that launches a guided conversation where Claude helps you adapt the plugin to your specific needs. It’s the fastest path from “installed” to “working the way I actually need it to.”
Think about plugins as a team investment. The more context your team adds to shared plugins — about how your sales process works, what your brand voice is, how your legal review checklist is structured — the more consistent and useful Claude’s outputs become for everyone. As Anthropic puts it, the rich context you share gets baked into every relevant interaction, so leaders spend less time enforcing processes and more time improving them.
Cowork plugins mark a meaningful shift in what AI agents can mean for professional work. When Claude knows your domain, speaks your company’s language, and automates the mechanical parts of your most frequent workflows, it stops being a tool you reach for occasionally and starts being infrastructure for how your work gets done.
Want to keep up with the latest in AI tools, practical guides, and real-world applications for modern work? Visit tooltechsavvy.com for more in-depth articles on Claude, AI productivity, and the technology shaping how we work. There’s always something worth reading over there.
