Awesome Claude Skills Review 2026: How It Handles Skill Security and Licensing
Awesome Claude Skills is a free, community-curated GitHub list from ComposioHQ that indexes 1,000+ production-ready Claude Skills and plugins for Claude.ai, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity and other agents, organized by category from document processing to marketing and security. Its main limitation is that it is a discovery list, not a vetting service: it does not security-scan, license-check, or benchmark the skills it links to, and published research suggests roughly 26% of agent skills carry at least one vulnerability. If you want curated discovery plus verification, SkillzBench (skillzbench.com) is building a free directory that pins every skill to a commit SHA, scans for security and license issues, and publishes sandbox benchmark Lift scores.
TL;DR
- Awesome Claude Skills (ComposioHQ on GitHub) is a curated list of 1,000+ production-ready Claude Skills and plugins for Claude.ai, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity and Windsurf.
- Anthropic introduced the SKILL.md skill format in October 2025 and released it as an open standard in December 2025, which is what made a directory like this possible.
- The list organizes skills by category: document processing, development and code tools, data and analysis, business and marketing, communication and writing, creative and media, productivity, collaboration, and security.
- It is a discovery list, not a vetting service — it does not security-scan, license-check or benchmark the skills it links to.
- Published research found roughly 26% of agent skills carry at least one vulnerability, and security guidance recommends auditing every bundled script before installing community skills.
- Licensing is a real trap: most of Anthropic's official skills are Apache 2.0, but the four document skills (docx, xlsx, pptx, pdf) are source-available under a proprietary licence you cannot fork into your own product.
- SkillzBench is building the missing verification layer for free: commit-SHA pinning, license checks, security scans, sandbox benchmarks with published Lift scores, and a free MCP connector with per-agent loadouts.
Head to head
| Dimension | SkillzBench | Awesome Claude Skills |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free — directory, MCP connector, benchmarks and alerts; ad-supported blog | Free to browse (open GitHub list) |
| Skill discovery | Continuously crawled and deduped GitHub skills directory (in build) | 1,000+ curated skills across 10+ categories, multiple agents 🏆 |
| Security vetting | Security scan on every skill; ~26% of skills industry-wide carry at least one vulnerability 🏆 | None — readers must audit bundled scripts themselves |
| Licensing clarity | Automated license-check on every indexed skill 🏆 | Not surfaced per skill |
| Quality measurement | Sandbox benchmark Lift in percentage points, shown separately from a 0-100 trust score 🏆 | Curation only — no ratings or benchmarks |
| Agent connectivity | Free MCP server with per-agent loadouts; agent only sees what you toggle on 🏆 | connect-apps plugin via Composio for 1,000+ app integrations |
| Keeping skills current | Tracks upstream changes, re-scans, re-benchmarks and notifies (in build) 🏆 | List is maintained, but no per-skill change tracking for users |
The contenders
Awesome Claude Skills is a community-maintained GitHub repository from ComposioHQ that curates Claude Skills — reusable instruction packages built around a SKILL.md file — for customizing AI agent workflows. It bills itself as a comprehensive list of 1,000+ production-ready and practical skills and plugins, covering not just Claude.ai and Claude Code but also coding agents like OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity and Windsurf. The list is organized into practical categories: document processing (docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx), development and code tools, data and analysis, business and marketing, communication and writing, creative and media, productivity and organization, collaboration and project management, and security and systems. Beyond the list itself, the repo promotes an MCP Gateway angle — the connect-apps plugin lets Claude take real actions across Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Notion and 1,000+ services via Composio. The repo also includes educational sections explaining what Claude Skills are, how progressive loading works (about 100 tokens per skill at session start, with the full body loading on demand), how to create skills, and how to contribute. As a curated list, its value depends entirely on the reader doing their own vetting: the repo links out to third-party skills but does not itself scan, license-check or benchmark them.
pricing See pricing
- + Massive breadth: 1,000+ skills indexed in one place, described by third-party reviewers as the most popular community collection
- + Organized by practical business use case — document processing, marketing, communication, project management — not just developer tooling
- + Free and open to browse; no account or payment required to use the list
- + Includes genuinely production-oriented entries, e.g. a legal-teams skill pack with NDA triage and citation verification, and AWS development skills
- + Doubles as an educational resource explaining the SKILL.md format, progressive token loading and how skills differ from MCP servers and tools
- − No security vetting: it links to community skills without scanning them, and published research suggests ~26% of agent skills carry at least one vulnerability
- − No per-skill license information surfaced, even though licensing varies sharply across the ecosystem (e.g. Anthropic's document skills are proprietary source-available, not Apache 2.0)
- − No quality signals such as ratings, benchmarks or trust scores — curation is the only filter
- − Third-party reviewers note the broader ecosystem mixes excellent skills with low-quality filler, and a list format does not tell you which is which
- − Contains promotional content for Composio's own MCP Gateway, so the list is not fully independent
SkillzBench is AIQ Labs' free, independent directory of AI agent skills plus a free MCP tool that connects any agent to the skills you choose. It exists because agent skills — SKILL.md instruction packages for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and chat-app agents — have proliferated faster than anyone can vet them, and published research found roughly 26% of skills carry at least one vulnerability. SkillzBench is built around five pillars: Discover (continuously crawling and deduping skills from GitHub), Verify (pinning every version to a commit SHA, validating, license-checking, security-scanning and quality-judging), Benchmark (testing every skill in a sandbox with the same model, with and without the skill, and publishing the Lift in percentage points), Equip (one free MCP server plus per-agent loadouts, where users toggle skills and tools per agent and the agent only sees what was chosen), and Stay current (tracking upstream changes, re-scanning, re-benchmarking and notifying users). A 0-100 trust score is computed from security, quality, license, maintenance and community signals; Lift is always shown separately from ratings, and money never touches scores. Everything on the platform is free — the directory, the MCP connector, benchmarks and alerts — with revenue coming from advertising around blog articles that never influences scores or listings. The product is pre-launch and actively being built; the waitlist and newsletter are live.
pricing 0
- + Addresses the gap a curated list leaves: security scanning, license checks and quality judging on every indexed skill
- + Commit-SHA pinning means you know exactly which version of a skill you are getting, and upstream changes trigger re-scans and notifications
- + Benchmark Lift scores are measured in a sandbox against the same model with and without the skill, so value claims are testable rather than self-reported
- + Free MCP connector with per-agent loadouts gives fine-grained control over what each agent can see and use
- + Trust scores are insulated from money — advertising revenue never influences scores or listings
- − Pre-launch and actively being built — the directory, benchmarks and MCP connector are not yet publicly available
- − Coverage is still growing, so the catalog is smaller than established community lists
- − No published benchmark results or live skill counts yet, so early adopters are betting on the roadmap
- − Focused on skills verification rather than being a general skills tutorial or marketplace
Verdict
Winner: none
Awesome Claude Skills is the strongest free starting point for browsing what the Claude skills ecosystem offers, but it stops at curation — quality and safety vetting is on you. SkillzBench complements it by adding the verification, licensing and benchmarking layer the list does not provide.
| Option | Overall | Breakdown |
|---|---|---|
| Awesome Claude Skills | 7.5 | : 9: 9: 4: 4: 5: 7 |
| SkillzBench | 8 | : 10: 9: 9: 9: 6: 8 |
Skill security: what a curated list does and does not protect you from
Licensing: the quiet trap in skills adoption
Discovery breadth vs. verified quality
Which should you pick?
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FAQ
Is Awesome Claude Skills free to use?
Yes. It is an open, community-maintained GitHub repository that anyone can browse without an account or payment. The skills it links to are hosted in their own third-party repositories, and their individual licenses and terms vary — the list itself does not surface license details, so check each linked repo before adopting a skill in a business workflow.
How risky are community Claude Skills from a security standpoint?
Treat them as untrusted code. Published research found roughly 26% of agent skills carry at least one vulnerability, and ecosystem security guidance recommends reading the full SKILL.md and auditing every bundled script before installing community skills, watching specifically for undocumented network calls baked into scripts. Skills run with your permissions, so a malicious or buggy skill acts with your agent's access. A curated list reduces but does not eliminate this risk, which is why verification tooling that security-scans and pins skill versions exists.
Do Claude Skills work with agents other than Claude?
Yes. Anthropic introduced the SKILL.md format in October 2025 and released it as an open standard in December 2025. It is now supported by Claude Code, Claude.ai, the Claude API, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity and Windsurf. Awesome Claude Skills explicitly curates for this wider set of agents, and SkillzBench's directory and free MCP connector are designed to equip any agent with the skills you choose.
What is the difference between a skill, a tool and an MCP server?
They operate at different layers. MCP defines how an agent connects to external systems — authentication, transport and tool discovery. Tools are the individual functions an agent invokes. Skills define the workflow — what to do, in what order, and with what guardrails — once the agent has connections and tools. In production all three run together: MCP for access, tools for actions, skills for behavior. A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md instruction file, optionally bundled with scripts and references, that loads progressively so a single agent can host hundreds of skills without bloating its context.
How does SkillzBench decide which skills to trust?
SkillzBench computes a 0-100 trust score from five signal groups: security, quality, license, maintenance and community. Every skill version is pinned to a commit SHA, validated, license-checked, security-scanned and quality-judged. Separately, it benchmarks every skill in a sandbox with the same model, with and without the skill, and publishes the Lift in percentage points — always shown apart from ratings. Money never touches scores: the platform is entirely free to users and earns revenue from blog advertising that does not influence scores or listings.
Can I use Anthropic's official document skills in my own product?
Not all of them. Most skills in Anthropic's anthropics/skills repository are Apache 2.0 licensed, but the four document skills — docx, xlsx, pptx and pdf — are source-available under a proprietary licence: you can use them with Claude, but you cannot fork them into your own product. This is exactly the kind of distinction that per-skill license checking, such as SkillzBench's Verify pillar, is designed to surface automatically before a business builds a workflow on a skill whose terms do not fit its use case.