skills.sh Review 2026: How It Handles Skill Security and Licensing
Skills.sh is Vercel's free, open directory of AI agent skills — 83,627 skills with 8M+ installs, one-command installation (npx skills add owner/repo) across 20 coding agents, and third-party security scanning by Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket and Snyk — but it's a public discovery directory with no private skills, version pinning, review gates, or team controls. SkillzBench (currently in pre-launch) is building a free alternative layer: it benchmarks every skill in a sandbox and publishes the measured Lift, pins versions to a commit SHA, and license- and security-scans each one.
TL;DR
- Skills.sh is free: no subscription for the directory, and the CLI is MIT-licensed open source (vercel-labs/skills).
- Installation is a single command — npx skills add owner/repo — and the CLI auto-detects which of 20 supported agents you use, including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf and Zed.
- The directory held 83,627 skills with 8M+ total installs as of early 2026, and the top-ranked skill (find-skills) reads 3.6M installs.
- Every indexed skill is scanned by Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket and Snyk; a skill that fails every partner audit is excluded — but listing is still not a security guarantee.
- Ranking is by anonymous install telemetry with hourly deduplication, so popularity does not prove quality, maintenance, or fit.
- There are no private skills, no version pinning or rollback, no review gates, and no team constructs (roles, access control, audit trails).
- A security audit of 22,511 skills across the ecosystem found 140,963 issues, and Snyk's ToxicSkills research detected prompt injection in 36% of skills tested — review before you install.
Head to head
| Dimension | skills.sh |
|---|---|
| Pricing | Free; MIT-licensed CLI, no account needed to install 🏆 |
| Ease of use | One command: npx skills add owner/repo; CLI auto-detects the agent 🏆 |
| Agent compatibility | 20 agents: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Windsurf, Gemini, Cline, VS Code, Zed and more (Aider not listed) 🏆 |
| Skill catalog size | 83,627 skills, 8M+ installs; Official section: 6,588 skills from 102 organisations 🏆 |
| Security handling | Scanned by Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket and Snyk; skills failing all partner audits excluded — but listing is not a security guarantee |
| Licensing clarity | CLI is MIT-licensed; per-skill licenses vary by publisher and are surfaced in directory metadata 🏆 |
| Team/private skills | Not available — public directory only, no orgs, roles, or access control |
| Quality signal | Install counts and trending momentum; hourly deduplication prevents replayed installs |
The contenders
Skills.sh is Vercel's open directory and package manager for AI agent skills, launched January 20, 2026. Skills are SKILL.md instruction packages — Markdown plus optional scripts, templates and assets — that teach a coding agent how to handle specific tasks without bloating its context window. Developers browse a leaderboard (Hot, Trending, Top), find a skill, and install it with one command: npx skills add owner/repo. The CLI detects the agent in use and drops the skill into the right directory, working across 20 agents including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Gemini, Cline, VS Code and Zed. The directory has grown sections for Packs (shipped August 7, 2026), Topics, Official (6,588 skills from 102 organisations) and Audits. Every indexed skill is scanned by Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket and Snyk, and skills failing every partner audit are excluded. The CLI is MIT-licensed open source; installs need no account, and only the public API is rate-limited.
pricing 0/month
- + Completely free — no subscription for the directory and the CLI is MIT-licensed open source
- + One-command installation across 20 agents; the same skill works in each without rewrites
- + Real adoption signal: install counts with hourly deduplication and per-agent breakdowns
- + Third-party security scanning (Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket, Snyk) with exclusion for skills that fail every audit
- + Simple, inspectable Markdown format — no proprietary builder or hosted runtime
- + Official section surfaces verified first-party collections from Vercel, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google
- − Everything is public — no home for internal conventions, runbooks, or proprietary skills
- − No version pinning or rollback: installs point at whatever the author's repo contains right now
- − No review gate before a skill reaches your machine; installing one is a supply-chain decision, not harmless prompt copying
- − No team constructs: no organizations, member roles, access control, or audit trail
- − Popularity ranking doesn't prove correctness, maintenance quality, or security; skills.sh itself states it cannot guarantee the quality or security of every listed skill
- − Agent support varies — a skill's instructions, scripts and activation behavior may not work identically across every client
Verdict
Winner: skills.sh
For free public discovery and cross-agent installs in 2026, skills.sh is the established, zero-cost choice. Its gaps are team distribution, versioning, and quality judgment — areas where curated, benchmark-driven approaches are emerging.
| Option | Overall | Breakdown |
|---|---|---|
| skills.sh | 7.5 | : 10: 9: 7: 6: 9: 9 |
How skills.sh handles skill security
Licensing and what you're actually adopting
Where skills.sh runs out of road
Which should you pick?
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FAQ
Is skills.sh free to use?
Yes. Browsing the directory and using the MIT-licensed skills CLI have no listed subscription fee, and installing skills requires no account — only the public API is rate-limited. Costs can still come from your AI agent, model usage, or external services a skill invokes.
How does skills.sh handle security?
Every indexed skill is scanned by Gen Agent Trust Hub, Socket and Snyk, and a skill that fails every partner audit is excluded from the directory. However, skills.sh states it cannot guarantee the quality or security of every listed skill, so you should inspect SKILL.md and any scripts before installing — the same caution you'd apply to any third-party package.
Which AI agents does skills.sh work with?
Twenty coding agents are supported, including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Gemini, Cline, AMP, OpenClaw, Goose, OpenCode, Roo, Trae, VS Code and Zed. Aider is not on the list. The same skill installs into each agent's native directory from one source package.
Can I host private skills on skills.sh?
No. skills.sh is a public discovery directory with a leaderboard — there are no private skills, organizations, member roles, or access controls. Teams that need private distribution typically pair public discovery on skills.sh with a separate registry such as Agentman Agent Skills or localskills.sh.
How are skills ranked on the leaderboard?
By install count and trending momentum, powered by anonymous install telemetry. Deduplication runs hourly so a single install can't be replayed to inflate a count, and aggregates include per-agent breakdowns. Popularity signals adoption, not correctness or security.
How big is the skills.sh catalog?
As of early 2026 the directory listed 83,627 skills with 8M+ total installs, and the top-ranked skill, find-skills from vercel-labs/skills, reads 3.6M installs. The Official section lists 6,588 skills from 102 organisations, which is a better starting point than the trending tabs.