Best OpenClaw Skills (2026)

The best OpenClaw alternatives are other personal AI agents you message from a chat app, self-hosted or hosted. These picks rest on write-ups by people who switched and on what developers on Hacker News say they run now. People leave OpenClaw for four reasons: updates that break things, token bills, the work of running it, and security. If it kept breaking, most switchers land on Hermes Agent, which imports your OpenClaw memory and skills. If you want code you can read and agents locked in containers, pick NanoClaw. For a small VPS, a Raspberry Pi or a $10 board, look at ZeroClaw or PicoClaw. If you never want to run a server again, Claude Cowork, Grok Bot and Manus do the hosting for a monthly fee. A few things the makers' pages won't tell you. None of the open-source agents is free to run: you still pay a model provider, and switchers report $10 to $20 a month on cheap models and far more on top ones. People who moved to Claude's own tools say Anthropic stopped Claude subscriptions from covering OpenClaw in April 2026. NemoClaw is a sandbox that runs OpenClaw or Hermes inside it, not a replacement. QwenPaw was called CoPaw until April 2026. Perplexity's Computer and Personal Computer are different products. Hosted agents bill in credits or weekly allowances that are hard to predict. And a smaller codebase is easier to audit, but any agent holding your logins can still be tricked by a hostile web page or message. Ordered by how many independent users and reviewers recommend each one, then by GitHub stars, then by price. Prices checked October 11, 2026.

The best Claude skills are the SKILL.md packages that Hacker News users and independent reviewers keep recommending. This list ranks collections and single skills you can install today, with what each adds and its catch. If you want Claude to plan and test before it codes, get Superpowers. If you want it to question you before it starts, get grill-me from Matt Pocock's skills. For better-looking pages, start with frontend-design and add Impeccable to review the result. To build your own skills, or to make real Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, use Anthropic's repository. For marketing work, use Corey Haines's pack. Skills install in three ways. In Claude Code, run /plugin install from a marketplace, or copy a folder into ~/.claude/skills. For most coding agents, npx skills add owner/repo does the copying. In the Claude apps, upload a ZIP under Customize > Skills. Skills follow the open Agent Skills format, so most of these also run in Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI. Older guides are now wrong in places. Claude Code has merged custom commands into skills. Superpowers and Matt Pocock's skills are in Anthropic's official marketplace, so adding a separate marketplace is no longer needed. The Karpathy repository moved to a new owner. Star counts are huge and say little, and a link list such as awesome-claude-skills installs nothing. A skill is instructions plus scripts that run with your agent's permissions. Snyk scanned 3,984 skills from ClawHub and skills.sh and found a critical security issue in 13.4% of them. Read a skill before you install it, and install a few, not all. Items are ordered by how many independent people recommend each one, then by GitHub stars. Everything here is free. Numbers checked October 11, 2026.

The best Claude Code plugins, picked from the setups developers publish after pruning their own installs and from Hacker News threads where people say what they kept, not from install counts alone. A plugin is a bundle. One install can carry skills, slash commands, subagents, hooks and MCP servers. A skill is a single instruction file Claude loads when it judges it relevant, and an MCP server is a connection to an outside tool, so a plugin can contain both. Type /plugin inside Claude Code to browse Anthropic's official marketplace, which is connected from the start, or run /plugin install name@claude-plugins-official. For anything else, add the maker's marketplace first with /plugin marketplace add owner/repo. If you install one thing, make it Superpowers, plus the LSP plugin for your language. Add Security Guidance if you ship code you don't read line by line, Plannotator if you want to mark up plans in a browser, and Claude HUD to see how full the context is. Every enabled plugin adds to the context on every turn, and several of the writers quoted here deleted more than they kept. Plugins run code on your machine with your permissions, and community marketplaces are not reviewed, so read what a plugin will install before you say yes. Two names trip people up. Claude Code has a built-in review command alongside the Code Review plugin. And Anthropic keeps a second, smaller marketplace in the anthropics/claude-code repo, where the loop plugin still goes by ralph-wiggum and not ralph-loop. The list is ordered by how many independent people recommend each plugin, then by installs and GitHub stars. Prices checked October 11, 2026.

The best OpenCode plugins, and which ones work on OpenCode 2, ranked by how many developers outside each project say they use them, in blog posts, hands-on reviews and Hacker News threads. If your sessions run out of context, start with Dynamic Context Pruning. If you want the agent to plan before it codes, get Superpowers, or Plannotator to review plans in a browser. For a team of subagents, oh-my-opencode-slim is the one that runs on the current version. For memory that stays on your machine, opencode-mem. The thing no plugin page says loudly: OpenCode 2.0 came out in September 2026 with a new plugin system, and plugins written for OpenCode 1 do not load on it. Older guides tell you to add a package name to the "plugin" list in opencode.json, which OpenCode 1 then installs at startup. On OpenCode 2 the list is called "plugins" and there is a command for it, opencode plugin add <package>. Check the Works with line on each pick before you upgrade. OpenCode 1 still gets releases. Two names to keep straight. The OpenCode here is the one at opencode.ai, now in the anomalyco/opencode repository on GitHub. An earlier Go project with the same name, opencode-ai/opencode, is archived and continues as Crush. And oh-my-opencode was renamed oh-my-openagent. Plugins that sign you in with a Claude or Gemini subscription are left out. Google and Anthropic treat that as against their terms, the popular Antigravity one is archived, and accounts have been flagged. A plugin runs with your full permissions, so read what you install. Ordered by how many independent recommendations each plugin has, then by downloads and stars. A plugin that does not load on the current OpenCode ranks below the ones that do. Numbers checked October 17, 2026.

The best extensions for the Pi coding agent (some people call them plugins), picked from the setups developers publish and the write-ups that tested them, not from download counts alone. Pi is deliberately bare: no sub-agents, no plan mode, no permission prompts. You add what you miss with one command, pi install npm:<package>. If you are starting out, three cover most of the gap with Claude Code: pi-subagents for delegation, pi-web-access for search, and rpiv-ask-user-question so the model asks before it guesses. Add Plannotator if you want plan mode, and pi-permission-system if you don't want the agent free to run anything. Two things have changed that older guides miss. Pi has had MCP support built in since version 0.99, so pi-mcp-adapter is now an upgrade and no longer a requirement. And several popular names have lookalikes: npm has at least four other packages named pi-mcp-adapter under other people's scopes, and more than one /btw extension, so install by the exact name shown here. Extensions run with the same access to your machine that Pi has. Pi's catalog lists more than 5,000 packages, so read the source of anything that touches your shell or credentials, and pin versions you depend on. Ordered by how many independent users and reviewers recommend each one (Kay Rhodes's setup guide, Composio's tested top ten, developers on Hacker News and Pi's own GitHub discussions), then by npm downloads and GitHub stars. Downloads count automated installs too, so treat them as a rough signal. Numbers checked October 10, 2026.