Guide
Best Claude Code & agent Skills, by use case
The best agent Skill depends on the job. For code review, code-review-plugin; for security, trail-of-bits; for testing, webapp-testing; for DevOps, devops-engineer; for frontend, frontend-design; for SEO, the seo-geo-claude-skills bundle; for data analysis, xlsx; for documents, pdf; for web scraping, firecrawl. Each is a verified, catalogued SKILL.md skill. Pick a task for the full ranked shortlist.
Every pick links to its skill page with the composite score, license, provenance, and per-agent install commands. We rank by fit for the common case, not by raw star count.
Updated August 19, 2026 · first published June 21, 2026 · 191 skills catalogued
Method
How these are ranked, and what we actually checked
Ranking is a published formula, not an opinion: a composite 0–100 score over nine weighted inputs — install count, provenance, stars, upstream recency, verified cross-agent compatibility, documentation depth, install ergonomics, licence, and verification freshness. The weights are on the methodology page so you can disagree with a specific number rather than with a vibe.
Cataloguing an entry means the repository was fetched, the SKILL.md confirmed at the exact path we publish, the licence read from the licence file rather than a README badge, and the upstream last-push date recorded. Compatibility lists agents the skill was actually run on — not every agent that reads the format.
The part that matters most: entries get removed. 4 skills have been de-listed after failing verification — fabricated publisher organisations, install commands pointing at GitHub orgs that do not exist, archived upstreams — each with a permanent redirect and a public reason on the changelog. A recommendation list that only ever grows is not being checked.
At a glance
The top pick for each job
| Job | Top pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Code Quality & Review | code-review-plugin | Pre-merge review on Claude Code where you want a consistent, quotable format with zero install. |
| Security & Auditing | trail-of-bits | Pre-release vulnerability scans and ongoing security review on a codebase you control. |
| Testing & QA | webapp-testing | Filling test gaps in a web app or smoke-testing a UI after a change. |
| DevOps & Infrastructure | devops-engineer | Generalist DevOps work where you want a strong default across clouds. |
| Frontend & UI Design | frontend-design | Greenfield landing pages and marketing sites that should feel intentional, not templated. |
| SEO & Content | seo-geo-claude-skills | Running SEO as a structured agent workflow rather than ad-hoc prompts. |
| Marketing & Growth | corey-haines-marketing | Positioning, messaging, and campaign structure — the foundation the rest of marketing builds on. |
| Data & Analytics | xlsx | The dataset is a spreadsheet and you want models, pivots, or a formatted report back — the most common data-analysis case. |
| Document Processing | Anything PDF — extraction, form-filling, batch merge or redaction. | |
| Browser & Web Automation | firecrawl | Reliable, hosted scraping and structured extraction across many pages. |
| Databases & Schemas | supabase-skill | You're on Supabase or Postgres and want secure queries by default. |
| Email & Messaging | resend-email | Sending transactional or batch email from an app on Resend. |
| Diagrams & Visualization | mermaid-diagrams | In-doc diagrams that must render inline wherever Markdown renders. |
| Workflow Orchestration | superpowers | Long-running engineering tasks where each phase should hand off cleanly instead of the agent free-styling. |
| Payments & Billing | stripe-best-practices | Building, modifying, or reviewing any Stripe integration — payments, marketplaces, or subscriptions — where getting the API choice and key/webhook security right matters most. |
Go deeper
Ranked shortlist per job
- Best agent Skills for code review
The best agent Skills for reviewing code before merge — structured, severity-tagged reviews and security-first passes across Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.
- Best agent Skills for security & auditing
The best agent Skills for security review and vulnerability detection — firm-grade static analysis (CodeQL, Semgrep), Kubernetes hardening, and real-exploit validation.
- Best agent Skills for testing & QA
The best agent Skills for writing and running tests — Playwright web-app testing, browser automation patterns, and test-driven-development workflows.
- Best agent Skills for DevOps & infrastructure
The best agent Skills for DevOps work — CI/CD, containers, blue-green and canary deploys, Terraform, and Kubernetes hardening across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- Best agent Skills for frontend & UI design
The best agent Skills for building production-grade UIs — distinctive design direction, brand systems, theming, and shadcn/Tailwind defaults that avoid generic AI output.
- Best agent Skills for SEO & content
The best agent Skills for SEO and content ops — keyword research, technical audits, GEO/AEO for AI search, blog drafting, and AI-text humanization.
- Best agent Skills for marketing & growth
The best agent Skills for marketing teams — landing-page CRO, copywriting, LinkedIn content, email sequences, and the SEO/GEO bundle that powers organic growth.
- Best agent Skills for data analysis
The best agent Skills for analyzing data — Excel modeling with real formulas, multi-source cited research, primary-source data feeds, and publication-grade D3 visualization.
- Best agent Skills for document processing
The best agent Skills for working with documents — Anthropic's official pdf, docx, xlsx, and pptx Skills, each with tested scripts for the format edge cases improvised code misses.
- Best agent Skills for web scraping
The best agent Skills for scraping the web — firecrawl for agent-native extraction at scale, browser-use and playwright-skill for JavaScript-heavy pages, and ethical rate-limited scraping patterns.
- Best agent Skills for databases
The best agent Skills for database work — vendor-published skills for Supabase/Postgres and PlanetScale/MySQL, plus Prisma ORM, MongoDB, and Redis caching patterns.
- Best agent Skills for email
The best agent Skills for email — Resend's first-party transactional skill, its deliverability playbook, React email templates, Twilio for SMS/WhatsApp, and Anthropic's drip-campaign skill.
- Best agent Skills for diagrams
The best agent Skills for generating diagrams — Mermaid from prose with self-validating syntax, Excalidraw whiteboard sketches, C4 architecture diagrams, and D3 data-driven visualization.
- Best agent Skills for workflow orchestration
The best agent Skills for orchestrating multi-step work — superpowers for a full engineering pipeline, ADR and system-design skills for decisions, multi-agent parallelism, and app-integration routing.
- Best agent Skills for payments & billing
The best agent Skills for Stripe and payments work — Stripe's own integration playbook, a checkout/subscriptions implementation Skill, Lemon Squeezy store operations, and safe Stripe API-version upgrades.
Start here
New to agent Skills?
- What is a Claude skill?
The definition, how Skills load in three tiers, and when an agent reaches for one.
- How to install a skill
The install command for each agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini, Antigravity.
- Skills vs subagents vs MCP vs plugins
The four primitives, what each is for, and when to use which.
- How to create a skill
Write your own SKILL.md — frontmatter, the description that triggers it, and best practices.
FAQ
Common questions
What are the best Claude Code skills?
The best skill depends on the job. For code review use code-review-plugin (Anthropic, bundled, /review). For security use trail-of-bits. For testing use webapp-testing. For DevOps use devops-engineer. For frontend use frontend-design (~277K installs). For SEO use the seo-geo-claude-skills bundle. For marketing, the right one is task-specific (corey-haines-marketing, email-sequence, and more). Each links to a ranked shortlist below.
Are these skills only for Claude Code?
No. SKILL.md is a cross-agent standard, and many of these run on Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity too — but real support varies per skill, so we list only verified-working agents on each skill page. frontend-design, for example, is verified across all seven agents we track.
How are these rankings decided?
Each skill gets a composite 0–100 score from nine inputs: install count, provenance, GitHub stars, recency, cross-agent compatibility, documentation, install ergonomics, license, and verification. On these guide pages we order by fit for the common case, not raw popularity. The methodology is public at /about/methodology.
What is the difference between a skill and an MCP server?
A Skill encodes methodology — how to do something — and loads into the current session. An MCP server gives the agent access to external systems (databases, APIs, browsers). Most real workflows use both. See skills vs subagents vs MCP vs plugins for the full distinction.
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