The Best OpenClaw Skills

The best OpenClaw skills are, for most people, the ones already on disk. 51 skill directories ship in the OpenClaw repository, covering notes, media, dev tooling, home automation, messaging, and MCP — and unlike anything on ClawHub, they need no vetting decision from you.

We haven't run OpenClaw or installed any skill. The list below is read directly from the openclaw/openclaw repository on 16 August 2026; everything else on this page is documented behavior, quoted where the wording matters.

What ships in the box

From the repository's skills/ directory:

Four worth knowing about by name:

• skill-creator — authors and reviews SKILL.md files. Its own description reads "Author or review AgentSkills: create, repair, validate, or restructure SKILL.md files and bundled resources," and it's the right starting point for writing your own rather than hand-rolling frontmatter.
• clawhub — searching, installing, verifying, updating, and publishing skills from inside a conversation. Its SKILL.md instructs the agent to "Search before claiming that a requested capability is unavailable" and to verify and get user approval before installing anything.
• mcporter — "List, configure, authenticate, call, and inspect MCP servers/tools with mcporter over HTTP or stdio." A skill whose whole job is driving MCP servers; see Agent Skills vs MCP.
• coding-agent — the one bundled skill that's opt-in. It needs skills.entries.coding-agent.enabled: true plus one of claude, codex, opencode, or another supported CLI installed and authenticated.

Most of them are gated, which is why you may not see them

Bundled skills declare their dependencies and disappear when those aren't met. peekaboo sets os: ["darwin"] and requires.bins: ["peekaboo"], so it doesn't exist on a Linux gateway. 1password gates on op. gemini gates on gemini. If a skill in the table above isn't showing up in openclaw skills list, the likely reason is that it's working exactly as designed — see gating.

Several also ship installer specs, so the macOS Skills UI can offer to install the missing binary for you.

Why there's no ranked list of ClawHub skills here

ClawHub is the largest skill registry of any agent covered on this site. It also has a download counter, which makes it look like the one ecosystem where a popularity ranking would be honest. It isn't, and the reason is in ClawHub's own documentation.

Install counts come from telemetry on the standalone CLI: "When you run clawhub install while logged in, the CLI may send a best-effort install event so ClawHub can compute aggregate install counts." Users can turn it off with CLAWHUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1.

So the counter is best-effort, tied to being logged in, opt-out, and attached to the standalone clawhub install — which is not the command most people use. Read it as a floor, never as usage share, and certainly not as quality.

Meanwhile, the skill totals circulating in roundups — "over 13,000 community skills," "over 5,700 skills" — don't agree with each other, and ClawHub publishes no headline figure of its own. We're not going to pick one.

That leaves us without any defensible basis for naming the ten best community skills, so we haven't. What follows is more useful.

What to actually check on a ClawHub listing

ClawHub surfaces real signals before you install, and they're more informative than a download count. Its documentation asks you to review, in this order: "the overall audit status, the risk level, any listed findings, required credentials, permissions, or environment variables, owner, source, version, changelog, downloads, stars, and other trust signals."

Two of those are frequently misread as the same thing. From the docs:

Risk level asks: "How much power is here?" Audit status asks: "What should I do with this result?"

A publishing skill showing Review at Medium risk isn't a red flag; it means the skill appears purpose-aligned but can act with meaningful account authority. A Pass on a skill that runs shell commands still deserves your attention — the documentation says so itself: "A Pass is reassuring, but it does not replace your own judgment."

Full treatment of what the audits check, what they miss, and what independent researchers found when they scanned the registry is on the security page.

Beyond the registry's own signals, the checklist that transfers from every other ecosystem still applies: read the SKILL.md, read anything in scripts/, check whether the description says when not to trigger, and check whether declared credentials match what the skill plausibly needs. The Claude Code and Hermes pages work through that reasoning in more detail.

Where else to look

• ClawHub itself — clawhub.ai, filterable by Trending, Featured, Official, and New. The Official filter is the closest thing to a curated tier.
• ~/.agents/skills — the cross-agent directory OpenClaw reads at priority 3. Skills published for Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor work here unchanged if they don't depend on that agent's specific tooling, so the organisation-published repositories listed on those pages are all candidates.
• Plugins — plugins can ship skills by listing skills directories in openclaw.plugin.json, loading at the lowest precedence tier.

Caveats

• We have not installed or run OpenClaw, or used any skill named here. The bundled list is the repository's skills/ directory tree, read via the GitHub API on 16 August 2026 — the docs describe bundled skills as "shipped with the install," and we did not install OpenClaw to confirm the shipped set matches the tree exactly.
• Skill descriptions quoted above are taken from the skills' own SKILL.md frontmatter.
• ClawHub's audit statuses and telemetry behavior are documented behavior, not independently verified by us.
• OpenClaw is under very active development; the repository was pushed to the same day this page was researched.

Sources

• openclaw/openclaw (GitHub) — the skills/ directory tree and individual SKILL.md files, read directly
• OpenClaw — ClawHub (official docs) — registry surfaces and install telemetry
• ClawHub — Security Audits (official docs) — audit status, risk level, what to check before installing
• OpenClaw — Skills (official docs) — gating, plugin skills, config overrides