Best OpenClaw Skills in 2026: Top 20 Must-Have

The 20 most useful OpenClaw skills in 2026 are Web Search, Tavily Deep Research, Code Runner, GitHub integration, Google Calendar, Email Send/Read, Telegram Advanced, Browser Relay, Trading Bot, and Home Assistant — all free to install from ClawHub's marketplace of 9,000+ skills. These skills transform OpenClaw from a basic chatbot into an autonomous agent that searches the web, manages your calendar, monitors markets, and controls your smart home.

Here's the complete ranked list with installation commands, use cases, and configuration tips for each skill.

---

Search Skills

1. Tavily Search

What it does: Real-time web search optimized for AI agents. Unlike raw Google results, Tavily returns clean, structured content with relevance scores — no ads, no boilerplate, just the information. Why it's great: Tavily is purpose-built for LLM consumption. Results come back as clean text chunks, making it dramatically more reliable than scraping raw HTML. It handles news, research papers, product pages, and general queries equally well. Install: Pricing: Free tier: 1,000 searches/month. Pro: $20/month for 10,000 searches. API key required from tavily.com. Verdict: The single most useful search skill. Install it first.

---

2. Deep Research

What it does: Multi-step research agent that generates a research plan, runs 10–30 searches, synthesizes findings, and produces a structured report with citations. Why it's great: For complex questions that require cross-referencing multiple sources, Deep Research turns a 45-minute manual research session into a 3-minute automated one. Output quality rivals professional research assistants for factual topics. Install: Pricing: Free (uses your configured search provider's credits). Costs 10–30 Tavily searches per report. Verdict: Incredibly powerful for market research, technical comparisons, and literature reviews. Overkill for simple questions.

---

3. Perplexity

What it does: Direct integration with the Perplexity API for AI-powered search with inline citations and follow-up reasoning. Why it's great: Perplexity's models are tuned specifically for search-augmented generation. When you need a quick, cited answer rather than a deep research report, it's faster and more concise than Deep Research. Install: Pricing: Requires Perplexity Pro ($20/month) or API key with pay-per-use pricing (~$5/1M tokens for the sonar model). Verdict: Great complement to Tavily Search. Use Perplexity for quick factual queries with citations, Deep Research for comprehensive analysis.

---

Productivity Skills

4. Google Calendar

What it does: Read, create, update, and delete Google Calendar events. Check free/busy times, schedule meetings, set reminders, and get daily agenda summaries. Why it's great: Natural language calendar management. "Schedule a 1-hour focus block every weekday morning at 9am for the next month" becomes a single command. The skill handles timezone math, conflict detection, and recurring event logic. Install: Pricing: Free (requires Google OAuth setup). Instructions included in skill documentation. Verdict: One of the highest-ROI skills for anyone with a Google Workspace or personal Gmail account.

---

5. Notion

What it does: Read and write Notion pages and databases. Create structured notes, update project trackers, query databases with filters, and append content to existing pages. Why it's great: Turns your Notion workspace into a writable memory store for your agents. Research results, meeting summaries, and task lists can be automatically saved to the right database with proper properties filled in. Install: Pricing: Free (requires Notion API key from your integration settings). Works with free Notion accounts. Verdict: Essential if you use Notion as your knowledge base. Pairs especially well with Deep Research — run a report and auto-save it to your Notion research database.

---

6. Email Send

What it does: Compose and send emails via Gmail or SMTP. Supports HTML formatting, CC/BCC, attachments from file paths, and template variables. Why it's great: Closes the loop on agent workflows that culminate in communication. Summarize a document, draft a response, send it — all in one agent chain without touching your email client. Install: Pricing: Free (uses Gmail API or your SMTP credentials). Requires OAuth setup for Gmail. Verdict: Powerful but use carefully. Enable confirmation mode in config so the agent always asks before sending.

---

7. Summarize

What it does: Intelligent document and content summarization. Accepts URLs, file paths, or raw text. Produces executive summaries, bullet-point lists, or structured briefs based on your preference. Why it's great: Handles long documents that exceed context windows by chunking and hierarchically summarizing. Feed it a 200-page PDF or a 3-hour YouTube transcript and get a clean 500-word summary. Install: Pricing: Free. Uses your configured LLM provider. Verdict: Deceptively simple but incredibly useful. The YouTube transcript summarization alone saves hours per week.

---

Communication Skills

8. Telegram Advanced

What it does: Full Telegram bot integration — send messages, receive and process incoming messages, manage channels, create polls, and trigger agent workflows from Telegram commands. Why it's great: Turns your phone into a remote control for your OpenClaw instance. Send a message from anywhere, get results back in Telegram. The bidirectional nature (receive triggers, not just send) unlocks genuinely useful mobile workflows. Install: Pricing: Free. Requires a Telegram bot token from @BotFather. Verdict: The best mobile interface for OpenClaw. If you only install one communication skill, make it this one.

---

9. Discord Manager

What it does: Post messages to Discord channels, read channel history, manage webhooks, react to messages, and monitor channels for trigger keywords. Why it's great: For teams using Discord, this skill turns OpenClaw into a team assistant accessible to everyone in the server. Automated daily standup summaries, release notifications, and alert routing are popular use cases. Install: Pricing: Free. Requires a Discord bot token and server admin permissions. Verdict: Excellent for team deployments. Less useful for solo users unless you already live in Discord.

---

Browser Skills

10. Browser Relay

What it does: Headless browser automation via Playwright. Navigate to URLs, click elements, fill forms, extract page content, take screenshots, and handle JavaScript-rendered pages. Why it's great: When Tavily Search can't access a page (paywalls, login-required content, JavaScript-heavy apps), Browser Relay can log in and extract the content. Also enables form automation and web scraping of dynamic sites. Install: Pricing: Free. Requires Playwright to be installed (npx playwright install chromium). Verdict: A powerful escape hatch for situations where simple HTTP-based tools fail. Slightly slower but handles virtually any website.

---

11. Web Scraper

What it does: Structured data extraction from websites. Define CSS selectors or use AI-assisted extraction to pull tables, lists, prices, and structured content from any public page. Why it's great: Where Browser Relay is a general browser, Web Scraper is purpose-built for data extraction. It's faster, handles pagination automatically, and produces clean structured output (JSON/CSV) rather than raw page content. Install: Pricing: Free. Some advanced features (proxy rotation, CAPTCHA handling) require the Pro tier at $15/month. Verdict: Best for recurring data collection tasks — price monitoring, job listing aggregation, news scraping.

---

Development Skills

12. GitHub

What it does: Full GitHub API access — read and create issues, PRs, and comments; search code across repositories; trigger workflows; manage branches; and review pull request diffs. Why it's great: Automates the tedious parts of software development. Triage issues by priority, generate release notes from merged PRs, find all usages of a deprecated function across your org's repos, or automatically create issues from error log patterns. Install: Pricing: Free. Requires a GitHub personal access token with appropriate scopes. Verdict: Essential for developers. The code search capability alone (semantic search across repos) is worth the install.

---

13. Code Runner

What it does: Execute Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and shell scripts in a sandboxed environment. Capture stdout, stderr, and return values. Supports package installation within the sandbox. Why it's great: Closes the loop between code generation and code execution. The agent can write a data processing script, run it against your files, see the output, debug errors, and iterate — all without you opening a terminal. Install: Pricing: Free. Sandbox runs locally; no external service required. Verdict: Transforms OpenClaw from a language model into a genuine programming assistant. Use with caution — review scripts before allowing execution on production data.

---

14. Docker Manager

What it does: Manage Docker containers, images, and compose stacks. Start/stop containers, view logs, inspect running processes, pull images, and execute commands inside containers. Why it's great: For self-hosted infrastructure, this skill lets OpenClaw act as a lightweight ops assistant. Check container health, restart a hung service, pull the latest image and redeploy — all via natural language. Install: Pricing: Free. Requires Docker daemon running locally or Docker context configured for remote hosts. Verdict: Valuable for developers and self-hosters. Niche for everyone else.

---

Content Skills

15. Image Gen

What it does: Generate images using Stable Diffusion (local via ComfyUI), FLUX, DALL-E 3, or Midjourney API. Accepts natural language prompts with style, size, and quality parameters. Why it's great: Inline image generation within agent workflows. Create a blog post outline, write the content, generate a hero image, and save everything to the right folder — one agent task, zero manual steps. Install: Pricing: Varies by backend. DALL-E 3: ~$0.04/image. FLUX local: free (requires GPU or Apple Silicon). Midjourney: requires active subscription. Verdict: The multi-backend support is the key feature. Local FLUX on an M4 Mac Mini produces excellent results at zero ongoing cost.

---

16. Content Writer

What it does: Structured long-form content generation with SEO optimization, outline-first workflow, tone control, and automatic internal linking suggestions. Why it's great: Goes beyond raw text generation — it researches the topic first (via Tavily), checks competitor content structure, generates an SEO-optimized outline, then writes section by section with word count targets. Output is consistently better than prompting the base model directly. Install: Pricing: Free. Uses your configured LLM and optionally Tavily Search credits for research. Verdict: If you produce written content regularly, this skill has the highest ROI of any in this list. The research-then-write workflow produces noticeably better output.

---

Smart Home Skills

17. Home Assistant

What it does: Full integration with Home Assistant. Control lights, thermostats, media players, and any other entity in your HA instance. Run automations, query sensor states, and create new automations via natural language. Why it's great: Natural language smart home control that actually understands context. "Turn off all lights except the bedroom and set the thermostat to night mode" is a single command. Creating new automations via conversation is genuinely impressive. Install: Pricing: Free. Requires a Home Assistant instance with Long-Lived Access Token. Verdict: The killer app for smart home enthusiasts. If you run Home Assistant, this skill is non-negotiable.

---

Power Tools

18. Memory

What it does: Persistent vector memory store for OpenClaw. Save facts, preferences, and context that persist across sessions. The agent automatically retrieves relevant memories based on the current conversation. Why it's great: Without Memory, every OpenClaw session starts from zero. With it, the agent remembers your preferences, previous research, ongoing projects, and personal context. Conversations feel coherent over time rather than stateless. Install: Pricing: Free. Stores vectors locally by default; optional cloud sync available. Verdict: Install this immediately. It's the foundation that makes every other skill more effective over time.

---

19. Self-Improve

What it does: Analyzes your OpenClaw usage patterns, identifies repetitive tasks and friction points, and suggests (or automatically creates) custom skill configurations and prompt templates. Why it's great: OpenClaw becomes progressively more tailored to your workflow. If you ask for meeting summaries in a specific format every time, Self-Improve learns the pattern and creates a shortcut. It's like having the agent study how you work and optimize for it. Install: Pricing: Free. Verdict: Subtle but powerful over a 2–4 week horizon. The personalization compounds significantly.

---

20. Multi-Agent

What it does: Spawn and coordinate multiple OpenClaw sub-agents running in parallel. Define task graphs, assign specialized agents to specific subtasks, and aggregate results. Why it's great: Some tasks are inherently parallel. Researching 10 competitors simultaneously, processing 50 documents at once, or running A/B tests on different prompts — Multi-Agent turns sequential 30-minute tasks into parallel 5-minute ones. Install: Pricing: Free. Each sub-agent uses your configured LLM, so costs scale with the number of agents. Verdict: Advanced skill with a learning curve, but the productivity multiplier is real. Start with 2–3 agent tasks before building complex graphs.

---

Recommended Starter Kit

If you're just getting started, install these 7 skills in order:

Memory — gives every future session persistent context

Tavily Search — adds real-time web knowledge

Summarize — handles long documents immediately

Google Calendar — high-ROI personal productivity win

Telegram Advanced — mobile access to your agent

Browser Relay — handles any website Tavily can't reach

Content Writer — if you create any written content

Install all seven:

This starter kit covers the four most common use cases — research, scheduling, communication, and content — without overwhelming complexity. Add GitHub, Code Runner, and Multi-Agent once you're comfortable with the basics.

The full power of OpenClaw emerges when these skills combine: Tavily researches a topic, Summarize condenses the findings, Content Writer drafts a post, Image Gen creates the header, Notion saves everything, and Telegram notifies you when it's done. That five-skill chain replaces a 2-hour manual workflow with a single command.

Are OpenClaw Skills Free?

Most OpenClaw skills are free and open-source. The official skills in ClawHub's marketplace (9,000+ available) can be installed with a single command at no cost. Some community-developed premium skills exist, but free alternatives are almost always available for the same functionality.