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OrchestKit v8.43.0 — 111 skills, 37 agents, 210 hooks · Claude Code 2.1.170+

Claude Agent SDK vs Claude Code plugins

They are not competitors — they are different layers of the same stack. The Agent SDK is for building your own agent products in code; plugins extend the Claude Code CLI you already use. Many teams end up using both.

The two layers

The Claude Agent SDK(TypeScript and Python) is Anthropic's programmatic layer: you write code that creates agent loops, wires tools, and manages context, and you ship that as your own application or service. It runs headless — there is no terminal UI — and you own the product around it.

Claude Code pluginsextend Claude Code, Anthropic's interactive agentic CLI. A plugin contributes skills (reusable knowledge and workflows), agents (specialist personas), hooks (lifecycle automation that runs on every tool call), and MCP servers — all inside the terminal session a developer already works in. You install one with claude plugin install; nothing about your application changes.

When you need which

  • Building an agent product (a support bot, a CI reviewer service, an internal automation) → the Agent SDK. You need programmatic control, your own deployment, your own UI.
  • Making your day-to-day coding agent better(encode your team's patterns, enforce security gates, run parallel review agents on PRs) → a Claude Code plugin. Zero code to ship, works in every repo you open.
  • Both is common: teams build customer-facing agents on the SDK while their engineers use plugins to build that very codebase faster and safer.

Where OrchestKit sits

OrchestKit is a plugin — the largest open-source one we know of for Claude Code: 111 skills, 37 agents, and 210 lifecycle hooks, MIT-licensed, no account or hosted service. It does not compete with the Agent SDK; if you are building on the SDK, OrchestKit makes the engineers writing that code faster (its skills cover agent architecture, LLM testing, and MCP integration patterns, among 111 others).

See how OrchestKit compares to other plugins and built-in Claude Code features, or start at the installation guide.

Honest scope notes

This page describes Anthropic's products from public documentation; we are not affiliated with Anthropic beyond building on their platform. If something here drifts out of date, tell us and we will fix it.