by Robbie

Best OpenClaw Skills for Business: Our Recommendations After 6 Months

Best OpenClaw Skills for Business: Our Recommendations After 6 Months

I write skills for Klaus. That gives me a perspective most listicle authors don’t have: I know what breaks from the inside, not just from installing and testing someone else’s code.

ClawHub has over 13,700 skills. Most guides rank them by download count and call it a day. Downloads don’t tell you which skills break after a week, which ones conflict with each other, or which ones are useful for running a business.

This is our honest list. What we pre-install on every Klaus instance, what we recommend from ClawHub, and what we’d skip entirely. No affiliate links, no sponsored picks. Just what we’ve learned from running OpenClaw as a business tool for six months.

What Are OpenClaw Skills?

OpenClaw skills are markdown instruction files that teach your agent to use specific tools. Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and instructions (OpenClaw docs). Install a skill, and your agent gains a new capability: calling an API, managing your calendar, scraping a website, running a workflow.

Install from ClawHub with one command:

clawhub install <skill-slug>

Or copy a skill folder directly into ~/.openclaw/skills/. Skills load from three locations in order of precedence: workspace skills (highest priority), managed/local skills, then bundled defaults.

One thing most guides skip: each skill adds roughly 24 tokens of overhead to every conversation. Install fifty skills and you’re burning tokens on capabilities your agent never uses. Be selective. Ten good skills beat fifty untested ones.

Skills We Pre-Install on Every Klaus Instance

These are not suggestions. These are what we decided every business user needs on day one, based on six months of watching what people actually do with their agents.

SkillWhat It DoesWhy We Pre-Install It
GOG (Google Workspace)Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Contacts80% of users connect Google first
Orthogonal SuiteApollo, Hunter.io, Exa, Olostep, and 100+ APIsLead gen and research without API key setup
AgentMailDedicated agent email inboxAgents need their own address, not yours
Token Usage MonitorReports API spend per modelPrevents surprise bills on BYOK plans
Browser RelayChrome control over TailscaleSame browser automation as running locally

GOG (Google Workspace)

GOG unifies Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Contacts into one skill. It’s the most-downloaded skill on ClawHub for good reason: instead of installing six separate integrations, you get one that covers everything.

We pre-install it because roughly 80% of our business users connect Google Workspace within the first hour. Without GOG, they’d be stuck setting up each service individually. “Send the quarterly report to Sarah and block my calendar for the review meeting” should be one sentence, not two configuration sessions.

We had to fork gog cli to manage secrets properly on the Linux machines we run. If you’re using another hosting service, make sure they’ve handled this.

Orthogonal Suite

Orthogonal is a marketplace of pre-built APIs for AI agents. A single integration gives your agent access to Apollo (sales intelligence), Hunter.io (email finder), Exa (AI-native search), Olostep (web scraping), Coresignal (company data), and dozens more.

Every Klaus user gets $20 in Orthogonal credits out of the box. No signup, no API keys. When you ask your agent to find someone’s email or scrape a website, it checks Orthogonal first. The alternative is signing up for five separate services, managing five sets of API keys, and configuring five billing relationships.

We wrote more about this in “Klaus + Orthogonal: Hundreds of APIs, Zero Configuration.”

AgentMail

Your agent needs its own email address. Not access to your personal inbox where it might accidentally reply-all to your entire company. AgentMail gives each agent a dedicated inbox for sending, receiving, and processing emails independently.

Email is the second most-requested integration after Google Workspace. Business users want their agent to handle cold outreach, follow-ups, and automated responses without touching personal mail.

We find lots of users start on AgentMail and switch to Gog after they’ve built trust in Klaus.

Token Usage Monitor

A skill we made that reports your API spend across models. Nothing fancy, but essential. On our BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) plans, users bring their own OpenRouter API keys. Without visibility into token usage, a runaway agent can rack up a serious bill before anyone notices.

Browser Relay

Our Chrome extension lets Klaus control your browser windows over Tailscale. This gives you the same browser automation capabilities you’d have running OpenClaw locally. We wrote about when browser automation actually works (and when it doesn’t) in a separate post.

Beyond what we pre-install, here are the ClawHub skills we recommend after testing dozens over six months.

SkillCategoryDownloadsBest For
SummarizeResearch26,100Briefings, meeting prep, competitive intel
WhatsApp CLICommunication16,400Client messaging outside the US
ObsidianKnowledge12,400Founders who already use Obsidian
SlackCommunication8,800Team updates and notifications
Tavily SearchResearch—Deep research and due diligence
n8nAutomation—Chat-driven workflow building
TelegramCommunication—Quick mobile messaging

Best ClawHub Skills for Business Communication

The number one thing our customers ask for is connecting their agent to the messaging platforms they already use.

Slack (8,800 Downloads)

The Slack skill handles messages, reactions, pins, and files within a workspace. The feature that matters most for business is configurable threading: you can set reply modes to off, first message only, or every message (OpenClaw docs). This prevents your agent from flooding channels.

If your team lives in Slack, this is the first communication skill to install.

WhatsApp CLI (16,400 Downloads)

The WhatsApp CLI skill lets your agent message contacts and search message history. It’s CLI-based, not the official WhatsApp Business API, which means it works but the setup is not trivial. You need the wacli binary installed and configured.

If your clients are in Europe, Latin America, or Asia, the setup effort pays off. WhatsApp is the default business messaging tool in most of the world.

Telegram

Telegram is the easiest messaging integration to set up. The API is well-documented, bot creation takes minutes, and the skill itself is lightweight. We often recommend starting here if you want to message your agent from your phone without the overhead of WhatsApp or Slack.

Best ClawHub Skills for Research and Lead Generation

Web scraping for leads and cold outreach is our customers’ top use case.

Self-Improving Agent (32,000 Downloads, 338 Stars)

The highest-starred skill on ClawHub. Self-improving-agent tracks corrections and learnings across sessions in structured markdown files. Fix a mistake once and the agent writes it down. Learnings that recur three or more times within 30 days get promoted to permanent memory.

For business, this means your agent stops making the same mistakes. If you correct it on how to format a lead report or which CRM fields matter, it remembers. Over time, your agent gets tuned to how you work.

Tavily is a search engine built for AI agents. The built-in web_fetch tool works for basic lookups, but it breaks on JavaScript-heavy pages and struggles with bot-protected sites. Tavily returns clean, structured results optimized for LLM consumption.

Best for research-heavy workflows: due diligence, market analysis, meeting prep, competitor research. If your agent does a lot of web research, this is the upgrade that makes the results usable.

Summarize (26,100 Downloads)

Point it at a URL, a PDF, an audio file, or a YouTube video and get a summary. It falls back to alternative scraping methods when sites block the first attempt.

Best for daily briefings and meeting prep. We see customers use this for competitive intelligence: “Summarize the last three blog posts from [competitor]” is a daily task that used to take 30 minutes and now takes 30 seconds.

Best ClawHub Skills for Automation

n8n Workflow Automation

The n8n skill connects OpenClaw to your local n8n instance for chat-driven workflow automation. Instead of building automations in a dashboard, you describe what you want and the agent creates the workflow.

“Every Monday at 9am, pull last week’s analytics and email me a summary” becomes a real workflow, not a hypothetical example.

Honest note: it requires running your own n8n instance. If you don’t already use n8n, the setup cost might outweigh the benefit. But if you do, this skill turns your agent into a workflow controller.

Obsidian (12,400 Downloads)

Obsidian is local-first knowledge management. The skill lets your agent search your vault, create notes, and manage links between them. No cloud, no account, just markdown files.

Good for founders who already use Obsidian as a second brain. If you take meeting notes, track decisions, and build knowledge bases in Obsidian, this skill makes your agent part of that system. If you don’t use Obsidian, skip it.

Skills We’d Skip (and Why)

Not everything on ClawHub is worth installing. Here’s what we’ve learned to avoid.

Skills with fewer than 100 downloads and no version history. A single-version skill with 12 downloads was probably published once and abandoned. No updates means no bug fixes, no security patches, and no confidence that it works with the current version of OpenClaw.

Skills that duplicate built-in capabilities. Several ClawHub skills repackage basic web fetch or file reading that OpenClaw already handles natively. Unless the skill genuinely adds something (like Tavily’s AI-optimized search), you’re adding token overhead for no benefit.

Vendor-branded skills that exist primarily as marketing. Some skills are thinly disguised product demos. They work, but they funnel you into a specific vendor’s ecosystem with aggressive upsells. Read the SKILL.md before installing. If half the instructions are “sign up for our premium plan,” move on.

The deeper concern is security. In late January 2026, attackers launched a coordinated campaign called ClawHavoc, planting malicious skills on ClawHub. Initial reports identified 341 malicious skills, including 335 using fake prerequisites to install the AMOS macOS stealer. Follow-up research found the true scope was over 1,100 malicious skills. The attackers used typosquatting, prompt injection, and CVE-2026-25253 to compromise users.

How to Vet OpenClaw Skills Before Installing

After ClawHavoc, OpenClaw partnered with VirusTotal to scan every published skill. All submissions now go through VirusTotal’s Code Insight analysis with automatic approval for benign skills and blocking for known malware. Skills are rescanned daily.

That helps, but it’s not enough. VirusTotal won’t catch a skill that uses natural language to instruct your agent to do something malicious. A carefully crafted prompt injection payload won’t trigger a virus signature.

Here is our practical checklist:

  1. Check the author. Look at their GitHub profile, their other skills, and how long their account has been active. The ClawHavoc attackers all had accounts less than one week old.
  2. Read the SKILL.md. It’s a markdown file. You can read it in two minutes. Look for unexpected network calls, credential access, or instructions that don’t match the skill’s description.
  3. Verify the security scan. On ClawHub, check that the scan status shows “Benign” before installing.
  4. Test in isolation. Don’t connect a new skill to your business accounts on day one. Run it in a sandbox first.
  5. Pin versions. Use clawhub install <slug>@1.2.0 to lock a specific version. This prevents surprise updates that could introduce malicious code.

This is part of why managed hosting matters. At Klaus, we review pre-installed skills and run security audits before deployment. We patch CVEs before they reach your instance. For the full security picture, see our OpenClaw security guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are OpenClaw skills free?

The skills themselves are free and open source. Some connect to paid APIs (like Exa, Tavily, or OpenAI Whisper) that require separate subscriptions or API keys (OpenClaw docs). The skill file is always free; the service it connects to might not be.

How many skills should I install?

We recommend 10-15 active skills for business use. Each skill adds approximately 24 tokens of overhead to every conversation. Fifty skills means 1,200 tokens burned before your agent reads your first message. Be selective.

Can I use OpenClaw skills with any AI model?

Yes. OpenClaw supports Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, and local models through Ollama (OpenClaw docs). Skills work the same regardless of which model you choose, because the skill is an instruction file, not model-specific code.

What happens if a skill breaks?

On Klaus, Clawbert checks every instance hourly and often fixes issues before you notice. Self-hosted users need to debug skill conflicts themselves. Common issues: a missing binary the skill depends on, or environment variables that aren’t set.

Where can I browse available skills?

ClawHub hosts the full registry (13,700+ skills). The VoltAgent awesome-openclaw-skills repository maintains a curated subset of 5,400+ vetted skills, filtered to remove spam, duplicates, and known malicious entries.

Key Takeaways

  • Start with GOG, Orthogonal, and one messaging integration (Telegram is the easiest). That covers 80% of business use cases.
  • Download count is a poor quality signal. A skill with 30,000 downloads can still have unpatched vulnerabilities. Test skills yourself or use a managed host that has already vetted them.
  • Each skill adds ~24 tokens of overhead per conversation. Ten focused skills outperform fifty untested ones.
  • Security is real. ClawHavoc planted over 1,100 malicious skills on ClawHub starting in late January 2026. Vet every skill before installing.
  • Self-improving-agent (32K downloads, 338 stars) is the single best skill for long-term business use. An agent that learns from its mistakes gets better every week.
  • If you write skills yourself, you learn which patterns hold up and which break under real workloads. That perspective shaped every recommendation in this list.

Every Klaus instance ships with GOG, Orthogonal, AgentMail, token monitoring, and browser automation ready to go. Sign up at klausai.com and start talking to your agent.

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