HubSpot has written the plainest explanation yet of three words people use interchangeably. In Claude skills vs. plugins vs. MCP connectors: A simple guide, the post separates them in one line: “Skills teach Claude a procedure, MCP connectors give it authorized access to an outside tool or data source, and Plugins package both together so a team can install everything at once.” The organizing idea is the useful part: “separate access from procedure from distribution. Each layer answers a different question.”
There are no figures, and the explanation is careful about limits. A connector is “one live connection, built on MCP, between Claude and a specific service,” run by the service itself, acting inside the user’s permissions. A skill “teaches the how: your team’s report format, your review checklist, the brand voice you always want applied,” and “can tell Claude how to use a connector’s data, but it can’t reach a live service on its own.” A plugin bundles skills, connectors, commands and sub-agents so a team installs once instead of each person adding each piece. “None of the three sits ‘above’ the others in a power ranking.” It is a marketing blog post from a company that ships a free Claude connector, and it says so; the taxonomy holds regardless.
The catalog holds HubSpot as one of the strongest records it has. The HubSpot provider page lists API pages across the CRM, including the HubSpot Custom Objects API, the HubSpot CRM Properties API and the HubSpot Pipelines API that a connector reads and writes. On the Agent Readiness score, the MCP server and agent skills are both lit, the two halves of the post’s taxonomy, along with idempotency, reversibility, error semantics, the event surface, delegated identity and protected resource metadata.
The Kin Score is 93.2, exemplar band, the highest of any provider this series has covered, carried by developer ergonomics at 94.6 and operational transparency at 94.7. The Agent Readiness score is 54.0, agent-ready. The unlit dimensions are a well-known catalog, consent identity, an agent card, dry-run mode, dynamic client registration and agentic commerce. HubSpot has the access layer and the procedure layer on the record. The third layer in its own taxonomy, distribution, has a contract-level equivalent too: a published catalog or agent card that lets an agent find the connector and its skills without a person installing them. That is the piece a company this far ahead has left to add.