ChatGPT Plugins List: Best Plugins and Apps in 2027

Search for a ChatGPT plugins list and most pages hand you the 2023 roster: Wolfram, Zapier, KAYAK, Klarna. None of those plugins work anymore. OpenAI shut the original system down in April 2024, spent two years rebuilding the idea around GPTs, apps and connectors, and in July 2026 brought the word back with a new Plugin Directory. That directory is where every useful add-on lives going into 2027. This list sorts the best plugins and apps by the job they do, shows how to install and call them, and flags the one deadline that hits anyone who still relies on a custom GPT.

💡 Short answer: Open ChatGPT, pick Plugins in the sidebar, install what you need, sign in to the service behind it, then call it with an @ mention. Custom GPTs retire on December 11, 2026, so migrate the ones you use before that date.

What Happened to ChatGPT Plugins

The 2023 Plugin Experiment

OpenAI launched plugins as an alpha on March 23, 2023 and opened a beta to Plus users on May 12, 2023. The idea was simple: let the chatbot call outside services so it could book a table, pull a flight price or run a calculation. Early names included Expedia, KAYAK, Instacart, Klarna, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram and Zapier, alongside OpenAI's own Browsing, Code Interpreter and Retrieval.

Plugins worked well in demos, but they never became the main way people extended ChatGPT. They felt like a side feature, and the next product made them look like a rough draft.

Why GPTs and Apps Took Over

GPTs launched on November 6, 2023, letting anyone package instructions and files into a reusable assistant. New plugin chats stopped on March 19, 2024, and every plugin chat ended on April 9, 2024.

The next step arrived in October 2025, when OpenAI introduced apps built on its Apps SDK and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Launch partners included Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify and Zillow. An App Directory followed in December 2025, and you called an app by naming it inside a chat.

The July 2026 Plugin Comeback

On July 9, 2026, the Plugin Directory replaced the App Directory. A modern plugin is a package, not a single integration. It can hold skills (reusable instructions and reference files), apps (connections to outside services through MCP) and app templates. ChatGPT and Codex share one directory, so a plugin you install for one can serve the other.

How the Plugin Directory Works

What Sits Inside a Plugin

Think of a plugin as a toolbox with a label on the lid. One plugin might ship only a skill, another only an app, and many ship both.

Because apps rest on the open MCP standard, one integration can work across several AI assistants instead of every vendor building a separate version for each platform. That is the biggest upgrade since the 2023 era.

Install and Call a Plugin in 4 Steps

1. Open ChatGPT and choose Plugins in the sidebar.
2. Review what the package contains: skills, apps, or both.
3. Select Install plugin.
4. Sign in to the service behind it when prompted.

After that, type @ followed by the plugin name inside a chat, or accept ChatGPT's suggestion when it offers one. Connecting is free. You pay for your ChatGPT plan and for any subscription the underlying tool charges. Availability depends on plan, workspace role and region, so a plugin you see in a coworker's account may be missing in yours. If one does not show up in the sidebar, check three things in order: your plan, your workspace settings and your region. Workspace admins can restrict access, so a missing plugin is sometimes a policy choice rather than a bug. And if ChatGPT fails to suggest the right plugin on its own, just name it with an @ mention.

Permissions and Sign-In

Installing a plugin does not bypass authorization. You still sign in to the underlying service, and workspace permissions still apply. As of June 2026, ChatGPT also lets you choose when an app asks for approval: always, before changes, or before important changes. For anything that sends email, moves files or touches billing, pick the strictest setting.

Three rules help before you install anything:

• Install what you will use this week, not everything in the directory. Every connected service widens what ChatGPT can reach.
• Check who published the plugin and what the apps inside it can read or change.
• Prefer plugins that only read data until you trust the workflow.

💡 Tip: Start every new plugin on the strictest approval setting. Loosen it only after a week of seeing what it actually does.

Best Plugins for Everyday Work

Files, Mail and Calendar

The most used plugins connect ChatGPT to the places your work already sits. Names below come from the Plugin Directory and third-party roundups as of October 2026. Listings change often, so confirm each one in your own account.

💡 Tip: Name the file or folder in your request. "Check the Drive folder called Launch Plan" beats "look at my files" every time.

Not everything needs a plugin. ChatGPT already ships with built-in tools: web search, deep research for multi-source reports with citations, Python-based data work on CSV and Excel files, and vision for reading photos and drawings. Reach for a plugin only when the job needs your private data or an outside service. A spreadsheet upload and a built-in tool will often finish the same task faster.

Meeting Notes and Messaging

Granola and Fathom capture meeting notes and context, so a follow-up email takes one prompt instead of ten minutes of recall. Slack and Teams plugins turn long threads into short summaries and help with escalations. Zoom adds insight from recorded calls, and Kahoot! and Quizlet turn notes and handbooks into training material for HR and support teams. Together they cut the busywork around meetings, which is where most plugin time savings show up first.

Best Plugins for Design and Content

Canva, Figma and Visual Tools

Canva creates and edits real designs from a chat request, and Figma supports design work and code generation. Both were among the first apps announced in 2025 and remain the safest picks for presentations, social posts and quick mockups.

For content teams, a few more names appear in third-party lists:

• Ubersuggest pulls search term research and SEO data into the conversation.
• vidIQ brings YouTube statistics and search terms.
• Metricool and Windsor.ai handle social scheduling and reporting.
• Runway, Higgsfield, invideo and OpenArt generate images and video from a prompt.

The catch with generation plugins is control. If you want to pick the exact model, resolution and style for each image or clip, a dedicated platform gives you more room. The last section shows how.

Best Plugins for Developers

Code, Data and Deployment

Developers get the sharpest gains because the work is already text. GitHub helps triage pull requests and failing builds. Supabase and Firebase let you query and manage databases in plain language. Vercel and Railway support building and deploying web apps. Firecrawl and Exa feed live web search and scraping into agent workflows.

Anything missing from the directory can still connect through a custom connector, which is simply an MCP server you point ChatGPT at. That makes the directory a starting line, not a ceiling.

Best Plugins for Life and Business

Travel, Music and Home

The launch apps of 2025 still make the best consumer list. Booking.com and Expedia search stays and flights, Spotify builds playlists from a sentence, Zillow filters homes on a map, and Coursera surfaces courses for a topic you name. The pattern is the same each time: say what you want, approve the connection once, and let the app return a result inside the chat.

Selling, Billing and Finance

Small business owners lean on a different shelf. Shopify and Stripe show store and payment data, HubSpot and monday.com handle contacts, deals and projects, and Intuit QuickBooks answers money questions in plain language. For research, Consensus and SciSpace ground answers in academic papers.

💡 Tip: Billing plugins deserve the strictest permission setting. Let ChatGPT read the numbers, and approve every write action by hand.

What Happens to Custom GPTs

Dates to Put on Your Calendar

OpenAI announced on September 11, 2026 that custom GPTs are going away and that plugins replace them.

What Migrates and What Does Not

Creators can open My GPTs, select Migrate to plugin and follow the steps. Only the latest published version moves, and the original GPT becomes read-only afterward.

• Moves over: instructions (they become a skill), knowledge files (they become reference files) and connected apps.
• Stays behind: old conversations, the model you had selected, sharing settings and custom actions, which you must rebuild.

Behavior is not guaranteed to match exactly, so test the new plugin against your five most common prompts before you retire the old one. A simple checklist keeps the move calm:

1. List every custom GPT your team uses and note who owns each one.
2. List the custom actions inside them, since those need rebuilding.
3. Migrate the latest published version of each GPT.
4. Share the new plugin on purpose, because migrated plugins start private and old sharing settings do not carry over.
5. Tell users that the original GPT is now read-only.

Make Visuals with Picasso IA

Plugins handle your files and tools. They do not replace dedicated image and video models, and that is where Picasso IA fits next to ChatGPT. Draft the brief with a language model, then generate the visuals with a model you choose on purpose.

How to Use Terra on PicassoIA

GPT 5.6 Terra is a balanced text model for daily writing, coding and reasoning at roughly half the cost of top-tier models. Here is a quick way to use it for plugin planning:

1. Open the GPT 5.6 Terra page and find the prompt box.
2. Set a system prompt to fix the role, for example "You are a workflow consultant who recommends ChatGPT plugins."
3. Write your prompt with the job, the tools you already use and the output you want, such as a table of five plugins with one first request each.
4. Leave reasoning effort on none for fast replies. Move to low or medium for comparisons, and to high only for hard problems, raising the max completion tokens so the answer is not cut short.
5. Pick verbosity: low for a short shortlist, high for a detailed plan.
6. Attach a screenshot through image input if you want it to read your current setup.

💡 Tip: If you use the messages format for a running conversation, the prompt and system prompt fields are ignored, so put your instructions inside the first message.

Once the brief is ready, turn it into pictures and clips. These models are all on the platform:

Pick one idea from this list and make it real today. Ask a plugin to gather the facts, let GPT 5.6 Terra turn them into a script, then open Picasso IA and generate the hero image and a short clip for it. Try three different models on the same prompt and compare the results side by side. That small experiment teaches you more about image and video generation than any list can.