Claude Skills vs. Prompts, Projects, MCP & Subagents
Claude Skills vs Prompts vs Projects vs MCP vs Subagents: when to use which in 2025
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Since the launch of Skills, there has been significant interest in understanding how the various components of Claude’s agentic ecosystem work together. Whether you’re building complex workflows in Claude Code, creating enterprise solutions using the API, or enhancing productivity on Claude.ai, knowing when to use which tool can fundamentally transform how you collaborate with Claude.
This guide will break down each building block, explain when to use what, and demonstrate how to combine them to achieve powerful agentic workflows.
What are Skills?
Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude dynamically discovers and loads when they’re relevant to a task. Think of them as specialised training manuals that provide Claude with domain-specific expertise—from handling Excel spreadsheets to following your organisation’s brand guidelines.
How Skills work:
When Claude encounters a task, it scans available Skills to find relevant matches. Skills use progressive disclosure: metadata is loaded first (approximately 100 tokens), providing enough information for Claude to know when a Skill is relevant. Full instructions are loaded when needed (under 5K tokens), while bundled files or scripts are only loaded when required.
When to use Skills:
Choose Skills when you need Claude to consistently and efficiently perform specialised tasks. They’re ideal for:
Organisational workflows: Brand guidelines, compliance procedures, document templates
Domain expertise: Excel formulas, PDF processing, data analysis
Personal preferences: Note-taking systems, coding patterns, research methods