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See also: List of ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugins and Plugins
ChatGPT Plugin Categories is an index of the topical groupings used to organize third-party plugins that extended ChatGPT during the 2023 to 2024 plugin era operated by OpenAI. The plugin program let outside developers connect their services to ChatGPT through a manifest file and an OpenAPI specification, allowing the chatbot to call live APIs, fetch real-time information, and act on behalf of users. The plugin store and the broader ChatGPT Plugins framework were officially deprecated by OpenAI on April 9, 2024, and were superseded by Custom GPTs and the GPT Store, which were announced at OpenAI's first DevDay on November 6, 2023. This page treats the category list as a historical reference and remains useful for tracing how the early ecosystem of large language model tool-use was first organized for end users.
At its peak in late 2023 the ChatGPT plugin store offered roughly one thousand plugins spread across more than sixty categories, ranging from Academic Research and Cybersecurity to Travel and Weather. Many of those categories survive in altered form within the GPT Store today, but the underlying plugin architecture (manifest plus OpenAPI plus user opt-in) was retired in favor of native Actions inside individual GPTs.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023 in a blog post titled "ChatGPT plugins," describing the feature as the company's "first plugins" for the chatbot and characterizing them as a way to help ChatGPT "access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services." The initial alpha launched with a small slate of partner integrations including Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier, plus two first-party plugins from OpenAI: a code interpreter and a browsing tool. Access was gated behind a waitlist and rolled out gradually to ChatGPT Plus subscribers throughout the spring of 2023.
In mid-May 2023 OpenAI broadened access. On May 12, 2023 the company announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all Plus subscribers the following week, and on May 19, 2023 the plugin store opened to all ChatGPT Plus customers, making the catalog of third-party plugins generally accessible. By the second half of 2023 the store had grown to several hundred plugins organized into the categories listed below, with a public discovery interface inside ChatGPT.
On November 6, 2023 OpenAI held its inaugural DevDay conference in San Francisco. There, chief executive Sam Altman introduced GPTs (custom versions of ChatGPT that anyone could build without code) and the upcoming GPT Store. The accompanying blog post, "Introducing GPTs," described GPTs as a successor concept that combined custom instructions, knowledge files, and Actions (the new name for plugin-style API calls) inside a single shareable assistant. OpenAI told developers the same day that plugins would be deprecated in favor of GPTs, and the plugin store stopped accepting new submissions shortly afterward.
The deprecation completed on April 9, 2024. On that date OpenAI disabled the plugin store and ended new conversations with plugins, leaving only existing conversations able to reference plugins through the end of their session window. The official help-center notice titled "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta" pointed users and developers to GPTs and the GPT Store for equivalent functionality.
The ChatGPT plugin system used a relatively thin specification on top of standard web technologies. A developer who wanted to publish a plugin needed to host two artifacts on their domain:
ai-plugin.json, served at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json. The manifest declared metadata such as the human-readable name, a description for humans, a description for the model, the authentication scheme, the URL of the OpenAPI specification, and contact and legal information.When a user enabled a plugin in ChatGPT, the model was given the natural-language description of the plugin and a compact representation of its OpenAPI surface. During a conversation the model could decide that a user request matched a plugin's capabilities, generate a structured request, and call the plugin endpoint over HTTPS. The plugin returned data (typically JSON), which ChatGPT would then summarize back to the user. Authentication options included no auth, service-level API keys, user-level API keys, and OAuth.
Users reached plugins through the ChatGPT Plus interface. After selecting the GPT-4 model, a user could open the plugin store, install up to three plugins per conversation, and toggle them on. The chatbot would then route relevant requests through those plugins automatically.
OpenAI gave several public reasons for sunsetting plugins in favor of GPTs and Actions:
The Actions framework that powers GPTs is a near-direct evolution of plugin infrastructure. It still uses an OpenAPI specification and supports the same authentication options, so most plugin developers were able to port their backends to a GPT with limited code changes.
The table below lists every plugin category that has a corresponding article on this wiki. Each entry links to the dedicated category page where notable plugins are catalogued. Categories are presented in alphabetical order.
| Category | Topical scope | Example plugins documented on this wiki |
|---|---|---|
| Academic Research | Scholarly search, citation lookup, and access to research databases | See category page |
| Advertising | Ad copy generation, campaign analysis, and ad-platform integrations | See category page |
| App Development | Mobile and desktop application building tools | See category page |
| Art | Art history references, image generation helpers, and creative prompts | See category page |
| Artificial Intelligence | Plugins that wrap other AI services such as image, audio, or text models | See category page |
| Beverage | Cocktail recipes, wine pairings, and drink discovery | See category page |
| Business | Productivity, planning, and business intelligence integrations | See category page |
| Cars | Vehicle research, listings, and automotive trivia | See category page |
| Charity | Nonprofit discovery, donation tooling, and fundraising | See category page |
| Collectibles | Trading cards, memorabilia, and collectible market data | See category page |
| Cryptocurrency | Crypto prices, on-chain analytics, and wallet helpers | See category page |
| Cybersecurity | Threat intelligence, vulnerability lookups, and security tooling | See category page |
| Data Analysis | Statistical computation, dataset exploration, and reporting | See category page |
| Data Visualization | Chart generation, dashboard creation, and rendering helpers | See category page |
| Design | Graphic design, UX inspiration, and asset libraries | See category page |
| Digital Media | Streaming, content libraries, and media metadata | See category page |
| E-Commerce | Online shopping integrations, price comparison, and storefronts | BuyWisely (ChatGPT Plugin) |
| Education | Tutors, course catalogs, and learning resource discovery | See category page |
| Entertainment | Movies, television, comedy, and lifestyle entertainment | See category page |
| Environment | Climate data, sustainability tooling, and conservation references | See category page |
| Fashion | Style advice, apparel search, and trend tracking | See category page |
| Finance | Stock data, accounting, lending, and budgeting tools | See category page |
| Food | Recipes, restaurants, and grocery integrations | See category page |
| Gaming | Video game databases, esports stats, and gaming companions | See category page |
| Geography | Maps, gazetteers, and place lookups | See category page |
| Health | Wellness, fitness tracking, medical references, and symptom helpers | See category page |
| Internet | Web utilities, browsing helpers, and online tools | See category page |
| IT Management | Infrastructure monitoring, ticketing, and operations tooling | See category page |
| Language Learning | Vocabulary trainers, translators, and language tutors | See category page |
| Law | Statute lookups, case research, and legal citation | See category page |
| Legal | Contract drafting, policy summaries, and compliance helpers | See category page |
| Lifestyle | Habits, hobbies, dating, and home life | See category page |
| Marketing | Email tools, audience analysis, and content marketing | See category page |
| Media | News aggregation, broadcast metadata, and editorial workflow | See category page |
| Music | Lyrics, music theory, streaming, and audio production | See category page |
| News | Headline aggregation, news search, and journalism utilities | See category page |
| Photography | Photo editing helpers, stock libraries, and camera references | See category page |
| Podcasts | Podcast discovery, transcripts, and audio summaries | See category page |
| Politics | Voting records, legislative tracking, and political analysis | See category page |
| Productivity | Calendars, to-do lists, note-taking, and workflow automation | See category page |
| Programming | Code search, language references, and developer utilities | See category page |
| Real Estate | Listings, valuations, and property analytics | See category page |
| Religion | Scripture lookup, theology, and faith resources | See category page |
| Science | Scientific data, units, and research helpers | See category page |
| Search Engine | Web search wrappers and specialized search engines | See category page |
| Self-Improvement | Habit building, mindfulness, and personal growth | See category page |
| SEO | Keyword research, audits, and link analysis | See category page |
| Shopping | Retail discovery and purchase assistance | See category page |
| Social Media | Social platform analytics, scheduling, and content tools | See category page |
| Software | General software tools and SaaS integrations | See category page |
| Software Development | DevOps, testing, and code-management tooling | See category page |
| Space | Astronomy, satellite data, and space exploration references | See category page |
| Sports | Game schedules, statistics, and sports media | See category page |
| Technology | Hardware, gadgets, and broad tech utilities | Speechki (ChatGPT Plugin) |
| Transportation | Public transit, ride-sharing, and logistics | See category page |
| Travel | Flights, hotels, itineraries, and destination guides | See category page |
| Weather | Forecasts, climate alerts, and meteorological data | See category page |
| Web Development | Frontend and backend web tooling | See category page |
| Web Services | Hosting, APIs, and cloud-service helpers | See category page |
| Writing | Editing, grammar, and content drafting | See category page |
The following bulleted list preserves the original alphabetical index of categories that this page first carried. Each link points to a dedicated category article that catalogs the plugins published in that area.
While the List of ChatGPT Plugins provides the full catalog tracked on this wiki, a small number of plugins serve as useful exemplars of what each broad category looked like in practice.
The E-Commerce category covered shopping, comparison, and merchant integrations. A representative entry is the BuyWisely (ChatGPT Plugin), released on May 20, 2023, which compared prices and surfaced offers from thousands of online shops in Australia. Other widely cited e-commerce plugins from the launch lineup included Shopify, which let merchants surface their stores inside ChatGPT, and Klarna, which provided a price comparison and product search experience.
The Technology category collected hardware, gadget, and broadly technical utilities. The Speechki (ChatGPT Plugin), also released on May 20, 2023, is a representative example: it converted ChatGPT text output into ready-to-use audio, returning a download link, an audio player page, or an embeddable player.
In the launch slate, Instacart was a high-profile food and grocery plugin that let users ask about recipes, identify the ingredients they needed, and order them from local stores in the United States. Although the wiki tracks this kind of plugin under the broader Food Delivery rubric, it remains a canonical example of how a major retail brand used the plugin protocol.
Travel was one of the most heavily represented categories at launch, with Expedia, Kayak, and OpenTable all participating in the alpha. These plugins let ChatGPT search flights, hotels, and restaurant reservations directly through partner APIs, and they were widely cited in coverage of the plugin announcement as evidence that mainstream consumer brands were willing to integrate with a chatbot interface.
Wolfram (sometimes called Wolfram Alpha) was the canonical computation plugin. It exposed Wolfram's symbolic, mathematical, and curated-data engine to ChatGPT and was held up by OpenAI in the initial blog post as an example of how plugins could give a language model access to authoritative computation that the base model could not do reliably on its own.
Zapier let ChatGPT trigger thousands of automated workflows across other software, and Slack let teams summarize channel activity. Both plugins were cited at launch as evidence that the plugin store was aimed at workplace productivity as well as consumer use cases.
At OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023, the company introduced two products that together replaced plugins:
Developers who maintained ChatGPT plugins in 2023 generally migrated their backends to Actions during the winter of 2023 to 2024. Because the OpenAPI surface remained largely the same, the migration was usually a matter of repackaging the plugin behind a new GPT rather than reimplementing the underlying API.
The GPT Store officially opened on January 10, 2024, with categories for writing, productivity, research, programming, education, and lifestyle, among others. Many of the plugin categories cataloged on this page have a clear analog in the GPT Store taxonomy, although the GPT Store's groupings are coarser and there is no longer a one-to-one mapping between the older plugin categories and the newer GPT categories.
Reception of the plugin program was mixed. Industry coverage at launch in March 2023 (in outlets including The Verge, TechCrunch, Reuters, and Wired) framed plugins as a major step toward turning ChatGPT into a general-purpose assistant. Commentators compared the plugin store to the iPhone App Store, and several pieces speculated that ChatGPT might become a dominant platform for consumer software discovery.
By the second half of 2023 the tone had shifted. Reviewers and developers raised three recurring concerns:
OpenAI's pivot to GPTs at DevDay 2023 was widely interpreted as a response to these criticisms. By packaging instructions, knowledge, and Actions inside a single named assistant, OpenAI shifted discovery away from a plugin marketplace and toward a marketplace of named applications, which the company argued would be easier for users to navigate.
The ChatGPT plugin era left a lasting mark on the broader large language model ecosystem in several ways: