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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Software
Software ChatGPT Plugins were a broad category of third-party extensions inside ChatGPT that connected the chatbot to general purpose software products and software-as-a-service platforms. Unlike the narrower Software Development ChatGPT Plugins category, which focused on tools used by engineers to manage code, repositories, and pipelines, the Software category covered everyday business software: workflow automation hubs, messaging platforms, customer relationship managers, e-commerce backends, low-code application builders, and the surrounding ecosystem of SaaS products. The category was active during the ChatGPT plugin beta from March 2023 until the platform was deprecated on April 9, 2024, when OpenAI wound down third-party plugins in favor of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.
During the live era, plugins in this group were the closest the plugin store came to general business productivity. Many of the launch partners on March 23, 2023 fell into this category, including Zapier, Slack, Shopify, and Klarna. Independent developers later filled out the catalog with integrations for project trackers, CRMs, no-code platforms, and document tools.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023, describing them as tools designed specifically for language models that help ChatGPT access information, run computations, or use third-party services. Out of the dozen plugins in the initial cohort, more than half belonged to the broad Software category as it was later understood: Zapier for cross-application automation, Slack for workplace messaging, Shopify for e-commerce, Klarna for shopping, and Wolfram for computation. The remaining launch partners covered travel, food delivery, language learning, and a regulatory news service.
Access opened in alpha to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and waitlisted developers. On May 12, 2023, OpenAI rolled out plugins broadly to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers, with around 70 plugins available at the start of the beta. The catalog grew rapidly and reached more than one thousand plugins by late 2023.
On November 6, 2023, at the first OpenAI DevDay, the company introduced GPTs, a way to build customized versions of ChatGPT for specific tasks. GPTs supported the same kind of external tool calls that plugins offered but bundled instructions, knowledge files, and Actions into a single shareable artifact. Users could no longer install new plugins or start fresh plugin conversations after March 19, 2024, and existing plugin conversations stopped working on April 9, 2024. The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | ChatGPT plugins announced with initial software partners including Zapier, Slack, Shopify, and Klarna |
| May 12, 2023 | Plugins rolled out broadly to ChatGPT Plus, around 70 plugins live at start |
| Mid-2023 | Plugin store grows to several hundred entries; software category expands with no-code, CRM, and document tools |
| November 6, 2023 | GPTs unveiled at OpenAI DevDay |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens with categories that absorb many former plugin categories |
| March 19, 2024 | New plugin installs and conversations disabled |
| April 9, 2024 | Existing plugin conversations stopped working |
The Software category sat next to several adjacent categories in the plugin directory, including Productivity ChatGPT Plugins, Software Development ChatGPT Plugins, Web Services, IT Management, and Business. Plugin authors frequently tagged a single product against more than one category so it would surface in multiple filters. The OpenAI Plugin Store carried no formal taxonomy, so categories were a best-effort labeling exercise.
The distinction between Software and the related categories generally followed these lines:
| Category | Primary focus |
|---|---|
| Software | General SaaS products, business software, and packaged tool integrations |
| Software Development | Engineering tooling such as repository hosts, CI systems, and issue trackers |
| Productivity | Personal task management, document review, calendars, and email |
| Web Services | Hosting, APIs, and cloud service helpers |
| IT Management | Network monitoring, device fleets, and system administration |
A plugin like Zapier was cross-listed under Software, Productivity, and IT Management because it could connect to any of those domains. The boundaries were porous, and most third-party roundups during 2023 treated the Software, Productivity, and Business categories as overlapping rather than mutually exclusive.
The plugins below were verified to have shipped in the OpenAI Plugin Store between March 2023 and the March 2024 freeze on new plugin sessions. Each entry describes behavior during that beta period; none of these plugins remain available through ChatGPT today in their original form, and most authors have either migrated to Custom GPTs, GPT Actions, Model Context Protocol servers, or native integrations inside their host platforms.
The Zapier plugin was a launch partner on March 23, 2023, and became the most prominent Software-category plugin during the entire beta. It connected ChatGPT to more than 5,000 applications through Zapier's existing automation graph. From inside a ChatGPT conversation, a user could ask the assistant to draft and send an email through Gmail, add a row to Google Sheets, post a message in Slack, create a task in Trello or Asana, push a record into HubSpot or Salesforce, or run any other Zap that already existed in the user's account.
Zapier formally retired the ChatGPT plugin on April 9, 2024, alongside the rest of the platform, and pointed users to its newer Zapier Central and Zapier AI Actions interfaces, which integrated with Custom GPTs through GPT Actions.
The Slack plugin was the second major workplace integration announced in the launch wave. Through the plugin, users could ask ChatGPT to summarize a Slack channel or thread, search past message history, draft a reply in a chosen tone, generate a status update, or compose meeting notes from a recent conversation. The integration was developed in partnership with Salesforce, which acquired Slack in 2021. After the plugin shut down, the same use cases moved into the native Slack AI product and into Salesforce Einstein Copilot.
Shopify shipped a launch-day plugin that let consumers search across the storefronts of merchants who had opted in. A user could ask ChatGPT for a product recommendation; the plugin would surface listings from participating Shopify stores along with prices and direct purchase links. Shopify later collaborated with OpenAI on more deeply integrated commerce experiences, including the Instant Checkout feature that brought direct purchasing into ChatGPT in 2025 through the Agentic Commerce Protocol.
Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later financial services company, was a launch partner on March 23, 2023. Its plugin functioned as a personal shopping assistant that searched across Klarna's catalog of approximately 500,000 retail partners. A user could describe an item; the plugin returned a curated list of products with prices, retailer names, and links. Klarna positioned the integration as a way to bring conversational shopping into ChatGPT and to highlight its own role as a price comparison and product discovery layer above traditional online stores.
Microsoft's Power Automate plugin connected ChatGPT to the Power Platform's automation library. Users could trigger workflows that touched the company's 1,000-plus connector list, including Office 365, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and many third-party services. The plugin appealed to enterprise users who already paid for Microsoft 365 and wanted a chat-based front end for routine processes such as approval workflows, document routing, and scheduled reports. Microsoft later folded these capabilities into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio.
Bardeen released a ChatGPT plugin during the beta that let users invoke the company's library of pre-built browser automations from inside a chat. A user could type a request such as summarizing the contents of the current page and saving the result into a Google Doc; the plugin would map the request to a matching Bardeen playbook and provide a link to run it. Bardeen integrated with widely used SaaS products including Google Sheets, Notion, HubSpot, and Slack.
KonnectzIT, Back4App, and Directual were three no-code or low-code platform plugins that filled smaller niches in the Software category. KonnectzIT focused on connecting marketing, CRM, payment, and ticketing tools at a smaller scale than Zapier or Power Automate. Back4App, a hosted backend-as-a-service company, let users create, deploy, and scale applications and databases through natural language. Directual emphasized full-stack web and Web3 application launches with built-in database, hosting, and authentication. All three were early examples of conversational interfaces to platform-as-a-service products, a pattern that later matured in dedicated AI development environments.
A cluster of business software plugins targeted specific work surfaces. Close CRM let sales users access lead data and ask ChatGPT to summarize a contact's recent activity; other CRMs were reachable indirectly through Zapier, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. The JIRA Issue Helper plugin let users create, read, update, and delete Atlassian Jira issues from inside a ChatGPT conversation. Gerev AI was an enterprise search plugin marketed as a search engine for an organization's internal knowledge, connecting to corporate document stores, wikis, and message archives so that ChatGPT could answer questions grounded in private content.
The value of Software-category plugins came less from any single tool than from chains of actions invoked from a single chat. Common workflows reported in launch coverage and user write-ups included the following:
| Workflow | Plugins typically used |
|---|---|
| Draft a marketing email and push it to a CRM | Zapier plus a CRM plugin |
| Summarize a Slack channel and create a follow-up task | Slack plus Zapier or Bardeen |
| Search a product catalog and place an order | Klarna or Shopify |
| Trigger an enterprise approval flow from a chat | Power Automate |
| Spin up a backend from a plain English description | Back4App or Directual |
| Search an organization's internal knowledge | Gerev AI |
Users could install up to three plugins simultaneously in a single conversation, which encouraged combinations such as a CRM plugin plus an automation hub plus a document reader. The three-plugin cap was a recurring source of user frustration because many useful workflows required more than three integrations to complete a task end to end.
Industry coverage of the launch in March 2023 framed plugins as a major step toward turning ChatGPT into a general-purpose assistant. Outlets including The Verge, TechCrunch, Reuters, and Wired compared the plugin store to the iPhone App Store. Software-category plugins received special attention in this coverage because they hinted at a future in which ChatGPT could substitute for a worker switching between business applications.
By the second half of 2023 the tone had shifted. Reviewers and developers raised three recurring concerns. Plugins frequently failed to invoke correctly, returned errors, or were used inappropriately by the model. With more than a thousand plugins in the store and only a flat list to browse, users struggled to find the right plugin for a given task. The three-plugin per chat limit made combinations awkward and forced users to plan their plugin selection ahead of a conversation. OpenAI's pivot to GPTs at DevDay 2023 was widely interpreted as a response to these criticisms.
The Software-category plugins shut down on the same date as the rest of the plugin platform, April 9, 2024. OpenAI gave several overlapping reasons for the wider decision, all of which applied to this category in particular.
The Software category did not vanish so much as migrate. The same use cases now run through a different stack of products.
| Successor | Role |
|---|---|
| Custom GPTs with GPT Actions | OpenAPI-based tool calls bundled into named assistants |
| ChatGPT native connectors | Built-in integrations for Gmail, Google Drive, SharePoint, and similar |
| Vendor-native AI features | Slack AI, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, Notion AI, HubSpot AI |
| Zapier Central and AI Actions | Conversational interface to Zapier's automation graph |
| Model Context Protocol servers | Open cross-vendor protocol that lets one integration work with many AI clients |
Many plugin authors chose to ship a Custom GPT after the deprecation, which let them keep most of their existing OpenAPI surface and reuse their authentication. Others moved their integration logic into the broader Model Context Protocol ecosystem, an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024. For business software vendors, the larger trend has been to embed AI directly into their own products rather than maintain a presence in someone else's chatbot.