Claude becomes significantly more useful when it can work with the tools and information you already use every day.
Without connectors, Claude mostly works with what you paste, upload, or tell it. With connectors, it can securely access information from connected apps and, where supported, take actions inside those services.
For example, Claude can search your emails, find documents in Google Drive, check your calendar, search Slack conversations, create tasks in Asana, or work with a GitHub repository.
Claude’s connector directory has grown to more than 200 connectors, covering productivity, communication, design, finance, healthcare, data and many other categories.
But you don’t need to connect everything. The real benefit comes from choosing the connectors that match the way you work.
Below are 10 of the most useful connectors to consider, particularly if you use Claude for work, research, productivity, content creation or software development.
What Are Connectors in Claude?
Before looking at individual connectors, it’s worth understanding what a connector actually does.
A connector acts as a bridge between Claude and another application. Once you authenticate the connection, Claude can use the capabilities exposed by that service. Depending on the connector, this could mean searching information, reading documents, creating records, updating tasks, sending messages or performing other actions.
For example, imagine that you ask:
“Find the latest document about our Q4 marketing strategy and summarize the changes from the previous version.”
If Google Drive is connected, Claude can search your Drive, locate the relevant documents and use their contents to answer you instead of requiring you to manually find and upload them.
This is the fundamental difference:
Without a connector, you bring the information to Claude. With a connector, Claude can retrieve relevant information from the service when your request requires it.
1. Google Drive — Your Personal Knowledge Base
If you work with documents regularly, Google Drive is one of the first connectors worth setting up.
Google Drive connects Claude to your Docs, Sheets and Slides, allowing Claude to search and retrieve information from your files. It can also organize files, create folders and, where supported, move, share or trash files—with approval requested by default for actions that change your Drive.
This can turn Claude into something resembling a searchable AI assistant for your personal or company documents. Instead of spending ten minutes searching through folders, you can ask:
- “Find the latest product roadmap and summarize the three biggest changes.”
- Or: “Search my meeting notes from this month and list every action item assigned to me.”
- Or: “Find our previous proposals for enterprise customers and identify the pricing structure we used.”
Why it is useful
The biggest advantage is that your documents don’t have to remain isolated from your AI workflow. Claude can work across multiple relevant files and synthesize information from them.
For researchers, consultants, writers, students, managers and business owners, this can be one of the most useful connectors in the entire ecosystem.
2. Gmail — Turn Your Inbox Into an AI Workspace
Email is one of the biggest sources of information overload. Important decisions, instructions, attachments, deadlines and conversations can be buried inside hundreds or thousands of messages.
The Gmail connector allows Claude to search emails, summarize conversations, identify relevant information and help draft, reply to, forward and send messages. Claude normally asks for approval before sending or changing things on your behalf.
Instead of manually searching for an old conversation, you can ask:
- “Find the emails from the client about the revised project deadline.”
- Or: “Summarize everything the marketing team discussed about the product launch this week.”
You can even use Claude to identify follow-ups:
“Which important emails from last week haven’t received a response from me?”
A particularly useful workflow
Gmail becomes even more powerful when combined with other connectors.
For example:
Gmail → Google Calendar → Google Drive
You could ask:
“Find the client’s latest email about tomorrow’s meeting, check the meeting details in my calendar, and find the relevant proposal in Drive. Give me a five-minute briefing.”
That’s much more powerful than simply asking an AI chatbot to summarize an email.
3. Google Calendar — Let Claude Manage Your Schedule
Google Calendar is another extremely practical connector, especially for people who spend a large part of their day in meetings.
Claude can view calendars, find available times, create and update events, manage invitations, RSVP to meetings and help coordinate schedules. It can also create meetings with options such as Google Meet links and conference-room bookings where available.
Instead of opening your calendar and manually comparing everyone’s availability, you can ask: “Find a 30-minute slot when Sarah, James and I are all available this week.” Or: “What meetings do I have tomorrow, and what documents should I review before each one?”
Why this changes the way you work
The real advantage isn’t simply creating calendar events. It’s allowing Claude to connect time + information + tasks.
For example: “I have a product meeting tomorrow. Find the relevant emails, pull the latest product document from Drive, and tell me what I should prepare.” Claude can use the calendar to understand what is happening and other connected services to determine what you need to know.
4. Slack — Give Claude Access to Your Team’s Conversations
For organizations that live inside Slack, this may be one of the most valuable connectors available. Slack conversations contain an enormous amount of information that never makes it into formal documents. Decisions, discussions, customer feedback, project updates and quick instructions often exist only in channels and threads.
The Slack connector allows Claude to search and retrieve messages, channels, threads, files and users. It can also draft messages and, where supported, send or schedule them.
- You could ask: “What decisions were made about the product launch this week?”
- Or: “Search the engineering channels for discussions about the login problem and summarize the proposed solutions.”
- Or: “Draft a message to the marketing team summarizing today’s decisions.”
The real value: finding lost context. Think about how often someone says: “I know we discussed this somewhere in Slack.” Finding that conversation manually can take ages.
With the connector, Claude can become the layer that searches through that conversational history and turns scattered discussions into a concise answer.
Slack also has newer interactive capabilities in Claude, allowing supported connectors to display interactive experiences directly within conversations.
5. Notion — Turn Your Company Wiki Into an AI Knowledge Base
If your organization uses Notion as its knowledge base, project-management system or company wiki, connecting it to Claude can be extremely powerful. Claude can search Notion pages, create pages, update content and modify page properties.
Imagine asking:
- “Find all the project pages mentioning ‘ready for development’ and summarize their current status.”
- Or: “Create a meeting-notes page for today’s meeting with decisions and action items.”
This changes Notion from simply being a place where information is stored into something Claude can actively work with.
Notion + Claude Skills
This is particularly interesting if you’re learning about Claude Skills. Anthropic specifically highlights workflows combining Notion with Skills for areas such as meeting intelligence, research and documentation, knowledge capture and turning product specifications into implementation tasks.
For example: Meeting → Claude → Notion
Claude can gather relevant information, prepare meeting material and then save structured notes and decisions back into Notion. That is much closer to an AI-powered workflow than a traditional chatbot.
6. GitHub — Essential for Developers
If you write software, GitHub is arguably one of the most useful connectors you can add.
Instead of copying code from your repository into a Claude conversation, you can connect Claude to your GitHub repositories and give it relevant context about the codebase. Claude’s current GitHub integration allows you to select repositories, files and folders for use in chats and projects.
This is particularly useful for questions such as:
- “Explain how authentication works in this repository.”
- “Find where user permissions are handled.”
- “Look through these files and identify potential causes of this bug.”
- “Summarize the architecture of this project.”
Why repository context matters
A coding assistant that sees one file can give you suggestions. An AI that understands the relationship between multiple files and the broader repository can reason about the application much more effectively.
GitHub therefore becomes particularly valuable for:
- Codebase exploration
- Debugging
- Documentation
- Code reviews
- Understanding unfamiliar projects
- Finding related implementations
- Planning changes
For developers, this is one connector worth experimenting with early.
7. Microsoft 365 — The Best Choice for Microsoft-Based Workplaces
Not every organization runs on Google Workspace. If your company uses Microsoft 365, the Microsoft 365 connector brings SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams into Claude. Claude can search and analyze documents, review email conversations, examine calendar information and retrieve context from Teams.
For example: “Find the Q4 strategy documents in SharePoint and summarize the major priorities.” Or: “Review the emails about the product launch and list unresolved issues.” Or: “Summarize yesterday’s Teams discussion about the new campaign.”
Depending on your organization’s configuration, write capabilities can also allow Claude to perform actions such as drafting or sending emails, managing calendar events and creating or updating files. These capabilities are administrator-controlled.
Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?
You don’t need both unless your work actually spans both ecosystems. If your organization primarily uses:
Google → Gmail + Calendar + Drive
If your organization primarily uses:
Microsoft → Outlook + Teams + SharePoint + OneDrive
For many companies, this single choice determines which connector ecosystem will be most useful.
8. Asana — Turn Conversations Into Actual Work
There’s a major difference between an AI that talks about work and an AI that can help organize the work. Asana’s Claude connector lets Claude search, create, update and track tasks, projects and goals. It can also turn conversations into structured projects, tasks, owners and timelines.
For example, after discussing a product launch, you could say:
- “Turn everything we’ve discussed into an Asana project with tasks, owners and deadlines.”
- Or: “What tasks are due today?”
- Or:”Give me a status update on the product launch project.”
Why this connector stands out? A common problem with AI assistants is the gap between planning and execution. You have a conversation about ten things that need to happen. Then someone has to manually create ten tasks. Asana helps close that gap.
The conversation can become:
Idea → Plan → Tasks → Owners → Deadlines
Asana is also currently listed among Claude’s interactive connectors, meaning supported workflows can display and interact with the connected experience directly inside Claude.
9. Linear — A Powerful Connector for Product and Engineering Teams
If your team uses Linear rather than Asana, this is one of the connectors you should investigate. Linear allows Claude to manage issues, projects and team workflows using natural language. Claude can create and assign issues, analyze existing issues, track development work and help coordinate releases.
- For example: “Create a high-priority bug for the login problem and assign it to the onboarding team.”
- Or: “Analyze the open issues related to the mobile app and identify the most common problem.”
- Or: “Create a release-preparation checklist for version 2.3.”
Why developers and product managers should care
Linear sits much closer to the actual software-development workflow than a general-purpose productivity application. When combined with GitHub, it becomes even more interesting:
- GitHub = code
- Linear = issues and product work
- Claude = reasoning layer between them
You could use Claude to understand an issue in Linear, investigate relevant code in GitHub and help turn the findings into an actionable development plan.
10. Canva — Turn Ideas Into Actual Designs
Canva is perhaps the most interesting connector on this list for marketers, content creators, social-media managers and non-designers. The Canva connector allows Claude to search, create, autofill and export Canva designs directly from a prompt. It can also help create presentations and work with branded templates.
Instead of saying: “Give me five ideas for a presentation.” you can go further:
- “Create a five-slide pitch deck for our AI product launch using our brand template.”
- Or: “Resize this design for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.”
- Or: “Create a presentation from this product brief using our brand guidelines.”
Canva is also one of Claude’s current interactive connectors, allowing users to work with supported designs directly within the Claude experience.
Why this is important
This illustrates where connectors are heading. The AI isn’t merely generating instructions for another application. It can increasingly coordinate the work between applications. For example:
Claude → Research → Canva → Presentation
Instead of researching something in one application, writing the presentation in another and manually designing it in Canva, connected workflows can bring those stages closer together.
Which Connectors Should You Install First?
You don’t need all ten.
The best starting point depends on what you do.
| If you are… | Start with… |
| A general professional | Google Drive + Gmail + Calendar |
| A Google Workspace user | Drive + Gmail + Calendar |
| A Microsoft 365 user | Microsoft 365 |
| A developer | GitHub + Linear |
| A project manager | Asana + Slack + Drive/Notion |
| A content creator | Canva + Drive |
| A researcher | Drive + Notion |
| A startup founder | Gmail + Calendar + Drive + Slack |
| A marketing professional | Canva + Slack + Drive + Asana |
| A product manager | Linear/Asana + Slack + GitHub + Notion |
The important thing is not the number of connectors you have installed. It is whether the connectors give Claude access to the information and systems you actually use.
Are Claude Connectors Safe?
This is an important question because connectors can give an AI access to potentially sensitive information.
The good news is that connectors are designed around the permissions you already have in the connected service. Claude’s documentation states that it inherits your permissions—for example, if you don’t have access to a private file, channel or record in the original system, the connector should not give Claude access to it.
Google Workspace connectors similarly state that Claude can access only the data available to the connected Google account and retrieves information when you ask a question requiring it.
However, you should still treat connectors seriously. Before connecting an account, consider:
- What information does this service contain?
- Does Claude need access to all of it?
- What actions can the connector perform?
- Does the connector require approval before making changes?
- Is it an official connector or a third-party connector?
- Does your company have policies governing AI access to business data?
This last point is especially important because not every connector in Claude’s directory is made by Anthropic. Anthropic says the directory includes connectors built and maintained by third-party developers using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and each provider has its own terms and privacy policy.
So don’t blindly connect every application you see.
Connectors vs Skills: What’s the Difference?
If you’ve been following the Claude ecosystem, you may also have heard about Skills. The two serve different purposes. A Connector gives Claude access to an external application or data source. A Skill teaches Claude how to perform a particular type of task.
For example:
Google Drive Connector: “Here are the documents you have access to.”
Research Skill: “Here’s how you should research a topic, evaluate sources and structure your findings.”
Combine the two and you get something much more powerful: “Search our research documents in Drive, apply my research workflow, identify the important findings and create a structured report.”
Anthropic also supports combining Skills and connectors in workflows. The Notion connector, for example, highlights several Skills designed to work with Notion for meeting intelligence, research and documentation, knowledge capture and product-specification workflows.
Remote Connectors vs Desktop Extensions
Not every connection works in exactly the same way. Anthropic currently distinguishes between remote connectors and desktop extensions.
Remote connectors are generally used for cloud services such as Slack, Notion, Linear and GitHub and can work across Claude’s supported surfaces. Desktop extensions are intended for tools that run locally on your computer or require local operating-system access, such as local files or databases.
For most users, this distinction doesn’t matter much—you simply connect the service you need. But it becomes important if you’re trying to connect Claude to something that exists only on your computer rather than in the cloud.
How to Get Started With Claude Connectors
Getting started is relatively straightforward. In Claude, open the Customize area and go to Connectors. Anthropic’s unified directory lets you browse available connectors and add the ones you need.
Once a connector is authenticated, Claude can automatically determine when it needs to use that service for a request. You don’t necessarily have to mention the connector by name every time. Anthropic says Claude can suggest or use a connected app when it matches the context of what you’re asking.
A good approach is to start with one or two connectors. Try real tasks and then gradually build workflows around them.
Final Thoughts: Connect Claude to the Work You Already Do
The biggest promise of Claude connectors isn’t that Claude can suddenly access another app. It’s that the boundaries between your applications start to disappear.
- Your emails are in Gmail.
- Your documents are in Drive.
- Your conversations are in Slack.
- Your tasks are in Asana.
- Your code is in GitHub.
- Your knowledge base is in Notion.
- Your designs are in Canva.
Normally, you are the person moving information between all of these systems. Connectors allow Claude to become the layer that helps find, understand, transform and act on that information.
If you’re just getting started, don’t install all 10 at once. Start with the services you use every day—Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Slack, Notion or Microsoft 365—and then add specialized connectors such as GitHub, Linear, Asana or Canva when your workflow demands them.
The goal isn’t to give Claude access to everything. The goal is to give Claude access to the right things.
And once you combine the right connectors with well-designed Claude Skills, you can move from asking an AI questions to building workflows where Claude can actually help you get the work done.
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