Lovable Skills vs Knowledge: What's the Difference?
Both extend what Lovable can do, but they solve very different problems. Use this guide to decide which one to reach for — and when to use both together.
TL;DR
- Skills give Lovable new abilities: a workflow, integration, or procedural know-how it didn't have out of the box.
- Knowledge gives Lovable context about your project: facts, design rules, naming conventions, business logic.
- Skills change what Lovable can do. Knowledge changes how it does it.
What is a Lovable Skill?
A Skill is a packaged capability: instructions, optional code, and a small contract that tells Lovable how to perform a task end-to-end. Think of it as installing a new tool in the agent's toolbox — Stripe checkout, Resend transactional email, a Supabase RLS audit, an SEO scan. Skills are reusable across projects, versioned independently, and discovered via the catalog at /skills. The full breakdown of how they're structured lives in the complete guide.
What is Project Knowledge?
Knowledge is the always-on context layer for one project: your tone of voice, palette, domain entities, "never use library X", "all amounts are in EUR cents". It steers every response without you re-explaining it each turn. It's invisible — it doesn't show up as a tool the agent calls, it shapes everything the agent already does.
The mental model
Picture a new senior engineer joining your team. Skills are the playbooks pinned to the wall — "this is how we ship checkout, this is how we set up auth". Knowledge is the onboarding doc that explains the company: product, customers, conventions, what we don't do. A great engineer needs both, and so does Lovable.
When to use which
| You want… | Use |
|---|---|
| Stripe checkout in one prompt | Skill |
| "Our buttons are always rounded-2xl, never rounded-full" | Knowledge |
| Generate PDF invoices on demand | Skill |
| "Our company is called Acme, B2B SaaS, EU only" | Knowledge |
| SEO audit + fixes | Skill |
| "Voice is matter-of-fact, never marketing-speak" | Knowledge |
| Spin up a Supabase Auth flow with Google + email | Skill |
| "All amounts in cents, all dates in ISO, all IDs UUID" | Knowledge |
Using them together
The best results come from combining both. A Skill knows how to ship a Stripe integration; Knowledge tells it your pricing tiers, currency, and that VAT must be applied to EU customers. The Skill executes; Knowledge constrains. The same pattern repeats across the stack: a Resend Skill plus Knowledge of your brand voice produces transactional emails that don't feel like every other SaaS. A PostHog Skill plus Knowledge of your funnel produces events that actually map to your KPIs.
Common confusion
"Should I put my API key in Knowledge?" No. Secrets go through the secrets flow, never into Knowledge or Skills. Both are visible to anyone with access to the project.
"Can a Skill read Knowledge?" Implicitly, yes — when a Skill runs, Knowledge is already steering the agent. You don't need to wire them together.
"Where do code conventions go?" Knowledge. Conventions are project- specific. A Skill that hard-codes your conventions is less portable.
Next steps
- Read the complete Lovable Skills guide
- See the top 10 Lovable Skills of 2026
- Learn how to build your own Skill
- Compare with Claude Skills
- See the curated SaaS stack
- Browse the catalog · By category
Keep reading
More guides on Lovable & Claude Skills, picked to complement this one.
Long-form reference: structure, install, author, publish.
Ranked picks, updated quarterly.
The curated stack for B2B builders.
Step-by-step authoring tutorial.
Side-by-side comparison.
Pre-built GitHub queries to import skills.
Browse the full catalog
Curated Lovable Skills for design, backend, AI, payments, auth and more.