| FMRS | 75 / 100 · B | 80 / 100 · B | 79 / 100 · B |
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| Reliability | 11 / 20 | 14 / 20 | 12 / 20 |
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| Security and permissions | 18 / 20 | 16 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 13 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 19 / 20 | 15 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 14 / 20 | 18 / 20 | 15 / 20 |
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| Best for | - Security-conscious developers building apps with AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex
- Individuals and small teams who want fully offline, local code scanning with no source upload
- Teams mapping CWE-keyed findings to code-visible compliance controls
| - Developers using fast-moving frameworks/libraries worried about the AI suggesting stale code
- Scenarios wanting zero-config documentation lookup
| - Developers auditing NPM dependencies within AI workflows
- Teams performing supply chain security assessments
- Users of Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code
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| Not for | - Teams seeking full compliance certification or runtime security proof (the tool explicitly does neither)
- Deep audits requiring cross-file/whole-program dataflow or runtime mobile testing
- Restricted environments that cannot run Node.js ≥22 or install cosign and engine binaries
- Essential Eight assessments (only ~1 of 8 mitigations is code-evidenced)
| - Looking up internal/private codebase documentation (Context7 targets publicly published open-source libraries)
- Cases needing very high coverage of obscure, niche libraries (coverage depends on what Context7's platform has indexed)
| - Projects outside the NPM ecosystem (e.g., pure Python/Go)
- Environments without network access to deps.dev, OSV.dev, and the npm registry
- Scenarios requiring maintenance by an official upstream vendor
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| Required permissions | - Reads project source and repository files (read-only; never edits or deletes your code)
- Stores engine data and scan history under ~/.codeinspectus
- Optionally writes one SBOM file (managed directory by default, or a chosen path)
- Runs SHA-verified Opengrep/Gitleaks/Trivy binaries as local subprocesses
- Reads git state for a git-safety recommendation; git operations require user approval and the tool never runs them itself
| - Usable without an API key (subject to a free-tier rate limit); CONTEXT7_API_KEY is an optional credential for higher quota
- Read-only documentation lookup — no code execution or local filesystem access involved
| - Network access to the NPM registry and external services (deps.dev, OSV.dev, OpenSSF, npms.io, GitHub)
- Read access to workspace lockfiles (pnpm-lock.yaml, package-lock., yarn.lock) for cache invalidation
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| Risks and side effects | - Prompt-injection detection is heuristic and immature; findings are worded "potential …" at medium confidence
- Fixes are applied by your AI agent and need human review; the tool only reports and never edits code
- Native rule coverage is deliberately narrow (mostly intrafile analysis); do not infer broader coverage than executed packs report
- Compliance mappings are AI-drafted and maintainer-reviewed with 0 of 96 community-verified — not an audit
- Engine binaries carry supply-chain risk, mitigated via SHA pinning, though setup/repair still downloads over the network
| - The free tier has limited quota — high-frequency use may hit rate limits
- Documentation content comes from Context7's platform index, so its accuracy and freshness depend on that platform's crawl cadence
| - Third-party READMEs and changelogs are untrusted external content; they are wrapped in tags with _meta flags but should still be handled cautiously
- Depends on availability and accuracy of external services
- Batch requests are capped at 25 packages to prevent registry enumeration; larger sets require batching
- Third-party open source project, not officially maintained by NPM or Anthropic
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| Supported clients | Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Windsurf, Cline, Aider | Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor, Cline, Amp | Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, Smithery.ai |
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| Tools | 6 | 2 | 19 |
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