| FMRS | 79 / 100 · B | 80 / 100 · B | 79 / 100 · B |
| Reliability | 12 / 20 | 14 / 20 | 12 / 20 |
|---|
| Security and permissions | 16 / 20 | 16 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 18 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 18 / 20 | 15 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 15 / 20 | 18 / 20 | 15 / 20 |
| Best for | - Developers auditing NPM dependencies within AI workflows
- Teams performing supply chain security assessments
- Users of Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code
| - Developers using fast-moving frameworks/libraries worried about the AI suggesting stale code
- Scenarios wanting zero-config documentation lookup
| - Engineering teams scaling AI coding agents while controlling spend
- Platform teams that need auditable, rollback-aware agent execution records
- Organizations using multiple agents (Claude, Codex, Gemini) under one governed flow
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| Not for | - 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
| - 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)
| - Developers who just want a simple code-completion helper without run governance
- Teams unwilling to accept local JSONL run records with HMAC signing
- Environments without a supported adapter (Claude/Codex/Gemini CLIs, direct provider, or verifier-only)
|
| Required permissions | - 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
| - 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
| - Read/write access to the configured repo root (writable scope restrictable via --allow-path/--deny-path)
- Ability to invoke the chosen agent CLI (Claude/Codex/Gemini, etc.) and its underlying model account
- Local disk writes for run records, receipts, and share outputs (share/run-receipt., etc.)
- Execution of user-configured verifier commands (e.g. npm test)
|
| Risks and side effects | - 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
| - 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
| - Verifier commands are executed; poorly chosen verifier commands carry security risk despite preflight policy checks
- Cost and token figures may be estimates (labeled with provenance) and should not be treated as settled accounting
- Receipt integrity must be verified before use as trustworthy evidence; missing rollback evidence is flagged as EVIDENCE_BOUNDARY
- Policy defaults come from martin.config.yaml and can be overridden by CLI flags; misconfiguration can loosen safety boundaries
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| Supported clients | Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, Smithery.ai | Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor, Cline, Amp | Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, Continue |
| Tools | 19 | 2 | 0 |