| FMRS | 63 / 100 · C | 80 / 100 · B | 79 / 100 · B |
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| Reliability | 11 / 20 | 14 / 20 | 12 / 20 |
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| Security and permissions | 13 / 20 | 16 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 11 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 15 / 20 | 15 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 13 / 20 | 18 / 20 | 15 / 20 |
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| Best for | - Teams that need the knowledge behind agent answers to stay inspectable, versioned, and portable
- Local-first workflows that avoid hosted indexes, cloud registries, or cloud refresh workers
- Scenarios requiring visible source references and conservative link resolution that warns instead of guessing
- Deployments that want deterministic lexical search without an embedding service or LLM key
| - 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 | - Retrieval quality that depends on vector or semantic search
- Heading-based splitting, or Obsidian semantics like Canvas, Bases, PDFs, images, audio, video, and Dataview fields
- Importing GitHub repository URLs directly (there is no dedicated importer; use a local checkout or docs folder)
- Workflows that need to write back to the knowledge source or need agent-callable write tools
| - 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 | - Read local bundle directories and source cache and refresh state under ~/.okfy
- Make same-origin network fetches to registered documentation sites when refresh is enabled (respects robots.txt by default)
- Be launched as a stdio subprocess by an MCP client; the tools themselves are read-only
| - 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 | - HTML cleanup quality varies by documentation site and can affect search results
- Preflight rejects DNS-resolved private targets, but fetch-time DNS is not IP-pinned, leaving a theoretical DNS rebinding risk
- The default stale-while-refresh mode can briefly serve non-latest docs; blocking or off modes change this
- One page or file becomes one concept with no heading-based splitting, so granularity can be coarse
- `--force` replaces a non-empty output bundle, and unsafe output directories are rejected unless an explicit dangerous override is given
| - 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 Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor | 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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