| FMRS | 69 / 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 | 14 / 20 | 16 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 13 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 17 / 20 | 15 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 14 / 20 | 18 / 20 | 15 / 20 |
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| Best for | - Developers using AI coding agents who want to reduce token consumption
- Teams that need cross-file impact analysis and entity-level diffs
- Projects working in Git repos that want deterministic dependency-graph answers instead of grep results
| - 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 | - Users who do not use an MCP client
- Scenarios needing browser automation, cloud storage, or database access
- Users wanting a zero-install experience: running sem mcp requires the sem binary to be installed first
| - 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 code repository files
- Store a SQLite entity cache and query index on the local machine (by default under the OS cache directory; overridable with SEM_CACHE_DIR)
- Optional: log in to sem cloud via the GitHub device flow with sem login (only needed for cloud acceleration)
| - 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 | - The sem binary name conflicts with the sem binary shipped by GNU Parallel; run sem --version to check which one you are using
- The entity cache is stored outside the repository by default under the OS cache directory, and setting SEM_CACHE_DIR can change its location
- Cloud queries are opt-in per repo; logging in does not by itself upload a repo or send a query, but enabling cloud queries does send data to sem cloud
- Local telemetry records command names on your own machine only and uploads nothing in that mode; opting in uploads counts, and SEM_NO_TELEMETRY=1 or DO_NOT_TRACK=1 forces the record-nothing behavior
- Agents issue read queries against repository code, so ensure their working directory and permission scope match your expectations
| - 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, Claude Desktop | Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor, Cline, Amp | Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, Smithery.ai |
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| Tools | 8 | 2 | 19 |
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