Snyk Advisor — the free tool most developers used to sanity-check an npm or PyPI package before adding it to a project — announced a sunset in early 2026. The service goes offline in January 2026, and search results pointing at advisor.snyk.io will return 404s shortly after. For the thousands of developers who used it as the reflex tool before adding a dependency, the obvious question is: what now? Here are four alternatives worth trying, and how they differ.

Why Advisor got shut down

Snyk has not published a detailed rationale, but the public wind-down notice suggests the obvious: a free tool that required constant maintenance, was not tied to their paid product, and was losing the marketing attribution battle against newer entrants. Advisor's value was a "package health score" derived from release cadence, maintainer activity, known CVEs, and dependency graph. It was aimed at the hobbyist or solo developer, not Snyk's enterprise buyer. That audience mismatch is usually what kills free tools at commercial companies.

The gap matters because the workflow — paste a package name, get a quality check — does not map cleanly to any single replacement.

Alternative 1: Socket.dev

The closest spiritual successor. Socket scans npm, PyPI, and a growing list of ecosystems and produces a risk score per package. Free tier is generous for individual lookups, and the browser extension flags suspicious packages as you browse GitHub and npm. The risk framing is more security-focused than Advisor's was — Socket flags behaviors like "introduced shell exec" or "accesses filesystem" rather than purely quality signals. If you want a paste-and-check replacement, this is it.

The miss: Socket does not produce a single score the way Advisor did. You get a behavior profile, which is more useful for serious review but less snappy for casual checks.

Alternative 2: Scorecard (OpenSSF)

OpenSSF Scorecard is an open-source project health scoring system maintained by the Open Source Security Foundation. It runs as a GitHub Action or CLI tool and produces a 0-10 score across maintenance, security policy, CI, code review, and other factors. It is the most "Advisor-like" in output shape, but it requires you to point it at a GitHub repository, not a package name, which adds a step for npm/PyPI lookups.

The upside is the transparency: every score component is explained, the code is open, and you can reproduce any result. The downside is no hosted UI — you either run the CLI or pick through the GitHub Action logs.

Alternative 3: npm audit + pip-audit + bundle audit

The bundled official tools in each ecosystem have quietly gotten much better. For vulnerability scanning specifically, npm audit, pip-audit, and bundle audit are now genuinely useful, integrate directly with lock files, and cover most of the "is this package going to import a CVE" question. They do not do quality scoring the way Advisor did — they will tell you about known vulnerabilities, not about release cadence or bus-factor risk.

For many users, this is all they actually used Advisor for. If your question is really "does this have known vulnerabilities," the official tooling now answers it without a third-party site.

Alternative 4: Runtime supply-chain monitoring

A meta-point: Advisor was build-time thinking. You check the package before you add it, and you move on. But modern supply-chain risk is as much about what gets shipped at runtime as what is in your package.json. The Polyfill.io incident in 2024 affected packages that had good Advisor scores — the score reflected the original maintainer's reputation, not the new owner's behavior.

Runtime monitoring — watching the scripts your live site actually loads, catching third-party CDN changes, and flagging new payload domains — covers a different failure mode that build-time scoring does not. If you were using Advisor as a holistic supply-chain check, extending your posture to include runtime monitoring closes the gap. We built BlackSight's supply-chain scanner for exactly this runtime watch. It complements package-level checks rather than replacing them.

What to actually do this week

Three concrete steps. Replace any automation or documentation that links to advisor.snyk.io — those links will 404 soon. Bookmark Socket.dev as your paste-and-check tool. Add npm audit (or the equivalent) to your CI if it is not already there. And if you are responsible for production web traffic, add a runtime script monitor on top. The Advisor shutdown is mostly a workflow disruption, but it is a fine moment to check whether your supply-chain posture is actually complete.