Offing compared with other tools

Offing answers one question: what in this repository is ending, and where is it used? Update bots and lifecycle databases answer neighbouring questions. This section states what each tool is good at, links the evidence for every claim, and says where Offing is the weaker choice.

Tool	Question it answers	Start with
Renovate	Which dependencies have newer versions, and can the update be automated?	Renovate compared
Dependabot	Which dependencies have updates or security advisories on GitHub?	Dependabot compared
endoflife.date	When does a product or release line stop receiving support?	endoflife.date compared

Where Offing differs

• Evidence, not just a version number. Every rule names its sources and the date a maintainer reviewed it (RULES.md); scans report the data version and age (DATA.md).
• Locations. Findings point at the exact declaration or usage (ARCHITECTURE.md), including retired APIs inside source files, which manifest-only tools cannot see.
• Offline and deterministic. Scans read local files and bundled data only (DATA.md); no account or hosted service is involved.

Measured, not asserted

Where Offing and Renovate can speak about the same dependency in the same file, the differential report compares their results on a pinned corpus and links the evidence for each disagreement, including the cases Renovate finds and Offing misses. The method is described in VALIDATION.md.