The research and development of nickel-based superalloys specifically for additive manufacturing involves a lengthy and costly process of composition design, powder production, printing, and characterization. This significantly hinders the rapid development and application of new alloys for additive manufacturing. To address this issue, this paper proposed evaluating the printability of alloy powders by laser scanning ingot materials, thereby avoiding multiple powder productions during the composition design process. Focusing on four typical nickel-based superalloys (Inconel 718, Hastelloy X, CM247LC, and Inconel 939), the correlation of cracking in both alloy powders and ingot materials during laser scanning was investigated. The results indicate that for the low crack sensitivity Inconel 718 alloy, no cracks are observed in either the laser-scanned powder or the ingot samples. In contrast, the high crack sensitivity alloys CM247LC and Inconel 939 exhibit solidification cracks in the laser-scanned powder samples due to insufficient interdendritic liquid phase feeding at the end of solidification under thermal contraction tensile stress and solid-state cracks due to residual stress during thermal cycling. However, only solidification cracks are found in the laser-scanned ingot samples, indicating that the types of cracks differ between the two states, but the cracking trends are consistent. For the Hastelloy X alloy, which has intermediate crack sensitivity, crack-free laser-scanned powder samples can be obtained within a certain process window, whereas all the parameters used for the laser-scanned ingot samples result in cracks, showing differences in cracking trends between the two states but with both exhibiting solidification cracks. These findings suggest that analysing the cracking behavior of laser-scanned ingot alloymaterials provides a reference for understanding the cracking behavior of the correspondingalloypowdersduringlaserpowderbedfusion(L-PBF)formation.