COMPARE · 8 PLATFORMS

Software engineering intelligence platforms, compared.

Sources last reviewed October 5, 2026

Software engineering intelligence (SEI) platforms join Git, issue-tracker and CI data to report delivery, and most now report AI adoption and spend.^[1]^[2]^[3] Weave, LinearB, Swarmia, Span and Waydev publish per-engineer prices;^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8] DX and Jellyfish sell by quote.^[9]^[10]

Zest is narrower: a plugin in each engineer's coding agent reports every session (model, tokens, skills, MCP tools), and Zest joins it to merged GitHub pull requests. It has no DORA metrics, surveys or capitalization; 5 engineers pay $49 a month on Pro.

Zest gets you:

Zest Pro: $49 a month for 5 engineers, seats included

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Free for 3 seats · No credit card

Winding / Teams Last 30 days

Zest

3 Members 1 Agent

Team overview

67%

AI Adoption▲ 34 pts

240

PRs Merged▲ 101

96.1h

Median AI Time▲ 9.5h

57.2h

Build Hours▲ 20.3h

This week

Member	AI	PRs/wk	AI Task	Plan	Impl	Last Standup	AI Stack
		22.8/wk				28 min ago
		15.8/wk				12 min ago
		4/wk				Aug 14
		—				2 hours ago

Current AI models & harnesses As of Sep 8

Claude CodeFable 5.1 (max) (with fallback)70.4 · Coding Agent Index

CodexGPT-6 Astra (max)67.0 · Coding Agent Index

Muse CodeMuse Spark 1.3 (xhigh)64.2 · Coding Agent Index

Grok BuildGrok 4.5 (high)64.1 · Coding Agent Index

Kimi Code CLIKimi K362.6 · Coding Agent Index

OpencodeGemini 3.8 Flash (high)61.2 · Coding Agent Index

Cursor CLIComposer 2.5 Fast38.3 · Coding Agent Index

Demo setups use current model families. The pairings above are the combinations benchmarked by Artificial Analysis; rankings measure performance, not popularity.

Claude Fable 5.1 (max with fallback)53.4GPT-6 Astra (max)52.8Claude Opus 5 (max)50.7Muse Spark 1.3 (max)48.2GLM-5.3 (max)44.9Grok 4.6 (high)44.4

Intelligence Index

Illustrative daily trends · Other totals: last 30 days. Build Hours: this week, model-estimated activity including overlap; not engineer hours.

USED BY ENGINEERING TEAMS AT

AT A GLANCE

Eight platforms on price, method and coverage

Eight platforms on price, method and coverage
	Zest	Weave	DX	Jellyfish	LinearB	Swarmia	Span	Waydev
Cost for 5 engineers	$49/mo	$210/mo	From $1,250/mo	From $2,567/mo	$1,450/mo	Free	$225/mo	$145/mo
Free plan or trial	Yes:	Yes:	No:	No:	Partly:	Yes:	Partly:	Yes:
How it reads AI coding	A plugin in each agent	Tool APIs, co-authorship, estimates	Vendor APIs plus a laptop daemon	Vendor APIs plus PR analysis	Vendor APIs plus Git signals	Vendor APIs, OTel, PR trailers	Laptop agent plus vendor APIs	Vendor APIs, OTel, commit trailer
Hosting and code access	Cloud only	SaaS; on-prem case by case	SaaS, dedicated or your AWS	Multi-tenant SaaS	SaaS only	SaaS, EU by default	SaaS (AWS, US)	Cloud or self-hosted
Developer surveys	No:	Partly:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:
DORA metrics	No:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:
Software capitalization	No:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:	Partly:	Yes:	Yes:	Yes:
PR automation or AI review	No:	No:	No:	No:	Yes:	No:	No:	No:
Git hosts	GitHub only	GitHub (others unlisted)	GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure	GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure	GitHub Cloud; more on Enterprise	GitHub, GitLab	GitHub, GitLab, Azure	GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure, Gerrit

Each column links to that vendor's own comparison; hover a cell for the sentence behind it. Facts from each vendor's own pages and AWS Marketplace listings, dated in the sources below. ✓ listed, – partly, × not listed on the pages we read, which is not proof the product lacks it.

WHAT IT COSTS

5 engineers, priced per workspace.

Zest charges one workspace price with seats included. Most of the category charges per engineer, or by quote. Switch the team size to see where each lands.

MONTHLY COST, LIST PRICE What your team pays a month

Zest $49/mo
Swarmia $0/mo
Waydev $145/mo
Weave $210/mo
Span $225/mo
DX from $1,250/mo
LinearB $1,450/mo
Jellyfish from $2,567/mo

Zest is one price per workspace with seats included. The others are charted at their cheapest published plan that shows AI use per engineer (Weave Pro at $42 an engineer; LinearB Essentials at $29 a user, at least 50 users; Swarmia AI adoption & cost at $5 a developer, free under 10; Span at $45 a contributor; Waydev Pro at $29 an active contributor), or from their smallest AWS Marketplace contract (DX and Jellyfish). Sources.

What is a software engineering intelligence (SEI) platform?

An SEI platform connects to your Git host, issue tracker and CI, and computes delivery metrics from them: cycle time, throughput, DORA and where engineering time goes. Most now add AI adoption, spend and impact; some add developer surveys and R&D capitalization. The DORA metrics guide explains the four delivery measures.

Four ways the platforms measure AI coding

The grid above says which method each platform uses. They see different things:

How each platform reads AI coding, from its own pages and docs, read October 5, 2026
Method	Who uses it	What it sees	What it misses
Admin APIs and OpenTelemetry from each AI tool	Jellyfish, LinearB, Swarmia, DX, Waydev, Weave; Span for spend	Active users, tokens and spend per person and tool	What the agent did, and which pull request it led to
Git and code signals	LinearB, Swarmia, Weave, Waydev, Jellyfish, Span	Co-author trailers, labels, branch names, or a model reading the diff	AI work that leaves no trailer, and its cost
Hooks or a daemon on each laptop	DX (lines), Span (whole sessions)	Which lines an agent wrote; for Span, the prompts and tool calls too	An install on every machine, often by MDM
A plugin inside each agent	Zest	Each session's model, tokens, skills and MCP tools, joined to its pull request	A plugin per engineer; no delivery data beyond pull requests

Which platform fits which team size

From each vendor's pricing page or AWS Marketplace listing:

Fewer than 10 engineers: Swarmia's free plan, Waydev's free Start Up plan (10 repositories), Weave's free Starter (org-level numbers only) or Zest's free Starter (3 seats).
10 to 50 engineers: Swarmia from $5 a developer a month, Waydev Pro at $29, Weave Pro at $42, Span at $45 on a one-year contract, or Zest at $144 a month for 10 on Pro.
50 or more: LinearB bills at least 50 users on Essentials and 100 on Enterprise. Jellyfish's one public bundle is $30,800 a year for 15 seats, and DX's listing starts at $15,000 a year.

Where Zest fits

Zest is AI coding analytics, narrower than the platforms above. It starts from the coding agents your engineers run, then joins them to what merged on GitHub.

What it reads: a plugin or extension in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot Chat, Grok Build and Hermes uploads each session (prompts, model, tokens, skills, MCP tools), and the GitHub App adds pull requests and commits.
What it writes: each engineer's standup at 6pm local time, in Slack or by email, and a weekly digest for the workspace owner.
What it lacks: DORA, surveys, capitalization, PR automation, issue trackers and any Git host but GitHub. It ranks no one.
What it costs: Starter is free for 3 seats with no credit card; 10 engineers pay $144 a month on Pro, billed monthly.

Zest's AI Stack overview for one engineer: platforms, models, agents and MCP tools with usage counts — Zest's AI Stack overview for one engineer

Questions to ask any vendor in a trial

Put the same questions to each platform you are weighing:

Which AI tools does it read, and through what: an admin API, OpenTelemetry, Git trailers or an agent on each laptop?
Is AI cost per engineer, and is it list price or what you pay?
Does it read or store source code, prompts or diffs, and in which region?
What must be installed on each laptop, and who approves that?

TRY IT ON YOUR TEAM

See what your team ships with AI.

Starter is free (3 seats, no credit card). Pro is $49 a month with 5 seats and Max is $149 a month with 10 seats — priced per workspace, not per engineer, with extra seats at $19 a month.

Start free See pricing

A FEW THINGS TO KNOW

Questions

Which engineering intelligence platforms publish their prices?+

Weave, LinearB, Swarmia, Span and Waydev publish per-engineer prices, Span on its comparison pages only. DX and Jellyfish sell by quote with a contract listed on AWS Marketplace, and Zest publishes per-workspace prices (checked October 5, 2026).

Which one is free for a small team?+

Swarmia is free for companies with fewer than 10 developers, Waydev's Start Up plan and Weave's Starter cost $0 with fewer features, LinearB offers a 45-day trial, and Zest's Starter is free for 3 seats with no credit card (checked October 5, 2026).

Which platforms read Claude Code and Cursor usage?+

Jellyfish, LinearB, Swarmia, DX, Waydev and Weave read both through the vendors' admin APIs or OpenTelemetry. Span and Zest read each session from inside the agent: Span with an agent on each laptop, Zest with a plugin.

How long does Zest take to set up?+

Minutes: an admin installs the Zest GitHub App and picks repositories, and each engineer adds the Zest plugin or extension to their coding agent. The backfill of past pull requests can take a few minutes for larger orgs.