Discount with code applied — 50% off Pro or Max for 6 months
COMPARE · ZEST VS SPAN
Sources last reviewed
The closest Span alternatives are Jellyfish for finance reports, DX for surveys, Swarmia, Waydev or Weave for lower published prices, and Zest for agent sessions through a plugin per engineer. Span's laptop agent records Claude Code and Cursor sessions, at $45 a contributor a month.[1][2]
A Span trace holds “prompts sent, MCP calls made, files edited, skills used, and the tokens spent”, and only its author sees the prompts.[1] Span adds allocation, capitalization, R&D tax credits and surveys on contracts from one year;[3] Zest adds a daily standup per engineer.
Zest gets you:
Free for 3 seats · No credit card
Winding / Teams Last 30 days 
Zest
| 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 |
Demo setups use current model families. The pairings above are the combinations benchmarked by Artificial Analysis; rankings measure performance, not popularity.
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
 Zest | Span | |
|---|---|---|
| What one agent session records | In Claude Code: prompts, replies, model, token counts, tools, skills and file diffs, linked to the pull request by commit SHA or PR URL, with secrets redacted on the laptop. | “Prompts sent, MCP calls made, files edited, skills used, and the tokens spent”, linked to the PR it produced and scored by agent evals; prompts are visible to their author only.[1] |
| Coding agents it reads | Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot Chat, Grok Build and Hermes. | Claude Code and Cursor, their cloud agents included; its earlier hooks guide also lists Codex CLI, Copilot CLI and VS Code chat.[1][4] |
| Setup | An admin installs the Zest GitHub App; each engineer adds the plugin or extension to their agent. No MDM and no demo. | IT installs Span's agent on each laptop through MDM (Jamf, Intune, Kandji and others), or engineers self-install; Linux is in beta.[1] |
| Hosting and code access | Cloud only. The plugins upload session transcripts (Claude Code's with file diffs) after redacting secrets on the laptop; the GitHub App never writes to your code. | SaaS on AWS in the US. The laptop agent sends prompt text, tool calls and file diffs; retention is 90 days by default, and each developer can turn on privacy mode.[5] |
| Software capitalization | No: Zest has no capitalization or allocation reports. | Yes: Engineering allocation, software capitalization and R&D tax credits.[3] |
| Cost for 5 engineers | $49/mo for 5 engineers: one Pro workspace, seats included. | $225/mo for 5 engineers: Span at $45 a contributor a month, with contracts from one year.[2] |
| Cost for 20 engineers | $334/mo for 20 engineers: one Pro workspace, 5 seats included and 15 added at $19 each. | $900/mo for 20 engineers: Span at $45 a contributor a month, with contracts from one year.[2] |
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.
Most of the category reads AI use from vendor APIs or Git; Span and Zest read the agent's own record of each session. Span runs evals over each trace and traces each line of a pull request back to the agent that wrote it. Zest records each session's model, tokens, estimated cost, skills and MCP tools, links it to its pull request by commit SHA or PR URL, and writes the day's standup from it.
Span's agent installs through MDM on macOS (Jamf, Intune, Kandji, Mosyle and others) and Windows (Intune, Rippling, Hexnode), or by self-install; Linux is a beta self-install. Span's team switches traces on for your organization and suggests a pilot for larger ones. Zest needs an admin to install the GitHub App; each engineer then adds the plugin.
Span's agent sends prompt text, tool inputs and outputs, and file diffs to Span's backend on AWS in the US. Retention is 90 days by default, down to 30, and each developer can turn on privacy mode.
Zest's plugins send the session transcript, prompts and replies included, after redacting secrets with more than 40 patterns on the laptop; if redaction can't start, nothing is captured. The Claude Code setup guide lists what the plugin records and never sends.
Jellyfish keeps Span's finance side: capitalization next to delivery from Git, Jira or Linear, CI and incident tools, with DevFinOps sold as its own module. It reads AI use from each tool's vendor API and from pull request analysis, with no laptop agent listed. It sells by quote; its one public AWS bundle is $30,800 a year for 15 seats.
DX also puts a daemon on each laptop: it hooks Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents and marks each line as AI or human, “without source code leaving the machine”. It pairs that with survey programs, as Span does, and Atlassian has owned it since November 2025. Its AWS listing starts at $15,000 a year.
Swarmia reads Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex usage and cost per person from each vendor's API or OpenTelemetry; it is free under 10 developers, its AI plan is $5 a developer a month, billed annually, and capitalization an $18 module. LinearB reads AI use from vendor APIs and Git signals and acts on pull requests with gitStream rules; Essentials is $29 a user a month, billed annually, for at least 50 users.
Waydev connects GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and Gerrit as well as GitHub, and its Enterprise plan runs in your own VPC; AI adoption starts on Pro at $29 per active contributor, billed annually. Span runs evals over each trace; Weave scores the pull request instead, with a model that estimates the expert hours behind it, at $42 an engineer a month on Pro, billed yearly ($50 monthly).
Zest is ours. Each engineer adds a plugin to Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build or Hermes, or an extension to Cursor or VS Code, and each session's model, tokens, skills and MCP calls are linked to its pull request; each engineer gets a daily standup. Starter is free for 3 seats; paid plans are priced per workspace. No finance reports, surveys, DORA or trace evals, and GitHub only.
Start from what you use Span for:
TRY IT ON YOUR TEAM
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.
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW
Span's comparison pages list $45 per contributor a month; its pricing page asks you to request a quote, and contracts start at a one-year term (checked October 5, 2026).
For finance reports, Jellyfish; for surveys, DX. For agent session data, Zest: both read each coding-agent session and link it to its pull request, Span through a laptop agent and Zest through a plugin per engineer.
No: Span offers a no-cost proof of concept to eligible teams, and people who only view dashboards are free. Zest's Starter plan is free for 3 seats with no credit card.
Not by default: prompts and full trace conversations are visible only to the engineer who wrote them. Span says a customer can ask its representative to change that policy.
