Swarmia alternative
The team-level metrics you want, without the per-seat meter.
Swarmia is the benchmark for developer-experience metrics — activity, review queues, delivery health — and it is a good product run in their cloud, billed per developer with a 50-developer minimum. Deckgauge reads the same sources — Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps — and answers the same questions from your own infrastructure: nothing leaves, no vendor operates it, you can read the source, and it starts at $600 / month.
SELF-HOSTED · FREE AND UNCAPPED CORE · YOUR POSTGRES AND CLICKHOUSE
Two products reading the same trackers. Different bills and boundaries.
| Swarmia | Deckgauge | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Swarmia's cloud only | Your infrastructure, in Docker |
| Who sees your data | The vendor processes your tracker and Git history | Nobody — Postgres and ClickHouse you host |
| Sources | Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps | Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps — read-only |
| Metrics | Activity, review queues, DORA-aligned delivery health | DORA, flow, review quality, workload, Team Focus, CapEx/OpEx |
| The board | Dashboards | Monday-style board the meeting runs on, plus dashboards |
| Pricing shape | Per developer per month, 50-dev minimum | Self-hosted free; hosted one plan, capacity bands, no headcount minimum |
| Licence | Commercial SaaS | FSL-1.1-ALv2 — free at any size, converts to Apache-2.0 in 2028 |
| Price | $45 per developer per month (Standard) — $27,000/year at 50 engineers. Cloud-only, no self-hosted option | Core free; hosted/commercial from $600 / month |
Two reasonable conclusions, depending on your constraints.
Choose Swarmia if your data policy permits a vendor cloud and you want the most polished team-level experience metrics with zero operational footprint. Their focus on the developer-experience side — how work feels, not just how it flows — is genuine, and per-seat SaaS is a normal way to buy it.
Choose Deckgauge if your source-control history and work items cannot sit in someone else's tenant — or the per-seat meter stops making sense at your size. You get the delivery picture across the same four sources, on your hardware, with a published price instead of a call.
Where Swarmia is still ahead.
- Zero ops. Swarmia installs nothing, upgrades nothing, backs up nothing. Deckgauge self-hosted means you run the containers — the four-command quickstart is genuinely four commands, but they are yours.
- Slack-native workflows. Swarmia's review-queue nudges and activity digests live where developers already are. Deckgauge's board is the meeting surface, not the chat surface.
- Ten years of DX focus. Their product has one thesis and it shows in the polish. Deckgauge's thesis is broader — the whole cockpit picture — which means less depth on any single screen.
A comparison that pretends the incumbent is bad is a comparison you should not trust. Swarmia is good at what it does; the question this page answers is whether what it does is the shape you can buy.
What a year costs at 50 engineers.
| Plan | Shape | At 50 engineers |
|---|---|---|
| Swarmia Standard | 45/dev/mo, 50-dev minimum | 27,000/year |
| Deckgauge self-hosted | Free, uncapped, any size | 0/year — your hardware |
| Deckgauge hosted | One plan, capacity bands | Published on the pricing page, no call |
The deeper the privacy constraint, the shorter this comparison gets: if self-hosting is a requirement rather than a preference, the commercial per-seat options leave the table and the question becomes Deckgauge versus building it yourself.
The demo needs no install, and the core is free.
Walk the seeded demo — two boards, 240 items, a roadmap, six months of history behind the DORA and flow widgets — or run the real thing with the four-command quickstart. The long-form comparison, including what a two-week trial of each looks like, is in the Swarmia comparison post.