GitPrime Competitors: Top Alternatives to GitPrime in 2020

Are you searching for alternatives to GitPrime? We've compiled a comprehensive list of the best alternatives to find the product that best suits your needs.

What is GitPrime? 

GitPrime (now Pluralsight Flow) is one of the many new engineering intelligence tools available - helping give visibility into how your team works while making it easier to demonstrate business value.

While all these tools plug into your git repositories to highlight trends, bottlenecks, and performance - each tool provides a different approach to measuring and communicating team performance. With different metrics, alerts, and reports it can be difficult to understand which tool is truly right for you. 

In this article we’ll help understand the main criteria for deciding on an engineering intelligence tool and cover the top tools used today.

But first..

What are engineering intelligence tools?

Being an engineering leader at the helm of a growing team can sometimes feel like you’re flying an airliner by gut feeling alone. Without your gauges, dashboard, and metrics panel it becomes difficult to quickly spot issues and keep your flight safely headed towards its destination.

Engineering intelligence tools are meant to be an engineering leader’s equivalent of a plane’s instrumentation panel - allowing you to quickly spot issues and correct course. 

As your engineering team grows, it becomes difficult to keep a pulse on how efficiently your team is working, where the team gets stuck, or if you’re even improving at all. Issues like technical debt, inefficient process, and degrading performance can silently build up in the background and prevent your team from supporting the business needs.

Engineering intelligence tools give you the visibility you need to uncover issues while providing concrete data to easily communicate engineering with outside stakeholders.

Now that we’ve covered how engineering intelligence tools help, let’s look at some of your options.

Alternatives to GitPrime in 2020

1. Haystack
2. Velocity (by Code Climate)
3. Pluralsight Flow (ex GitPrime)
4. LinearB
5. WayDev
6. PinPoint

Based on our research and criteria (covered below), here’s what we’ve found to be the top 3 engineering intelligence tools.

Best Engineering Intelligence Tools in 2020

1. Haystack
2. Velocity (by Code Climate)
3. Pluralsight Flow (ex GitPrime)

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Want to see the final verdict? Click here to see the results

In this article we’ll provide a high level comparison of the top 3 tools in the space.

‍We’ll share the results from talking with hundreds current and potential users to help shed light on how they match up in each decision criteria.

Note: We know this article is like ‘grading your own homework’ so we’ll do our best to be unbiased in this review

But first, some honorable mentions..

LinearB - LinearB, while relatively new to the space, is moving quickly to join the ranks as a contender. With that said, their focus is constantly changing and can range from “Standup 2.0” to project boards that largely resemble JIRA progress reports. Although we’re excited to see how LinearB progresses, we did not include them in this comparison due to their constantly changing focus.

WayDev - WayDev still remains a choice for early stage startups with their claim to fame being their recent Product Hunt launch. Their feature set and focus largely resembles that of GitPrime while starting to head more in the direction of engineering comparisons and ranking systems. Because of their similarity to GitPrime as well as their recent security breach, we’ve left them out of this comparison.

PinPoint - While all the tools mentioned above focus on code-level performance metrics for engineering leaders, Pinpoint’s metrics are closer oriented towards Project Management. While Pinpoint does, however, offer a few code-level metrics it’s not their core focus so we’ve left them out of this comparison.

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Want to know the final verdict? Click here to see the results

Methodology

While most engineering intelligence tools tackle the same problem, they all provide different solutions. Each tool boasts better team performance, actionable insights, and easier communication with your business counterparts so..

How do you choose? 

Since you’ll likely get a similar pitch from their respective websites, we’ve compiled a list of criteria that we believe encompasses all your needs.

Decision Making Criteria:

Quality of Metrics - There are many things we can measure, but few things we should. Which tool brings you the proven, research-backed metrics to help drive performance?

Developer friendly - Since data on it’s own is not actionable, you’ll likely need your teams to buy-in and align around metrics. So which tools are more likely to be adopted by your team? 

Ease of use - If you wanted to stumble around with piles of data then you could just write sql queries and build excel sheets. Which tool provides easy, actionable insights?

Security - Since all tools require access to your git repos, we’ll walk through security practices and which tools have you covered.

Surfacing Insights - The biggest benefit of engineering intelligence tools is to help you identify issues early. Which tools provide the best alerting on potential issues?

Expertise and support - Learning to use engineering data can seem daunting at first. Which tools give you the support you need to be successful?

Cost - There are some pretty high price tags in this space. Which tools are too expensive and which are right for you?

Individual Reporting - While we don’t agree metrics should be used at the individual level, some managers may still be looking for that. Which tool gives you metrics on individuals?

Customization - If you want to build your own dashboards and craft your own reports, which tool gives you the power to do that?

Integrations - Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, and countless other integrations that matter for your team. Which tool supports your stack?

API Support - Want to build your own dashboards as well? Which tools give you API access to pull, scrape, and parse the data you need.

Now that we have the criteria we’ll need to make a decision, let’s go through the top alternatives to GitPrime and see how they square up.

Findings and Recommendations

Quality of Metrics

Winner: Haystack

Reason: Strong focus on proven, industry-leading metrics

With multi-year research studies spanning across thousands of teams, we’re far from the days of lines of code and measuring just any metric we can get our hands on.

Research has uncovered metrics proven to not only drive performance but culture and developer satisfaction as well. With elite teams shattering industry benchmarks and boasting 100x faster, 200x more frequent deployments (compared to their low performing counterparts) it’s important to understand which tools help drive true performance and which simply don’t.

Haystack provides the highest quality of metrics. Each of their core metrics is derived from research across thousands of engineering teams - leaving the guesswork at the door.

While Velocity and GitPrime may have longer lists of metrics letting you ‘choose your own adventure’, they often do not resemble today’s best practice and steer leaders into focusing on the wrong metrics such as Commits Per Day, Impact Scores, or Coding Days Per Week - which don’t show correlation to engineering performance.

Due to a strict focus on research backed metrics, we’ve ranked Haystack higher in this category but if you’re interested in choosing from a large list of metrics like Impact Scores or Commits Per Day, then Velocity or GitPrime may be a better fit. 

Want to drive performance with proven metrics? Try Haystack

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Developer Friendly

Winner: Haystack

Reason: Hyper focus on team insights over developer comparisons.

While data for execs can be useful, real performance is driven by engineering teams themselves. Haystack’s focus on team level insights over developer rankings makes it the right solution for engineering leaders looking to get their teams involved.

Looking for a dev friendly tool? Try Haystack

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Ease of Use

‍Winner: Haystack

Reason: Simple, clean dashboard.

While Velocity and GitPrime have the bells, whistles, and customizations - Haystack keeps it simple by providing only key performance metrics and alerts. You won’t find a huge wall of data leaving you in analysis paralysis but likely a simple UI quickly highlighting your biggest bottlenecks and trends. This makes Haystack simpler, easier to use, and more likely that your teams will be able to pick it up and use it effectively.

Want to get up and running quickly? Try Haystack

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Security 

Winners: Haystack, Velocity, GitPrime

Reason: All use industry best practices

Each of these companies provides public security pages displaying industry best practices for security. Strong permissioning, encryption, and basically everything else you can ask for. 

While Velocity and GitPrime download source code (on ephemeral instances) to produce their metrics, Haystack restricts its usage to the GitHub API - never touching the source code itself. 

While this may seem like a security advantage, each company’s security practices are air tight so regardless of using source code or not - your data is in good hands.

Looking for a secure tool? Try Haystack

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Surfacing Insights

Winners: Haystack

Reason: More comprehensive alerting (including burnout, overwork)

While all tools provide email and slack alerts to surface insights, they each have a different focus. Velocity tends to alert on prs with issues or ‘risks’ while GitPrime tends to alert on people-focused metrics, drawing attention to contributors who may be stuck or problematic.

Haystack on the other hand provides a healthy mix of the two - giving engineering leaders alerts on risky pull requests, work that may be stuck, and intelligent insights around burnout and unhealthy work patterns to keep your sprints on track.

While all tools help surface insights, Haystack provides a wider view into team health giving it a leg up in this criteria.

Looking for automated insights? Try Haystack

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Expertise and Support

Winner: Haystack

Reason: Performance specialist support across all tiers

While all tools offer their expertise and support to help build data-driven engineering teams, Haystack is the only tool offering a performance specialist at every pricing tier. 

Haystack offers white glove service and support for all it’s users. In many cases, you’ll talk with the founders who have years of experience scaling data-driven engineering teams from early startups all the way to top tech enterprises.

Need help with your metrics strategy? Try Haystack 

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Cost

Winner: Haystack

Reason: Cheaper, month-to-month plans.

While all the top tools charge by a number of people (active developers), Velocity and GitPrime have annual 12 month contracts (typically paid upfront) while Haystack is the only product which offers a monthly subscription.

Not only does this decrease your upfront costs quite significantly, it’s also the cheapest option of the three at $25/developer/month.

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Prefer month to month pricing? Try Haystack

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Individual Reporting

Winner: GitPrime

Reason: Focus on individual contributor metrics.

Haystack has a strict ‘no’ policy when it comes to individual reporting, taking a strong stance against using stats from a team's codebase to evaluate engineers. With psychological safety being a top performance driver, you’ll likely want to steer clear of judgement or ranking systems. 

If you disagree, it doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. If you’re like many engineering leaders interested in generating statistics at the individual level then both vendors (GitPrime and Velocity) may provide the reports you need.

While both tools provide reports to help identify ‘coaching opportunities’, GitPrime spends a larger effort on developer-specific areas - giving you more insight into contributors who may be stuck or problematic.

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Customizations

Winner: Velocity, GitPrime

Reason: Custom reporting capabilities

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While we hope you won’t need too many customizations outside the core dashboards, as engineers we do understand the desire to ‘build it yourself’ and have a bit more control. 

Both GitPrime and Velocity provide great features for custom reporting, permissions, and configuration to help customize the application for yourself.

Haystack on the other hand takes a more opinionated approach, carefully crafting each metric and report that goes into its dashboard to prevent potential misuse or focus on the wrong metrics. For this reason you won’t find many opportunities for customization with Haystack.

Don’t want to build it yourself? Try Haystack

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Integrations

Winner: GitPrime, Velocity

Reason: Support for Bitbucket and Gitlab

GitPrime and Velocity provide integrations across the three major version control systems while Haystack only supports Github at the moment. While a custom integration with Haystack may still come out to less than the alternatives, it doesn’t come out of the box just yet.

If you’re a Bitbucket or Gitlab user, you may want to join the waitlist or check out some other options.

Looking for insights from Github? Try Haystack

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API Support

Winner: GitPrime, Velocity

Reason: API Support for Enterprise customers

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While GitPrime and Velocity both offer API Access, they are reserved for their Enterprise Tier customers only. Haystack currently does not support API access so if you’re looking to use an API to build your own dashboards it makes sense to check out Velocity or GitPrime’s Enterprise Tier for that.

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The Verdict

Choosing an engineering intelligence tool can be a largely opinionated decision. At the end of the day the difference between these three tools lies mainly in their approach to measurement. Whether you’re measuring engineers, teams, or pieces of work - it comes down to what you’re looking for in your engineering intelligence tool.

The remainder of the article will walk through a head-to-head comparison of the top tools so you can make the most informed purchase decisions for your team.

GitPrime vs. Haystack vs. Velocity

While each of these tools tackles the same core problem of visibility, they each provide a different approach to measurement.

Haystack - Haystack puts team performance at the center of its product, leaving the guess work at the door and focusing only on metrics proven to drive performance and developer satisfaction. Haystack also offers the most developer friendly option by removing any individual reports, comparisons, or rankings and focusing solely on team-level metrics. While you likely won’t find tons of customizations, widgets, or endless features - we see that as a plus. Haystack’s metrics are carefully crafted so you can feel confident you’re using the right metrics. Giving you and your team a tool they will love at a price that beats the competition.

Looking for the best engineering intelligence tool? Try Haystack

Velocity - Velocity is the best tool for teams that need customizations or integrations beyond what Haystack offers (they only support Github at the moment). While these customizations may be helpful, their engineering comparison systems (to help uncover ‘coaching opportunities’) can often lead to cultural issues, reducing developer adoption. While these comparisons may turn off the developer crowd, executives can feel confident that Velocity has the customization capabilities you’re looking for - with a price to match.

GitPrime - GitPrime is the best tool for executives looking for individual performance metrics, equipping leaders to keep close track of engineers and identify the strongest and weakest performers of the bunch. While GitPrime provides the most robust set of metrics, widgets, and customizations - the core metrics used to evaluate engineering ‘performance’ (TT100, ‘Impact Scores’, and Coding Days) are largely correlated with lines of code which don’t resemble today’s best practice.

If you still haven’t made up your mind, then all products offer 14-day trials. You can sign up for Haystack’s here.

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Haystack helps engineering leaders identify burnout and team health patterns. Instead of guessing if you're improving, or constantly bothering your team for updates, simply use Haystack to get alerts in your inbox every morning. Plus a dashboard to track improvements over time.

Try it for free

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