Haystack vs. Waydev

Haystack or Waydev?

Haystack is the best tool for engineering leaders looking to improve delivery using proven measures such as Cycle Time, Deployment Frequency, and Change Failure Rate. With a strong focus on team-level delivery metrics, we are also enable the most developer friendly experience.

Waydev is perfect for non-engineering executives looking for a wide range of metrics on individual output with features such as leaderboards to rank individual developers based on their output. 

Metrics and Dashboard

Haystack provides a carefully selected set of metrics proven to be effective in improving software delivery. Our simple dashboard gives high level trends on key metrics like Cycle Time, Deployment Frequency, and Change Failure Rate while allowing you to deep dive into any bottleneck and outlier you may see.  

Waydev focuses on output metrics on an individual level providing executives with insights like Number of Commits and Number of PRs. Their dashboard is designed primarily to give a bird's eye view of your team's input, output and work habits instead of delivery insights. This can be difficult for engineering leaders to get actionable insights but is great for assessing which developers worked the best.

Developer Culture

At Haystack we firmly stand against the notion that individual level metrics can provide actionable insights and believe that they cause more damage to work culture as they are invasive, stress-inducing and misleading. As such, we only track delivery at a team level delivery while avoiding misleading output metrics like “lines of code”. We also provide additional insights to aid managers preventing harmful things like burnout. 

If you are interested in tracking individual activity, then Waydev is the tool for you. They allow tracking individual developers input, output, work hours and habits. With a core focus on individual reporting and features for team ranking.

Surfacing Insights

Haystack Integrates with Slack and provides real time comprehensive alerts around sprint risks, blockers and burnout. Some favorites are burnout alerts, pull requests stuck in discussion, and work overload (high concurrent work)

Waydev does not provide alerts but gives a daily summary of work done.

Support

We have a dedicated support team of experienced engineering leaders available on-demand from our Slack Community. Every Haystack user has a dedicated private slack channel with our team of experts to help you deep dive into your data and teach you how to improve delivery. 

Waydev provides a dedicated manager only on their premium and enterprise tiers.

Security

Haystack is the only tool that doesn’t read, store, or persist source code. We use the Github API to pull metadata such as timestamps and commit messages to produce all our insights. We also maintain industry best practices to ensure that all user information is safe.

Cost 

Haystack is charged on a monthly basis with each contract renewed at the end of the month, with our entry price at $25 per developer a month. 

Waydev requires that contracts are locked in for an annual rate of $449 per developer a year for their entry level pricing.