Comparison

Gary vs Swarmia

insights vs. instincts

Swarmia is an engineering effectiveness platform focused on developer experience surveys, investment tracking, and working agreements. Gary is an AI staff engineer that lives in Slack and connects GitHub, Linear, and Sentry to proactively flag issues. Swarmia helps you measure effectiveness. Gary helps you act on it.

what's the fundamental difference?

Swarmia is analytics-first: it shows you trends, tracks investments, and runs developer surveys so you can understand how your team is doing. Gary is action-first: he watches your tools in real time and speaks up when something specific needs attention. Swarmia is the quarterly review. Gary is the daily standup.

Feature comparison

Feature
Gary
Swarmia
Delivery method
Slack messages, proactive and on-demand
Web dashboard with Slack notifications
Merge conflict detection
Proactive Slack alert when two PRs touch the same files
Not available
PR summaries
Full context: ticket, risk, blast radius, unresolved feedback
Not available
Developer experience
Not available (Gary focuses on operational coordination)
Developer surveys and experience tracking
Investment tracking
Not available
Categorize work into new features, bugs, debt, etc.
Sentry integration
Correlates errors to deploys and identifies likely cause
Not available
Working agreements
Learns team patterns passively and adapts
Explicit team agreements with tracking and nudges
Pricing
$150-750/month flat
Per-developer pricing, starts around €28/dev/month

Where Gary is stronger

  • proactive, real-time alerts in Slack — not periodic reports
  • cross-tool correlation (GitHub + Linear + Sentry)
  • flat pricing regardless of team size
  • merge conflict detection and Sentry error correlation
  • takes actions like assigning reviewers and pinging people

Where Swarmia is stronger

  • developer experience surveys and tracking
  • investment categorization and tracking
  • working agreements with team-level nudges
  • strong enterprise and compliance features
  • deeper analytics for engineering leadership reporting

The verdict

Swarmia is built for engineering leaders who want to measure team health and investment allocation over time. Gary is built for the day-to-day: catching problems as they happen and delivering context where the team already works. if you need quarterly effectiveness reports, Swarmia. if you need someone watching the shop every day, Gary.

Want to see what Gary catches on your team?