Comparison
Forge vs Swarmia
Feature matrices are spin by construction, so this page compares only what you can check yourself: how each side counts a billable person, what the published numbers say at a few team sizes, and which promises about per-person data exist in writing.
What Swarmia is
Swarmia is an engineering effectiveness platform — DORA metrics, investment balance, working agreements, and developer-experience surveys on top of GitHub and the issue tracker. Some credit before the comparison:
- A mature, well-regarded product with years of production history — Forge is the newcomer here.
- Working agreements and Slack feedback loops are a genuinely different capability, not something Forge replicates.
- They publish their pricing, which most of this category does not.
Forge is narrower on purpose: the review tax read from merged pull requests, estimates with confidence bands graded against what work actually cost, and commitments sized to real capacity — as a layer beside the tracker you already run.
How each side counts a billable person
Swarmia
developers added to teams in Swarmia — a list someone in the org provisions and maintains.
Forge
a covered contributor — someone who authored or reviewed an analyzed pull request in the last 30 days, counted from the repo. Nobody provisions a list; bots are excluded; quiet months roll off; viewers are always free.
- Lite is €20 per developer per month; Standard, the tier with issue-tracker integration, is €39. The quote column uses Standard, since Forge Team includes tracker sync.
- A free plan covers companies with fewer than 10 developers.
- Prices are published in euros; nothing here converts them.
The published numbers, side by side
| Team size | Swarmia · Standard, €39/developer/month | Forge Team · monthly |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | €585 | $299 |
| 25 | €975 | $419 |
| 40 | €1,560 | $599 |
| 60 | €2,340 | $839 |
The Swarmia column is computed from the prices published at www.swarmia.com/pricing/, read on 2026-08-04 — check it there, since it may have moved. Currencies are shown as published, never converted. The Forge column is computed from the same pricing module the billing code uses. The team sizes assume every team member ships in a given month; under coverage a quieter month bills less, under a seat list it doesn’t.
The promise only one side publishes
Every tool in this category reads per-person activity; the question is what the org gets to see. Forge’s answer is structural and public: per-person review load is shown only as a distribution — concentration, counts, never a named ranking — and each person’s energy ledger lives in their own account, where no org-side query can reach it. The promise is written down, from the engineer’s side, at /privacy-for-engineers.
This page makes no claim about what Swarmia shows a manager — go look, or ask them for the equivalent page. The comparison is simply that one side has put the promise in writing where every engineer can read it, and invites the other to.
What this page cannot tell you
- Whether Swarmia’s breadth is worth more to you than Forge’s read. They do things Forge does not, and the reverse; a price table cannot weigh that.
- Whether the prices above are still current. They were read on 2026-08-04; vendors move pages and change tiers. The links are there to be followed.
- What a negotiated contract would actually cost you — published list prices are where a negotiation starts, not where it ends.
Why the pricing works this way: Why Forge doesn’t sell seats. Other comparisons: LinearB · Jellyfish
The fastest way to judge Forge is the number itself: read a repository free — no account, nothing installed.