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Don’t just measure
the system. Improve it.

DX gives you a clear readout of developer experience. Swarmia turns that picture into action across the whole organization.
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Swarmia is trusted by great software organizations from startups to enterprises
Miro
Bolt
Honeycomb
Engine
Parloa
Matillion
Lovable
TrueLayer
Aiven
Cleo
Trustpilot
Staffbase

Built on the same research

Credit where it’s due: DX has put serious time and money into developer experience research. Their advisors’ contributions to DORA and SPACE, the DXI, the AI frameworks, and the papers they’ve funded and published — that’s a real investment, and the whole field is better for it.


That research is public, though. We’ve built Swarmia on the same body of work, and so has everyone else who’s serious about this space. DX and Swarmia both respect the science. The real question is how each platform puts it to practice.


That’s where we differ, and it’s what the rest of this page is about.

“Swarmia has provided us with a clear understanding of where our teams are excelling and where they could use additional support. The combination of quantitative developer insights with periodic qualitative feedback is powerful.”
Dave Cumberland
CTO, Axios HQ

Where Swarmia wins

There are three differences that hold up no matter how big your org gets — from the first team you roll it out to, to the hundredth.

Built to improve the system, not just report on it

DX turns data into benchmarks and executive readouts. Swarmia turns it into proactive signals and email digests highlighting the biggest risks and opportunities.

Working agreements and Slack or Teams notifications, on the other hand, help engineering teams improve their ways of working — every day, not once a quarter. This way, the people steering the org and the teams doing the work are looking at the same data.

Metrics that hold up when finance comes knocking

Engineering intelligence has to stand up when finance and auditors start asking questions.

Swarmia’s software capitalization is built for exactly that: an FTE model validated at about 95 percent accuracy against traditional time tracking, SOC 1-audited reports, and acceptance from Big Four auditors including KPMG — with drill-down all the way to individual commits when someone wants to see the work behind a number.

Opinionated by default, flexible when you need it

DX’s data product is SQL-based with no mapping layer, so it takes real configuration upfront and ongoing maintenance to keep your data in check.

Swarmia is opinionated by design: connect your tools, compare teams without demanding perfect Jira hygiene, and let the AI-powered setup keep pace as your organization changes. When you want to go deeper, you can build custom reports, ask Swarmia AI, export data via the API, or use the MCP to answer any questions you may have.
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You’re in great company

“Swarmia offers visibility to different metrics for people in different roles. For individual contributors you get insights about your code, for teams you get information about how you are performing and how you are living according to your team agreements, and for management overall insights about how the whole development organization is doing.”

Verified User

IT Services
“Swarmia offers easy and flexible onboarding. The same flexibility is used across the whole software.”

Verified User

Media
“Swarmia has been an absolute game-changer for me and my team on collaboration and code management. It has provided us with the much-needed clarity and insights into our work, helping us identify areas that require attention.”

Verified User

Software
“We've been really happy with Swarmia. It gives the much needed visibility for developers to see their own development metrics.”

Verified User

Travel & Hospitality
“I am exceptionally happy with the decision to bring in the use of Swarmia as part of the product team’s development tools. Swarmia has enabled the team to make appropriate changes to increase development speed, based on the data of our earlier performance.”

Verified User

Software
“I can highly recommend Swarmia. The tool was really easy to deploy, and it provides a lot of good insights. Also, our developers love the Slack integration.”

Verified User

Software
Let’s set the record straight
Isn’t Swarmia only for small teams?

No. We serve customers from small startups to enterprises, and have several Fortune 500 companies as customers. Our feature set and service model are built to match — with enterprise-grade security, professional services, and finance-grade capitalization reporting that stands up to audit.

Is Swarmia limited to pull request and DORA metrics?

No. Pull request and DORA metrics are one part of it. Swarmia also covers developer experience surveys, AI impact, software capitalization, and investment balance, connected in one platform so the insights at the intersections are visible, not scattered across four tools.

DX says you see the data but not the drivers. Is that true?

No. Swarmia combines real-time system data with developer experience surveys, so you get both what’s happening and how your engineers are experiencing it. The real difference from DX is what happens next: Swarmia is built to help organizations change the drivers, not only chart them.

Can Swarmia measure the impact of AI coding tools?

Yes. It’s one of the areas Swarmia invests in most. Swarmia measures AI tool usage, the impact of AI on how work flows, and the cost of the tools you’re running. You can answer what you got for your AI investment without stitching together vendor dashboards and see AI and FTE cost side by side to understand the real cost of software development — down to every last pull request.

Is Swarmia a black box?

No. You can see how each metric is calculated all the way down. Swarmia lets you drill from a top-line number to the individual commits and pull requests behind it, and you can export everything through the API, build your own views in the explore view, or query it through the MCP server. Nothing is hidden behind a metric you can’t open up.

Can Swarmia roll up metrics across many teams?

Yes. Swarmia gives leaders cross-cutting views across teams and the whole org, with monthly leadership reports that summarize what changed and where to look. Teams get their own view to improve on their own terms, and leaders get the roll-up — the same data, read at the altitude each audience needs.

See how Swarmia compares to DX for yourself

Get a personalized walkthrough and find out what Swarmia can do for your engineering organization.
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