What are the differences between the Lite and Standard plans?

The Lite plan is a limited version of Swarmia that's mainly designed for improving your engineering organization's pull request flow. The Standard plan, on the other hand, offers a more holistic view into software development productivity.

If there are more than 15 software developers in your company, you can choose between Swarmia’s Lite and Standard plans. In this article, we’ll walk through what’s included in both of those plans so you can choose the right one for your engineering organization.

What’s included in the Lite plan?

As the name suggests, the Lite plan offers a limited version of Swarmia with a focus on measuring and improving your engineering teams’ pull request flow. In this section, we introduce the key features included in the Lite plan.

Pull request insights

The pull requests view in Swarmia shows all your team’s open pull requests in real time on a single page, even if you’re working with multiple repositories. Many of our developer users like to bookmark this page to make sure no PRs are falling through the cracks.

GitHub-related Working Agreements

Working Agreements in the Lite plan allow you to set and track team-wide pacts related to your team’s GitHub activity. You can adopt and configure your team’s own agreements — and then set up Slack notifications to make sure everyone in the team stays accountable.

Two-way integration between GitHub and Slack

One of the key features in the Lite plan are our GitHub–Slack notifications. They allow developers to read, reply, and/or react to comments in their pull requests without leaving Slack. You can also subscribe to personal notifications about code review requests, failed CI builds, and more.

Developer Overview for pull requests

With the Lite plan of Swarmia, you’ll also get access to a limited version of Developer Overview. This particular view allows developers and their managers see all the pull requests and code reviews a developer has worked on during the selected time period.

To recap, the Lite plan is a great fit for engineering organizations that are mainly interested in improving their pull request flow or whose issue tracker we don’t yet support. You can get started with a free 14-day trial or a live demo.

What’s included in the Standard plan?

The Standard plan includes everything in Lite and many features that are exclusive to the Standard plan. In this section, we’ll walk through the Swarmia features you’ll only get full access to with the Standard plan.

Work Log by issue

Work Log allows you to visualize engineering work to improve the flow and focus of engineering work. One of the more powerful features is the ability to group work by issue. This connects the real work (pull requests) with the project perspective in your issue tracker, and is only available in the Standard plan.

This view, along with its detailed issue pop-ups, is a great way to bring visibility into all the things your engineering team is working on, recap completed projects in retrospectives, become better at planning, and start important conversations in the team.

High-level Work Log

Another similar view that is only available in the Standard plan of Swarmia is the high-level Work Log. It shows a team’s past projects, bugs, or tasks over the past year, and allows you to spot blockers and anti-patterns like too much work in progress.

This view is particularly useful when communicating about the progress of engineering projects to the non-engineering leadership or the board.

More actionable investment insights

While you can technically use the Lite plan to configure investment categories based on pull request data alone, the view’s real value comes from the ability to combine PRs with data from your issue tracker.

This allows you to dig deeper into each investment category to further analyze the issues that belong to a certain category. Connecting the dots between planned work and actual work gives you a more accurate understanding of where teams are spending their time so you can more intentionally balance your engineering investment.

Richer Developer Overview

Developer Overview brings healthy visibility into the work of individual developers, and it’s available in all Swarmia plans. In addition to seeing the pull requests a developer has worked on, the Standard plan also shows you the projects they’ve contributed to. Combined, this information encourages much more nuanced conversations between software engineers and their managers.

Focus Insights

Flow Insights allow your team to analyze and improve their focus and are only available in the Standard plan. The view pulls data from your issue tracker to help you understand the cycle time of projects, tasks, or bugs so you can analyze the progression of issues, intentionally limit work-in-progress, and protect your flow as a team.

More Working Agreements

Working Agreements give engineering teams the opportunity to adopt healthy habits from the highest performing teams in the industry as well as set numeric targets for team metrics like cycle time and work in progress.

The Standard plan gives you access to a much larger library of Working Agreements, including agreements on avoiding working alone, closing projects in less than X days, or setting a maximum number of in-progress projects for the team.

Issue summaries in Slack

Finally, while the the Lite plan includes a ton of useful Slack features including personal Slack notifications about GitHub comments and review requests, the Standard plan brings even more dev workflows directly into Slack.

For example, teams can turn on issue summary notifications that let them celebrate completed work and continuously improve their ways of working based on useful stats about newly completed projects.

Lite vs. Standard?

To recap: the Lite plan is a great way to get started with Swarmia if you’re mainly looking to improve your pull request lifecycle. But if you’re looking for more holistic insights on software development productivity, focus, and investment balance — and are using either Jira or Linear as your issue tracker — we’d strongly recommend the Standard plan.

If you have any questions about the Swarmia plans, feel free to reach out to us in the chat, schedule a call with us, or email us at hello@swarmia.com.