Quick Answer
Swarmia measures how a team turns ideas into shipped software, using git, pull request and issue-tracker data, then nudges the team in Slack to hold to agreements it set for itself. DevClocked measures what happens inside the work, session by session, including AI agent runs and what those runs cost in tokens. For team health, DORA and where engineering effort goes, Swarmia is the stronger product. For knowing which sessions and which agents produced the shipped work, DevClocked answers a question Swarmia does not ask.
At a glance
| DevClocked | Swarmia | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary unit | Session and work block | Team |
| Data source | Local tracker across IDE, terminal and AI agents, plus git | GitHub/GitLab, issue trackers, Slack, AI vendor admin APIs |
| Core metric | Leverage (output per unit of effort) | DORA, cycle time, investment balance |
| AI measurement | Per-session agent runs, tokens, AI vs human attribution | Adoption, activity and cost per tool and per person |
| Working agreements | No | Yes, with Slack and Teams nudges |
| Issue-tracker integration | Focused | Jira and Linear, first-class |
| Installed on developer machines | Yes, developer installs the tracker | No, except optional Claude Code telemetry |
| Best for | Measuring agent-augmented output | Improving team delivery and effort allocation |
What Swarmia does well
Swarmia has one of the better reputations in this category and it earned it. Its metrics are research-backed rather than invented, covering DORA, cycle time and pull request flow, and it reads GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Linear and Slack rather than git alone.
Working agreements are the feature I would miss. A team picks a rule it wants to hold itself to, limiting work in progress or reviewing pull requests faster, and Swarmia sends the reminder in Slack or Microsoft Teams with a daily digest of exceptions. That closes the gap between a decision made in a retrospective and what the team does on Tuesday. Dashboards nobody opens do not.
Investment balance is the other standout. It sorts work into new features, improvements, productivity and keeping the lights on, then shows the split at organisation, team and individual level. Swarmia recommends 10 to 15 percent on productivity and keeping KTLO under 30 percent. Answering "where did the quarter actually go" with data is a real capability and DevClocked does not have it.
Swarmia also refuses to build what it thinks is harmful. No lines of code, no code churn, no ranking developers against each other. Its GitHub app asks for source-code access because GitHub requires it, but Swarmia says it never reads your source and stores only the size of the change per filename.
Where DevClocked is different
Swarmia reads the systems your organisation already runs. DevClocked instruments the work as it happens on the machine where it happens.
Sessions, not artifacts. Swarmia's unit of analysis is a pull request or an issue. DevClocked's is a session, a stretch of real work in an IDE or terminal, grouped into Work Blocks. A branch abandoned after four hours of exploration leaves nothing for Swarmia to measure. It leaves a session in DevClocked.
AI cost tied to output, not to a seat. Swarmia measures AI, and measures it well at the administrative level. It connects to Cursor and Claude Code admin APIs and to GitHub Copilot Business, then breaks down adoption and cost per tool and per person, which is how you find unused licences. DevClocked works from the other side, observing agent runs locally so token spend attaches to a session, a repo and the work that came out of it. Swarmia tells you what Claude Code cost this month. DevClocked tells you what that spend produced.
One opinionated metric. Leverage Score is output relative to effort, with AI and human contribution separated. Swarmia gives you a suite to interpret. DevClocked gives you one number to argue with.
On surveillance, honestly. Swarmia's position is that analytics should help teams rather than watch individuals, and that position is genuine and well argued. DevClocked tracks at a finer grain, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What it captures is session metadata only. No screenshots, no keystroke logging, no file contents. Durations, repository names and languages sync, nothing else. The developer installs the tracker and sees their own data first, and the team product reports aggregate leverage rather than a ranking of people. The architectural difference is simpler than the philosophy. Swarmia never asks a developer to install anything, because it reads systems the organisation already owns. If your rule is that nothing runs on a developer's laptop, that rule points at Swarmia and you should follow it. The fuller position is at /posts/engineering-team-visibility-without-surveillance.
Approximate hours, stated as approximate. DevClocked starts from a git baseline, a rough signal and never a clock, then corrects it with telemetry from a light editor extension and an editor-agnostic CLI tracker, calibrating the two over time. Accurate hours from git history alone are a guess.
Feature by feature
| Feature | DevClocked | Swarmia |
|---|---|---|
| DORA and delivery metrics | No | Yes (strength) |
| Working agreements with Slack nudges | No | Yes (signature strength) |
| Investment balance / effort allocation | No | Yes (strength) |
| Jira and Linear integration | Focused | Yes (strength) |
| No stack ranking by design | Aggregate team views | Yes, explicit policy |
| AI tool adoption and spend | Yes | Yes, via vendor admin APIs |
| Per-session agent tracking | Yes | No |
| Token cost tied to a specific session | Yes | No |
| AI vs human attribution on output | Yes | Partial |
| Work that never becomes a PR | Yes | No |
| Terminal and IDE session tracking | Yes | No |
| Leverage Score | Yes | No |
Pricing
Swarmia's free plan is intended for companies with fewer than 10 developers and includes most Standard plan features. Paid billing is per seat, counted as unique team members added to Swarmia teams, monthly or annual with a discount for annual. Signup starts a free Standard trial and needs no credit card. Swarmia's pricing page does not expose per-developer figures in a form we could verify and third-party listings disagree, so verify current pricing before budgeting. Enterprise terms go through sales.
DevClocked publishes pricing at /pricing, with team features on the Business tier. Verify both before you commit.
Who should pick which
Pick Swarmia if your question is about the team. DORA and cycle time, a Slack loop that makes retrospective decisions stick, a view of how much of the quarter went to KTLO, and work already visible in GitHub and Jira or Linear. Also pick Swarmia if your organisation will not install tracking software on developer machines. That is a legitimate constraint and a clear answer.
Pick DevClocked if your engineers run Claude Code, Codex CLI and Cursor all day and you cannot tell what that is producing. Per-session agent tracking, token cost against shipped output and AI versus human attribution are the reasons to install a tracker at all. See /teams.
Run both if you have the budget. They overlap less than the category suggests.
Verdict
Swarmia is the better team delivery product, and it is not close. Working agreements, investment balance and a principled refusal to rank people are hard to match. It measures what reaches GitHub and your issue tracker, and reads AI usage from vendor admin data. DevClocked measures the sessions underneath, where the agents run and the tokens get spent, and ties that cost to what shipped. If your question is AI leverage, DevClocked. If it is how your teams deliver, Swarmia.
FAQ
Only partly. Swarmia is a team delivery and effort-allocation platform, DevClocked is session and AI-agent measurement. Teams switch when the AI question becomes the important one and a vendor-level view is not specific enough.
Yes. It connects to Cursor and Claude Code admin APIs and to GitHub Copilot Business, reporting adoption, activity and cost per tool and per developer. It reads vendor admin data, so it sees spend and usage rather than individual agent sessions and what they shipped.
The team product reports aggregate leverage, not a ranking. Swarmia goes further and refuses to ship stack ranking, leaderboards, lines-of-code or churn metrics as a matter of policy. If that guarantee matters more to you than agent-level detail, Swarmia is the right call.
No. No screenshots, no keystroke logging, no file-content capture. Only session metadata syncs: durations, repository names and languages. More at /features/privacy-first-tracking.
Yes, and it is a reasonable setup. Swarmia for DORA, working agreements and investment balance. DevClocked for agent sessions, token cost and leverage. More in /posts/measure-ai-adoption-across-engineering-team.