Discount with code applied — 50% off Pro or Max for 6 months
COMPARE · ZEST VS DX
Sources last reviewed
The closest DX alternatives are Span and Swarmia if you keep surveys, Jellyfish for finance reports, LinearB for pull request rules and Waydev to self-host. DX, Atlassian's since November 2025, starts at $15,000 a year on AWS Marketplace.[1][2]
DX pairs developer surveys with system data from 80 sources, from Git and Jira to PagerDuty, calendars and 20 AI coding tools, plus a laptop daemon that marks AI-written lines; it runs multi-tenant, single-tenant or in your own AWS account.[3][4][5][6] Zest runs no surveys: it reads GitHub and each engineer's agent sessions, in Zest's cloud.
Zest gets you:
Free for 3 seats · No credit card
Winding / Teams Last 30 days 
Zest
| Member | AI | PRs/wk | AI Task | Plan | Impl | Last Standup | AI Stack |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22.8/wk | 28 min ago | ||||||
| 15.8/wk | 12 min ago | ||||||
| 4/wk | Aug 14 | ||||||
| — | 2 hours ago |
Demo setups use current model families. The pairings above are the combinations benchmarked by Artificial Analysis; rankings measure performance, not popularity.
Illustrative daily trends · Other totals: last 30 days. Build Hours: this week, model-estimated activity including overlap; not engineer hours.
USED BY ENGINEERING TEAMS AT
AT A GLANCE
 Zest | DX | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sells it | Zest, self-serve: sign up and connect GitHub, no demo. | Atlassian, which completed the purchase on November 10, 2025. DX sits in its Software Collection with Rovo Dev, Pipelines and Bitbucket, and is still sold on its own.[1][7] |
| Developer surveys | No: Zest runs no developer surveys. | Yes: Research-based surveys: the Developer Experience Index (DXI), DevSat and experience sampling.[3] |
| DORA metrics | No: No DORA metrics: pull request throughput and cycle time from GitHub only. | Yes: The DX Core 4 framework “unifies DORA, SPACE, and DevEx”.[8] |
| How it reads AI coding | A plugin or extension in each engineer's agent uploads every session: prompts, replies, model, tokens, tools, skills and MCP calls. Cursor's token counts come from Cursor's dashboard, only if the engineer turns that on. | Admin APIs and OpenTelemetry for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Copilot, plus a daemon on each laptop that hooks the agents and marks AI-written lines “without source code leaving the machine”.[4][5] |
| Data it connects to | GitHub pull requests and commits, and each engineer's agent sessions; no issue tracker, CI, incident, calendar or HR data. | Git, issue trackers, CI/CD, incident tools such as PagerDuty and Opsgenie, Google and Outlook calendars, and 20 AI coding tools.[4] |
| Hosting and code access | Cloud only. The plugins upload session transcripts (Claude Code's with file diffs) after redacting secrets on the laptop; the GitHub App never writes to your code. | Multi-tenant SaaS, a single-tenant Dedicated instance, or Managed in your own AWS account; no self-hosted product. The daemon keeps source snapshots and raw diffs on the laptop.[6][9] |
| Cost for 5 engineers | $49/mo for 5 engineers: one Pro workspace, seats included. | From $1,250/mo for 5 engineers: the AWS Marketplace listing starts at $15,000 for a 12-month contract, plus $672 for each additional active contributor.[2] |
| Free plan or trial | Yes: Starter is free for 3 seats, no credit card. | No: No free plan, trial or pricing page; you start with a demo.[2][3] |
Facts from each vendor's own pages and AWS Marketplace listings, dated in the sources below. ✓ listed, – partly, × not listed on the pages we read, which is not proof the product lacks it.
Atlassian completed its purchase of DX on November 10, 2025. DX sits in Atlassian's Software Collection with Rovo Dev, Pipelines and Bitbucket, and getdx.com still sells it on its own, after a demo. The AWS Marketplace listing starts at $15,000 for a 12-month contract, plus $672 for each additional active contributor.
DX's surveys (the Developer Experience Index, DevSat and experience sampling) ask engineers where their time goes. Its Core 4 framework folds DORA, SPACE and developer experience into one set of measures. Surveys catch friction no log shows, and they take a program to run: questions, reminders, a response rate. More on the frameworks in developer productivity metrics.
DX's daemon hooks Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI and other agents on each laptop and marks every line as AI or human, with no model guessing. Its docs list the limits: background and cloud agents aren't counted, nothing is attributed retroactively, and token cost isn't assigned to commits or pull requests.
Zest starts inside the agent: each session's model, tokens, skills and MCP tools, with its cost, linked to the pull request it led to. DX tells you how much of the code AI wrote; Zest shows how each engineer works with the agent.
Span, like DX, runs developer experience surveys and reports allocation and capitalization, and it adds R&D tax credits and an AI readiness survey. Its laptop agent records whole Claude Code and Cursor sessions, prompts and tool calls included, where DX's daemon marks lines. It lists $45 a contributor a month on a one-year contract.
Swarmia sells developer surveys as a module, $9 a developer a month on their own, next to delivery metrics and AI adoption ($5, billed annually). It reads Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex from each vendor's API, or Claude Code's OpenTelemetry set on each laptop.
Jellyfish reads Git, Jira or Linear, CI, incident tools and each AI tool's vendor API, and sells AI Impact, Developer Productivity and DevFinOps as modules. Like DX it sells by quote; its one public AWS bundle is $30,800 a year for 15 seats. Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant named both Leaders.
LinearB acts on pull requests with gitStream rules and AI reviews, from $29 a user a month, billed annually, for at least 50 users. Waydev Enterprise runs self-hosted or in your own VPC, with the on-prem versions of GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and Bitbucket. Both include developer surveys. Weave has a model score each pull request; it lists no survey product.
Zest is ours and needs no demo. A plugin in Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build or Hermes, or an extension in Cursor or VS Code, records each session's model, tokens, skills and MCP calls; the GitHub App links it to the pull request, and each engineer gets a daily standup. Starter is free for 3 seats. No surveys, DORA, benchmarks or capitalization, and GitHub only.
Start from what you use DX for:
TRY IT ON YOUR TEAM
Starter is free (3 seats, no credit card). Pro is $49 a month with 5 seats and Max is $149 a month with 10 seats — priced per workspace, not per engineer, with extra seats at $19 a month.
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW
Yes. Atlassian completed its acquisition of DX on November 10, 2025, and lists DX in its Software Collection (checked October 5, 2026).
DX doesn't publish prices on getdx.com. Its AWS Marketplace listing starts at $15,000 for a 12-month contract, plus $672 for each additional active contributor (checked October 5, 2026).
Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for developer productivity insight platforms named Atlassian (DX), Jellyfish, LinearB and Swarmia Leaders. Span is the closest on surveys plus agent data. Swarmia, LinearB, Waydev and Weave publish per-engineer prices; Span lists $45 a contributor on its comparison pages.
DX's developer productivity framework, which in DX's words “unifies DORA, SPACE, and DevEx” into one set of measures.
No. Zest measures the AI coding work itself (sessions, models, skills, MCP tools and the pull requests they led to); surveys and benchmarks are DX's strength.
