Discount with code applied — 50% off Pro or Max for 6 months
COMPARE · ZEST VS WAYDEV
Sources last reviewed
The closest Waydev alternatives are Swarmia for a lower price, Weave for a score per pull request, DX to run in your own AWS account, Jellyfish or LinearB for a larger org, and Zest for monthly billing. Waydev bills each active contributor yearly, from $29 on Pro.[1]
Premium ($49) adds AI impact, ROI and DORA, and a free Start Up plan covers 10 repositories; Waydev connects GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and Gerrit, and Enterprise runs in your own VPC.[1][2] If your code is not on GitHub, or must stay on your own servers, Waydev fits and Zest does not.
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 | Waydev | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are billed for | The workspace, billed monthly: Pro is $49 with 5 seats, then $19 a seat. | Each active contributor, an engineer who commits code, billed annually.[1] |
| Free plan or trial | Yes: Starter is free for 3 seats, no credit card. | Yes: A Start Up plan from $0 with 10 repositories, 3 months of data and AI cost metrics, no card; paid plans offer a free trial on request.[1] |
| Self-hosting and on-prem Git | No: Zest is cloud-hosted and connects GitHub only. | Yes: Enterprise runs self-hosted or in your own VPC, air-gapped if needed, with on-prem GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and Bitbucket.[1][2] |
| Git hosts | GitHub only, through the Zest GitHub App. | GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and Gerrit; their on-prem versions on Enterprise.[1] |
| 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. | Vendor APIs for Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code and Windsurf (Copilot's per organization only; Claude Code's tokens through OpenTelemetry on each laptop), and an optional git hook that writes AI line counts into each commit.[3][4][5][6] |
| Comparing AI tools | Per session: each engineer's model, tokens and estimated cost in each agent, and which sessions ended in a merged pull request. | Premium compares Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code and Windsurf on cost per commit, per PR and per feature; a tool that reports no cost counts as $0 unless an admin sets token prices.[1][3][7] |
| DORA metrics | No: No DORA metrics: pull request throughput and cycle time from GitHub only. | Yes: DORA metrics on Premium and Enterprise, not Pro.[1] |
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.
Waydev's AI adoption view starts on Pro, billed for the year per active contributor; AI impact, the vendor ROI comparison and DORA need Premium at $49. Zest bills the workspace monthly. At list price, against Waydev Pro:
| Engineers | Waydev Pro | Zest |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | $145/mo | $49/mo (Pro) |
| 10 | $290/mo | $144/mo (Pro) |
| 20 | $580/mo | $334/mo (Pro) |
Waydev's Enterprise plan runs self-hosted or in your own VPC on AWS, Azure or GCP, with an air-gapped option, and connects the on-prem versions of GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket and Jira. In the cloud it clones repositories to analyze them and keeps no code. Zest is cloud-hosted and connects GitHub through its GitHub App, nothing else.
Waydev compares Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code and Windsurf on cost per commit, per pull request and per feature, on Premium. Copilot's API reports per organization, not per user, and Claude Code's tokens need an OpenTelemetry config on each developer's machine.
Zest compares at the session: each engineer's model, tokens and estimated cost in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or Copilot Chat, and which sessions ended in a merged pull request. Copilot metrics covers what GitHub reports itself.
Swarmia costs less: its AI plan is $5 a developer a month, billed annually, against $29 for Waydev Pro, and it is free for companies with fewer than 10 developers. Its pricing page lists GitHub and GitLab only, and it runs as SaaS on Google Cloud, in Frankfurt by default, with no self-hosted option listed.
Weave bills per engineer too: Starter is free, Pro is $42 a month billed yearly or $50 monthly. It adds a model score for each pull request, and private cloud or on-prem hosting is case by case on Enterprise.
DX has no self-hosted product, but it runs single-tenant or managed in your own AWS account, as well as multi-tenant, with 80 data connectors. It leads with developer survey programs and sells after a demo; its AWS listing starts at $15,000 a year, plus $672 for each added contributor.
Jellyfish lists 60 integrations, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps among them, and sells by quote; its one public AWS bundle is $30,800 a year for 15 seats. LinearB is priced like Waydev Pro, $29 a user a month billed annually, but Essentials bills at least 50 users and connects GitHub Cloud only; other hosts need Enterprise.
Span also bills per contributor, $45 a month on a one-year contract, and records whole Claude Code and Cursor sessions with a laptop agent rolled out by MDM, with capitalization and surveys on top.
Zest is ours: billed monthly per workspace, and Starter is free for 3 seats. Its plugins and extensions record each engineer's sessions in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot Chat, Grok Build and Hermes, with model, tokens and cost. Cloud-hosted and GitHub only, with no DORA, surveys or capitalization.
Start from why you'd leave Waydev:
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
Waydev's pricing page lists a Start Up plan from $0, Pro at $29 and Premium at $49 per active contributor a month, billed annually, and a custom Enterprise quote (checked October 5, 2026).
Yes, on Enterprise: self-hosted or in your own VPC on AWS, Azure or GCP, air-gapped if needed, with the on-prem versions of GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and Bitbucket.
To self-host, stay on Waydev Enterprise; DX runs managed in your own AWS account but has no self-hosted product. On GitHub or GitLab, Swarmia bills per developer and is free under 10. For one monthly price per workspace on GitHub, Zest.
Yes. Each engineer's sessions from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot Chat, Grok Build and Hermes land on one dashboard with their models, tokens and skills, next to the pull requests each session led to.
