Navigara vs Swarmia: what each one shows an engineering leader

Swarmia shows where engineering time and money went, and what each person’s AI tools cost. Navigara produces one figure: throughput against the same team’s pre-AI year. Both answer questions finance asks. A leader defending a mix wants the breakdown. A leader asked whether two years of AI tooling worked needs a comparison that resolves to a number.

What Swarmia measures

Swarmia reads widely: Git, trackers, CI/CD, surveys, and the 22 HRIS and payroll systems named on its integrations page. The payroll join is what lets it express engineering work in terms of both money and activity.

Investment Balance is the allocation view. Swarmia describes it as showing “how much time and money you’re spending on different types of engineering work,” sliced by roadmap versus bugs, planned versus unplanned, or one initiative versus another.

On AI cost, Swarmia “breaks down usage and cost by person, so you can see who’s on Claude Code, who’s on Cursor, and what each of them is costing you every month.” Spend also rolls up to team and department. The AI cost page shipped as a beta in August 2026. It sits in the AI adoption & cost add-on at $5 per developer per month, and in the Productivity & AI impact add-on at $23.

On individuals, Swarmia says it “is built around system-level insight and feedback, not individual monitoring.” The per-person AI cost view sits alongside that line, so how the data gets used depends on the org installing it.

Capitalization is an $18 add-on. Swarmia’s capitalization page cites “Our SOC 1 audited approach” and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, and offers auditors spreadsheet reports.

Pricing is published and starts low. Free for up to 9 developers; then $45 (Standard) or $55 (Enterprise) per developer per month, billed annually. Add-ons: $5 AI adoption & cost, $9 developer surveys, $18 software capitalization, $23 productivity & AI impact.

What Navigara measures

Navigara reads the repository and scores each merged change.

Engineering Throughput Value (ETV) sorts each merged commit into one of five categories (features, maintenance, tests, docs, and fixes) and sums them with equal weights. Allocation reporting can tell you 40% of the quarter went to maintenance. ETV scores the maintenance commits themselves, so three weeks of dependency bumps and a migration that unblocked the next two quarters do not receive the same score.

The comparison point is the team’s own history. Navigara “reads back through years of commits” and reports the current quarter against the pre-AI year. The Measure tier includes per-developer and per-team breakdowns, and the docs say individual scores “should not be read as a complete performance picture when supporting roles are present.”

Navigara also sells capitalization now. The Pro tier includes “CapEx / OpEx reporting, audit-defensible,” which classifies commits as capital or operating expense and cites IAS 38 and ASC 350-40. The method differs from Swarmia’s: Navigara starts from the commit; Swarmia from issue-tracker effort joined to payroll.

Side by side

Read the pricing lines together with the add-ons. A 60-engineer org running Swarmia, with capitalization and AI costs, pays a materially different amount than the base tier, and the capitalization line is the one finance usually signs off on.

Where the two overlap

Both read Git. Both report at team level. Both now sell AI cost attribution and capitalization. Both are bought by an engineering leader in response to a question from finance or the board.

The split is allocation against comparison. Swarmia answers where the quarter went. Navigara answers whether the quarter shipped more than the pre-AI year did.

If that second question is the one you keep getting asked, connect a repository, and Navigara reads back to your pre-AI year.

Which one fits your org

Swarmia fits an org that capitalizes on R&D from tracker and payroll data and wants the mix broken out by time and money. The free tier for 9 developers also makes it the easiest tool in this category to try out with a small team.

Navigara fits an org of roughly 20 to 100 engineers that adopted AI tooling in the last three years and needs one defensible figure on whether throughput has moved. The repository is the only required input, so there is no HRIS integration or survey round to set up first.

Both work above roughly 300 engineers, and they answer to different people. Swarmia’s allocation reports go to finance. The baseline goes to whoever approved the tooling budget.

What neither one sees

Navigara scores “only merged commits on connected repositories,” so code review, incident response, mentorship, and planning sit outside the score. Allocation reporting has a mirror-image limitation: it reports the mix without judging whether it was correct.

Talk to us if you want the baseline comparison run against your own history.