Greptile is a hosted PR-review bot — a comment-on-every-PR product that uploads your repository to its own cloud and charges roughly $30 per developer per month. Sverklo is a local-first MCP server (MIT, free) that gives your AI agent the same symbol graph and risk scoring at edit time, not just at review time, with zero bytes of code leaving the machine. This page explains what each does best, where they differ, and when to use them together.
Need the four-way overview? See the multi-product comparison covering sverklo vs Serena, GitNexus, and Greptile across six dimensions.
| Sverklo | Greptile | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Local MCP server (37 tools) | Hosted PR-review SaaS bot |
| License / Price | MIT Free for all use | ~$30/dev/mo Hosted SaaS |
| Where your code lives | 100% on your machine — never uploaded | Uploaded and stored in Greptile's cloud |
| Surface to the AI agent | Continuous: 37 MCP tools at edit time, search time, and review time | Review-only: bot comments after PR opens |
| Client support | Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, any MCP client | GitHub PRs (Slack, Linear integrations) |
| Symbol graph | Hybrid BM25 + vector + PageRank at the symbol level | Proprietary embedding-based search |
| Blast-radius analysis | sverklo_impact shows callers, callees, test coverage |
Not exposed as a separate primitive |
| PR review | Risk-scored diff (importance × coverage × churn) + CI gate (--fail-on high) |
Inline review comments + summary on every PR |
| Memory of past decisions | Bi-temporal, git-pinned, queryable at any past commit | Not available |
| Privacy | 100% local, no telemetry, no API keys, MIT | SOC 2 hosted, but your code lives in Greptile's infrastructure |
| Inline PR comments | Single sticky comment via GitHub Action (no per-line review yet) | Per-line review comments on every PR |
| Setup | npm install -g sverklo && sverklo init — 30s |
Auth GitHub app, contract, onboarding |
| Open source | Yes (MIT) | No (proprietary, hosted) |
Sverklo publishes a reproducible 5-baseline retrieval benchmark on 180 hand-verified tasks across 6 OSS codebases. Full ranking page. Greptile is closed-source and isn't on the public bench, so we can only compare sverklo against the other open baselines:
| baseline | F1 | P1 def | P2 refs | P4 deps | tokens |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sverklo | 0.58 | 0.63 | 0.27 | 0.84 | 652 |
| smart-grep | 0.34 | 0.20 | 0.20 | 0.40 | 714 |
| jcodemunch-mcp | 0.29 | 0.52 | 0.01 | 0.33 | 1,907 |
Sverklo wins overall F1 (0.58) and dominates file-dependency reasoning (P4 0.84) — the slice that most directly maps to PR-review's "what would break if I change this?" question. Jcodemunch-mcp uniquely reaches P5 recall 1.00 with F1 0.34, and we publish that tradeoff visibly. Greptile's symbol resolution is proprietary so we can't say where it would land; the open-baseline numbers above are the only third-party-reproducible reference points in the category.
“sverklo-bench could absolutely evolve into LMSYS-style category arena” — Jake Gravelle, maintainer of jcodemunch-mcp
--fail-on high) that fail builds locally without a cloud round-tripGreptile is a PR-review bot: a hosted comment-on-every-diff product that reads your repo from its own cloud and posts inline reviews after a PR opens. It's a great fit for teams who want a managed reviewer with no install, accept the SaaS price, and are comfortable uploading their code.
Sverklo is an agent-grounding layer: a local MCP server that gives Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf a real symbol graph the moment the agent starts reasoning — at edit time, search time, and review time. The PR is just one of many surfaces; the engine runs continuously inside your editor. Same intelligence, different point in the loop.
They're not mutually exclusive. Run sverklo locally to ground your agent and gate your CI; let Greptile post the inline PR comments your team's reviewer flow expects. Or pick sverklo if uploading the codebase isn't an option.
MIT licensed. One command. Works with every MCP client.
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