Greptile is a hosted PR-review bot — a comment-on-every-PR product whose hosted deployment processes repository data in Greptile's infrastructure. Its Pro plan is $30 per seat per month, and it also offers a free individual Starter plan and self-hosted deployment. 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. Its bundled ONNX provider is local by default; an explicitly configured remote embedding provider may receive code chunks. 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 | Bundled local provider by default; remote provider only if configured | Hosted deployment processes repo data in Greptile infrastructure; self-hosting is also available |
| 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 | Local by default, telemetry off by default, no API key for bundled provider, 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: its hosted deployment reads repository data in Greptile's infrastructure and posts inline reviews after a PR opens; self-hosting is also available. It's a good fit for teams who want a managed reviewer with no install and are comfortable with that hosted boundary.
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 use Sverklo's bundled provider when your code must remain local.
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