Swarmia Reviews & Product Details

Out the box DORA metrics. Easy setup. Opinionated but flexible.

As a CTO it allowed me to get all the metrics without much time commitment.

Setup took less than half an hour. And then it just started working.

Developers have loved it - it hasn't got in their way, but provided helpful insights that they've taken on board. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only small issue that I've come across was around adding other users to view dashboards.

I set things up using Github accounts - which seemed intuitive. Yet the CEO and product manager don't have a Github account, so they aren't able to log in and view dashboards.

Swarmia do have the ability to convert users to Google auth - so they've solved this problem. But this was the only point of friction that I experienced. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The onboarding experience is well guided and takes a lot of the guess work out of setting something like this up. Especially the integrations with the various engineering tools to bring all the data into the one place.

The implementation was straight forward and provided a large number of insights out of the box. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are some defaults that Swarmia don't make obvious, so it was a little tricky identifying areas in our CI/CD that are custom, where we could improve the process to help the tool work better for us. Not a massive issue, we just wanted to get the most out of Swarmia and when the initial numbers didn't look right, we had to track it down within our pipeline manually to find the discrepancies. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Swarmia gives me full visibility into the development process without micromanaging. I particularly value metrics like Flow Efficiency, Cycle Time, and Focus Summary, which help us track productivity trends and identify bottlenecks. The ability to group work by initiatives and use granular filters (such as issue type, label, or assignee) lets me tailor reports to the needs of different stakeholders. I also appreciate how Swarmia highlights things like scope creep or delivery interruptions, so I can proactively address issues with the team or client. For me, the tool is intuitive and provides just the right amount of actionable insight without overwhelming me with data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes, Swarmia classifies scope changes (like adding a small bug fix during review) as scope creep, which can be misleading. I’d love to see more flexibility in how these events are categorized or allow us to mark some changes as “minor.” Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really appreciate Swarmia for its ability to provide comprehensive insights into team collaboration and performance metrics. Over the past six months, it has become an indispensable tool to evaluate key performance indicators for the teams I manage. It's particularly useful for understanding pull request times and tracking the direction of team efforts, as well as seeing the adoption of tools like Cursor. Swarmia's focus on team-based trends rather than micromanagement aligns perfectly with my need to assess collaborative efforts and their outcomes. I am impressed by its capacity to deliver insights on a team level, rather than just individual metrics, which helps me as a CTO to report back on team contributions without the need to manually track developers’ work on various tickets. The recent release of the FTE tracking feature stands out, allowing me to retrospectively view time spent on specific tasks and understand staff efforts more effectively. Furthermore, the tool's setup was straightforward for someone familiar with GitHub, and its integration with platforms like GitHub and Jira enhances its utility. Swarmia's remarkable performance in solving a variety of problems related to team reporting and curiosity about team dynamics ensures I am confident in recommending it with a perfect score. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find the user onboarding process for developers challenging. When I invite new developers, they often do not understand what Swarmia is for and what we can accomplish with it. The initial instructions or introduction is unclear, which makes it hard for them to grasp how to proceed. The lack of a clear, initial invitation process exacerbates this issue, especially if the invitee is not part of the GitHub organization, as it prevents them from logging in. Additionally, it would be more convenient if involvement in the GitHub organization was not a requirement because I have many external contributors for different branches, which complicates managing access. Currently, I have to add all developers to the organization, which is not ideal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Swarmia has been useful both within our engineering team as well as across the wider business, giving us useful metrics with which to frame our productivity and efficiency. We utilise the Categorisation and DORA metrics extensively. It is also great when engineers are onboarding as we can monitor their fit with the rest of the engineering team. It also allows us to spot problems in our engineering workflow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Must be careful not to be too metric focused, which is a drawback of any tool like this. Categorisation is very useful, but it has taken us a while to find the right filters based on how we use Linear to get everything categorised correctly. Sometimes to find the data you need it can require a bunch of clicking around drilling down into menus. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the ease of setup and the Working Agreements. I have not seen a feature like working agreements in other competitors we've tried. And the investment balance has become critical for reporting useful statistics to my executive team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are LOTS of features. It's difficult to know where to start when looking at all the possible data insights. I think a guided set up based on the problems my team is trying to solve would be useful to point in the direction of the useful data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Swarmia is very easy to set up and provides great visibility into engineering work. I especially appreciate how quickly I can access meaningful metrics across teams, like sprint progress, uncategorized work, and focus areas. It makes it much easier to have productive conversations and spot trends early. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some features feel a bit unreliable — for example, the sprint view sometimes misses relevant data. Also, it’s not possible to filter key metrics like cycle time or story points at the individual contributor level, which would be useful in some contexts like 1:1s or coaching. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Swarmia provides information about the time/metrics it takes for certain processes to take place. It really allows you to stay onto of things other than make sure all PR/process are being performed efficiently and correctly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Downsides are it may not taken into account some life cycle for a task, as it may not understand the complexity of a task and assume it has taken too long for it to be completed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Swarmia is easy to connect to tools you are probably already using, like Jira and your Github organization account.

Everything feels fresh, good looking and, though there are many metrics and graphs, quite easy to get along.

It has quickly become my main hub to check pending PRs, the work focus for each member of the team and follow up on the targets that we as a team have agreed upon.

It's also great to show and share with our managers, so they can have a glance of how good the development team is performing and improving.

The customer service was also really helpful, and they have answered my questions and are taking my feedback into account.

Last, but not least, we are currently a small development of just 5 members, though we might hire 1 or 2 more in the following months.

Swarmia has a free plan for up to 9 developers, with no restrictions on the available features, so even though I don't consider it expensive on the paid plans, for us right now is a no brainer, no excuses to try it out.

2025 update: I wanted to share that after almost 2 years using Swarmia on a daily basis, it's become our main tool for managing the developers and teams quality of work, identify issues and promote improvements for our own processes. I highly recommend giving it a try, as I don't want to imagine my worklife now if I were to lose this tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I just found a few pain points while using Swarmia:

- Right now I cannot see completed tasks by user, only task creation. The done tasks are only shown by team.

2025 update: this was solved by the dev team a while back, a few weeks after my suggestion, so it is no longer a problem!

- It needs an existing PR to show the ongoing commits, so until the PR gets created there can be days where a given developer seems to be doing nothing.

- It requires a bit of a mental and working shift, as it works best if your team follows their recommendations, which admittedly is kind of the point of their promised improvement, but still can cause some friction to some people. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Swarmia measures real work

- Aligned with agile way of working

- Easy to get adoption among collegues

- Easy to follow and to drive change

- Relevant metrics and recommendations Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Would be awesome to get an easy action management connected to the agreements for the team. Like a palce for team retrospectives Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.