Best 12 Alternatives to Jellyfish for Engineering Leaders in 2026

These are the best alternatives to Jellyfish this year:

1. Pensero

2. LinearB

3. Swarmia

4. Biland

5. Waydev

6. Snapshot Reviews

7. Taito.ai

8. Entelligence

9. Oobeya

10. Lattice

11. Culture Amp

12. DEEL Engage

Engineering leaders today face a common challenge: understanding what their teams are actually accomplishing without drowning in dashboards, metrics, and technical jargon.

Jellyfish has established itself as a comprehensive platform, but its complexity, enterprise pricing, and heavy focus on financial reporting don't always align with what engineering managers need day-to-day.

The right alternative depends on what matters most to your leadership style. Some teams need better visibility into daily work. Others want automated performance insights. Many simply need engineering data translated into language that makes sense to everyone, not just technical stakeholders.

This guide examines eight compelling alternatives, starting with platforms that prioritize clarity and actionable insights over complexity.

The 12 Best Alternatives to Jellyfish

1. Pensero

Pensero represents what engineering intelligence should be: insightful, accessible, and genuinely useful for daily decision-making.

Built by a team with over 20 years of average experience in the tech industry, the platform transforms the overwhelming flood of engineering data into simple, executive-ready insights that everyone can understand immediately.

What makes Pensero different

The fundamental difference lies in how it communicates. While other tools present you with dashboards to interpret, Pensero gives you Executive Summaries that turn engineering data into simple, human TLDRs every leader understands.

No more translating Git commits into business impact. No more explaining technical metrics to non-technical stakeholders. The platform does that work for you.

Key capabilities

• "What Happened Yesterday" gives you instant visibility into daily team activity without requiring status reports or diving through commit histories. You stay connected to your team's work without micromanaging.

• Body of Work Analysis goes beyond surface metrics like velocity or commit counts to assess actual engineering output over time. This provides nuanced understanding of productivity, recognizing that meaningful work isn't always reflected in simple measurements.

• Executive Summaries automatically generate iteration and sprint summaries in plain language. Whether you're updating stakeholders, running retrospectives, or simply keeping your finger on the pulse, these summaries give you the full picture without the effort.

• AI Cycle Analysis helps you understand how AI coding tools are actually impacting your team's workflow, not through Jira labels or guesswork, but through genuine analysis of how work patterns change.

• Industry Benchmarks let you compare your team's performance against relevant peers, giving context to your metrics and helping you set realistic expectations.

What you need to know

Integrations: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Google Calendar, Cursor, Claude Code

Pricing: Free tier for up to 10 engineers and 1 repository; $50/month premium; custom enterprise pricing

Notable customers: Travelperk, Elfie.co, Caravelo

Why Pensero should be your first choice

Engineering leadership is hard enough without needing to become a data analyst. Pensero respects your time and expertise by giving you insights in the language of leadership, not the language of Git.

The platform reflects deep understanding of what engineering managers actually need: not another dashboard to monitor, but intelligent clarity delivered when and where you need it.

2. LinearB

LinearB brings substantial capabilities to engineering intelligence, particularly for teams that prioritize DORA metrics, agile metrics, and delivery optimization.

With a team of 140 employees and significant backing from Tel Aviv, the platform offers comprehensive workflow automation alongside real-time performance dashboards.

What it does well

The platform's recent AI features include automated PR descriptions, AI-powered code reviews, and iteration summaries that demonstrate commitment to reducing engineering toil.

LinearB serves organizations with 50+ engineers well, providing industry-standard frameworks for measuring team performance through both DORA and SPACE metrics.

What you need to know

• Best for: Teams deeply invested in DevOps practices and workflow automation

• Integrations: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Slack, and other essential development tools

• Pricing: Free tier with basic functionality; business features starting at $49/month; custom enterprise pricing

The strength in delivery metrics and workflow automation makes LinearB valuable for teams where DevOps excellence is paramount.

3. Swarmia

Swarmia takes a refreshingly developer-centric approach to engineering intelligence, emphasizing transparency and team ownership over top-down management.

The Helsinki and New York-based company built a platform that respects developer autonomy while giving leaders necessary visibility.

What makes it different

Swarmia commits to making engineering data accessible to developers themselves, aligning closely with modern developer experience metrics that prioritize autonomy and transparency. Individual contributors gain insights into their own work patterns, helping them identify bottlenecks and improvement opportunities independently.

For engineering leaders, Swarmia offers comprehensive DORA metrics and delivery insights, presented in contexts that encourage healthy team dynamics. The platform includes investment tracking features that help organizations understand where engineering effort actually goes.

What you need to know

• Best for: Organizations prioritizing developer autonomy and transparency.

• Worth noting: The developer-first philosophy means less detailed financial reporting compared to platforms focused exclusively on leadership visibility. Organizations valuing healthy team dynamics and developer satisfaction often find this approach aligns well with their culture.

4. Bilanc

Emerging from Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, Bilanc focuses on one of engineering management's most painful tasks: performance reviews.

The platform generates AI-powered reviews incorporating codebase insights, productivity data, and collaboration context.

Key strength

Bilanc creates a comprehensive knowledge graph of your codebase, surfacing actionable insights that would otherwise require hours of manual investigation.

Engineering leaders can provide impactful feedback without manually piecing together information from multiple sources. The platform synthesizes months of work into coherent, actionable performance assessments.

Notable features

Complexity scoring for pull requests (0-10 scale) provides nuanced understanding beyond simple metrics. The bell-curve distribution analysis identifies performance outliers using statistical methods, bringing rigor to performance assessments.

What you need to know

• Best for: Leaders needing comprehensive performance insights and automated review generation

• Pricing: Approximately €20 per engineer per month

• Customer highlight: MoonPay

The platform works particularly well as complementary to traditional software engineering metrics rather than replacing them. It addresses the human element of engineering management that pure metrics platforms miss.

Not a good fit? Check out some Bilanc alternatives.

5. Waydev

Waydev specializes in dashboarding for engineering managers, ingesting data from repositories and ticketing systems to provide comprehensive productivity overviews.

Despite being a smaller operation, the platform offers robust implementation of both DORA and SPACE frameworks.

What it offers

The platform combines quantitative delivery metrics with qualitative team health insights, recognizing that engineering productivity involves both output and wellbeing.

The engagement module uses developer experience surveys combined with workload level analysis, attempting to identify burnout risks and team satisfaction issues before they impact productivity.

Deployment options

The web interface emphasizes data visualization through customizable dashboards. Waydev offers both SaaS ($45.75 per developer/month) and self-hosted ($70.75 per developer/month) deployment options.

What you need to know

Best for: Engineering managers valuing comprehensive DORA and SPACE framework implementation

The platform suits data-oriented engineering managers wanting established frameworks without requiring extensive workflow automation or AI-assisted features.

6. Snapshot Reviews

Snapshot Reviews, developed by Flatiron Co (an IT outsourcing company based in Miami), brings unique emphasis on code quality analysis.

The platform connects to Jira and GitHub to provide insights from both code analysis and developer activities.

Unique angle

What distinguishes Snapshot Reviews is its built-in AI feature that analyzes code quality, likely powered by OpenAI's models. This line-by-line code review capability helps teams maintain quality standards while meeting tight deadlines.

The interface focuses on pull requests, code reviews, and commits per team member, providing engineering managers with granular visibility into individual contribution patterns.

What you need to know

Best for: Teams emphasizing deep code analysis alongside performance metrics

Pricing tiers:

• Free tier: Up to 5 users

• Basic: $15 per engineer per month

• AI Enhanced: $40 per engineer per month

For organizations where code quality represents a critical concern, this emphasis on analysis over simple metrics offers genuine value.

7. Taito.ai

Taito.ai represents a fundamentally different approach to engineering management, focusing on continuous feedback and performance enablement rather than retrospective analysis.

The Helsinki-based platform with Accel backing addresses the performance management cycle itself.

Core approach

The platform uses AI to assist with goal setting, suggesting personalized objectives based on employee roles and aligning them with team and company goals automatically.

The single-page aggregated feedback view reduces the burden of performance appraisal cycles significantly. Instead of managers scrambling to reconstruct an employee's year during review season, Taito.ai continuously captures feedback that can be synthesized when needed.

Integration philosophy

Taito.ai works within tools teams already use: Slack, Google Calendar, and various HRIS systems, making adoption frictionless. The platform reads calendar data to provide managers with tips for one-to-one meetings.

What you need to know

• Best for: Organizations transforming annual reviews into ongoing performance enablement

• Pricing: €10 per employee per month

• Early customers: Supermetrics (360 employees), Faculty.AI

Teams must determine whether this feedback-centric approach aligns with their broader performance philosophy.

8. Entelligence

Entelligence was founded by Aiswarya Sankar, a Berkeley graduate and former Uber engineering manager.

Backed by Mayfield, Correlation Ventures, and Embedding VC, with support from strategic angels at Zapier, GitLab, Cisco, and NVIDIA, the company raised a $5 million seed round. While well-funded, users have noted limited onboarding support and a lean operational setup.

Key features

• AI Code Review automates pull request reviews with context-aware feedback and walkthroughs, helping teams maintain quality standards without bottlenecking on manual reviews.

• Automated Documentation generates and maintains up-to-date documentation from the codebase itself, solving the perennial problem of documentation falling behind code changes.

• Codebase Chat allows natural language queries for instant insights and suggestions, making large codebases more accessible to new team members.

• Team Insights provides analytics on contributions and identifies development bottlenecks, with reporting focused on repositories rather than teams.

Technical foundation

The platform combines React and TypeScript on the frontend with Python/Django and AWS on the backend, utilizing Docker and Kubernetes for infrastructure.

What you need to know

• Best for: Teams seeking AI-powered code review and automated documentation

• Pricing: Freemium model; $20 per user per month for paid tier

• Integrations: GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Discord, Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Jira, Linear, Asana, Sentry, PagerDuty

• Customer base: DigiBee (Brazil), Chegg (US), Composio (US), Thought Minds (US), assistant/ui (YC 25), Citizen Health (US)

Initial testing revealed some product stability issues that the platform continues to address.

9. Oobeya

Oobeya provides software engineering intelligence that helps organizations gather and analyze data from across their development ecosystem, offering a flexible alternative to Jellyfish's more structured approach.

What it offers

The platform connects to multiple data sources to provide engineering leaders with unified visibility into team performance, quality metrics, and delivery insights. Oobeya's primary strength lies in its customization capabilities, teams can tailor dashboards and reports to match their specific workflows and organizational contexts.

Unlike Jellyfish's comprehensive but prescriptive approach, Oobeya gives teams more control over how they want to view and analyze their data.

Key capabilities

• Customizable dashboards that adapt to your team's unique needs and metrics

• Multi-source data integration for comprehensive engineering visibility

• Value stream mapping to identify bottlenecks across delivery pipelines

• Team-level and organization-level insights with flexible reporting

What you need to know

Best for: Mid-size to large engineering organizations needing customizable engineering intelligence without Jellyfish's financial reporting overhead

Integrations: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Azure DevOps

Pricing: $29 to $39 per seat; up to 100 seats ($6-10k/month monthly fee per team)

Worth noting: Requires more initial setup and configuration than plug-and-play solutions, but the flexibility pays off for teams with specific reporting needs that don't fit standard frameworks

10. Lattice

Lattice extends beyond pure engineering metrics into comprehensive people management, combining performance reviews, goal tracking, and engagement measurement in ways Jellyfish doesn't attempt.

What makes it different

While Jellyfish focuses on engineering work and financial alignment, Lattice addresses the broader human context of engineering team management. For leaders managing both delivery and people development, Lattice provides structure around goal-setting, career development, and team health.

The platform combines OKR tracking, performance reviews, continuous feedback, and employee engagement surveys into a unified system that complements rather than replaces engineering-specific tools.

Key capabilities

• Performance management with customizable review cycles and 360-degree feedback

• OKR tracking with alignment across individual, team, and organizational levels

• Engagement surveys designed to measure team satisfaction and identify retention risks

• One-on-one meeting tools and templates for structured manager-employee conversations

• AI-assisted features for drafting performance reviews and synthesizing feedback

What you need to know

Best for: Engineering leaders wanting to combine delivery metrics with comprehensive people management; organizations building holistic people operations

Integrations: Slack, Teams, JIRA, Gmail, GDocs, Personio, Workday, BambooHR, SFDC

Pricing: Base package (Performance + OKRs) starts at ~$11/employee/month; Engagement adds $4/employee/month; Enterprise pricing custom

Compliance: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR

Worth noting: Lattice targets HR and people operations primarily; engineering-specific delivery insights are less developed than dedicated engineering intelligence platforms like Jellyfish. Works best when adopted organization-wide rather than just within engineering.

11. Culture Amp

Culture Amp represents the most comprehensive approach to employee engagement and performance management, offering engineering organizations a way to balance delivery metrics with deep team health insights.

What it does well

Culture Amp built its reputation on scientifically-designed employee engagement surveys and has expanded into performance management and development. With over 6,500 customers and serving 25 million employees, the platform brings research-backed methodologies to measuring team satisfaction and cultural health.

For engineering organizations, this means combining technical delivery metrics with deeper insights into burnout risk, team satisfaction, and organizational culture—areas where Jellyfish provides limited visibility.

Key capabilities

• Research-backed engagement surveys designed specifically to measure team health accurately

• Performance management including goal tracking, continuous feedback, and structured review cycles

• Development planning with career frameworks and growth conversations

• Analytics that synthesize engagement data with performance metrics

• AI-powered analysis using Google Vertex AI to turn thousands of employee comments into actionable insights and recommendations

What you need to know

Best for: Organizations treating engineering team health as seriously as delivery metrics; companies wanting validated, research-backed employee engagement measurement

Integrations: Google Vertex AI for AI features, Slack, Teams, major HRIS platforms

Pricing: Estimated $3-10 per employee per month depending on modules; minimum commitments apply ($9k-$17.6k for 200 employees; $14.6k-$25.8k for 1,000 employees)

Notable customers: 6,500+ companies globally (specific engineering-focused customers not disclosed)

Compliance: SOC 2, GDPR compliant

Worth noting: Culture Amp's comprehensive people-focused approach requires buy-in beyond just engineering leadership. Most effective when adopted organization-wide rather than as an engineering-only tool. Less detailed on technical delivery metrics compared to Jellyfish.

12. DEEL Engage

DEEL Engage offers performance management as an add-on to DEEL's global payroll and HR platform, providing an integrated alternative for companies already using DEEL's core services.

What makes it different

Unlike standalone engineering intelligence platforms, DEEL Engage integrates directly with DEEL's comprehensive employee data, creating a unified system for global teams. For organizations managing distributed engineering teams across multiple countries, this integration eliminates data silos between payroll, HR, and performance management.

The platform emphasizes continuous feedback and performance tracking without requiring separate logins or data synchronization that plague multi-tool setups.

Key capabilities

• Employee engagement and real-time feedback tools integrated with DEEL's HR platform

• Performance tracking with metrics evaluation and goal completion monitoring

• Communication and collaboration features designed for distributed teams

• Cultural integration activities and team-building for remote/hybrid environments

• Slack integration allowing users to manage processes without platform login

What you need to know

Best for: Organizations already using DEEL for global payroll/HR seeking integrated performance management; distributed teams needing unified employee data

Pricing: Additional $20 per employee per month (on top of DEEL's core payroll services)

Integration advantage: Direct access to comprehensive employee information in one platform eliminates typical integration headaches

Worth noting: Works best as part of the broader DEEL ecosystem; teams not using DEEL's core services may find standalone alternatives more suitable. Less sophisticated on pure engineering metrics compared to Jellyfish, but stronger on global team management and unified employee data.

Understanding the SPACE Framework: Beyond DORA Metrics

While Jellyfish and many engineering intelligence platforms emphasize DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery), forward-thinking organizations in 2026 recognize the need for more holistic measurement.

The SPACE framework (Satisfaction and Well-being, Performance, Activity, Communication and Collaboration, Efficiency and Flow) provides a multi-dimensional view of engineering excellence that delivery metrics alone cannot capture.

Why SPACE matters

DORA metrics excel at measuring delivery pipeline performance but miss critical aspects of sustainable engineering productivity. Developer satisfaction, for instance, isn't just a "feel-good" metric, it's a leading indicator of future performance and retention.

Similarly, collaboration quality and workflow efficiency significantly impact both delivery speed and developer morale in ways that pure throughput measurements overlook.

By embracing comprehensive frameworks like SPACE, engineering leaders move from narrow delivery optimization to strategic approaches that balance speed, quality, and team sustainability, crucial for building resilient, high-performing organizations long-term.

Avoiding 3 Common Metric Pitfalls

The promise of data-driven engineering leadership is immense, but the path contains significant traps. As one expert notes, "What gets measured gets managed, even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so."

1. The measurement trap

One common pitfall is measuring everything. In enthusiasm for data-driven decisions, leaders often collect every possible metric, creating overwhelming data that's difficult to interpret or act upon. This leads to "metric theater", data collection and display without meaningful change.

A more effective approach starts with specific problems or questions, then identifies the few key metrics providing the most insight.

2. Individual performance assessment dangers

Using metrics for individual performance evaluation represents another significant pitfall. Engineering metrics work best for understanding and improving systems and processes, not evaluating individual developers.

When metrics tie to individual performance, it inevitably leads to gaming the system, developers optimizing for metrics rather than desired outcomes. This stifles collaboration, discourages risk-taking, and ultimately harms both team culture and product quality.

3. Context matters

Finally, avoid one-size-fits-all approaches. The right metrics for a platform team differ from those for a product team. What works for large enterprises may not suit small startups.

Forcing all teams to adopt identical metrics ignores unique work contexts and can create resentment and disengagement. Instead, empower teams to choose metrics most relevant to their goals and challenges, while providing guidance ensuring alignment with broader organizational objectives.

Making the Right Choice for Your Team

Jellyfish established itself as a leader in comprehensive engineering intelligence, particularly for organizations needing DevFinOps capabilities and detailed financial reporting. For large enterprises managing substantial R&D budgets and requiring software capitalization automation, Jellyfish remains a strong choice.

But as this guide demonstrates, engineering leadership demands vary dramatically across organizations. The right platform depends entirely on what your team needs most:

• Need clarity and communication? Pensero transforms engineering data into insights everyone understands immediately, without requiring dashboard interpretation.

• Need delivery optimization? LinearB provides comprehensive DORA metrics and workflow automation for DevOps-focused teams.

• Need developer-first transparency? Swarmia empowers individual contributors with their own productivity insights while giving leaders necessary visibility.

• Need performance management integration? Lattice and Culture Amp combine delivery metrics with the human side of engineering leadership.

• Need AI-powered code quality? Entelligence and Snapshot Reviews emphasize automated review and documentation generation.

• Need flexible customization? Oobeya adapts to your specific workflows and reporting requirements.

• Need global team integration? DEEL Engage unifies performance management with global HR and payroll data.

The engineering intelligence market has matured beyond simple metric dashboards. In 2026, the best platforms recognize that sustainable high performance requires understanding not just how fast teams work, but what they're building, how they're collaborating, and whether they're working on the right things.

Choose the platform aligning with your leadership philosophy, integrating with your existing workflow, and addressing your team's actual challenges, not just the ones that are easy to measure.

For most engineering leaders, that means starting with Pensero's free tier to experience how engineering intelligence should work: insightful, accessible, and genuinely useful for the decisions you make every day.

Why Teams Look Beyond Jellyfish

Before diving into alternatives, it's worth understanding what drives teams away from Jellyfish.

The platform excels at DevFinOps, software capitalization reporting, and resource allocation analytics. These capabilities matter enormously to finance teams and senior executives managing R&D budgets.

However, many engineering managers find themselves overwhelmed by features they rarely use. The platform's strength in financial metrics can feel disconnected from the daily reality of leading engineering teams. When your primary need is understanding team productivity, workflow bottlenecks, or how to support individual contributors more effectively, Jellyfish's comprehensive approach can feel like overkill.

Additionally, Jellyfish typically targets organizations with substantial engineering teams, making it less accessible for growing startups or mid-sized companies that need powerful insights without enterprise-level investment.

Making the Right Choice

The engineering intelligence landscape continues evolving rapidly, with AI capabilities becoming standard rather than differentiators.

The platforms that succeed translate technical complexity into leadership clarity. Tools that engineering leaders actually want to use rather than feel obligated to monitor.

Pensero stands out by focusing on what engineering leaders need most: clear insights delivered in plain language, without requiring them to become data analysts or spend hours interpreting dashboards.

The platform's Executive Summaries, "What Happened Yesterday" visibility, and Body of Work Analysis address real daily challenges that engineering managers face.

Each alternative has its strengths, but if your primary need is understanding your team's work clearly enough to lead effectively, communicate confidently, and make informed decisions quickly, Pensero deserves your first look.

The platform reflects over 20 years of collective experience understanding what engineering leaders actually need: not another dashboard to monitor, but intelligent clarity delivered when and where you need it.

Consider starting with Pensero's free tier to experience how engineering intelligence should work. Insightful, accessible, and genuinely useful for the decisions you make every day.