We Both Know Your Metrics Are Lying to You
Story points look great. Team feels underwater. Sound familiar?
Let Me Be Honest Here
I've evaluated every engineering metrics platform. They're all running the same playbook.
Week One Reality Check
You know the drill. Sales demo looks amazing. Then you actually try to use it.
LinearB wants you to categorize every single work item. Create team hierarchies that'll be outdated next quarter. Configure GitStream with YAML that nobody understands. Three weeks later? You've got dashboards showing your velocity is "42." Helpful.
Jellyfish is worse. Twenty developer minimum just to talk to them. Then their data is "regularly missing or wrong" - actual customer quote from G2. Requires perfect Jira hygiene. When's the last time you saw that?
Swarmia looks nice. Working agreements sound great in theory. But it's still just metrics without context. "Your deployment frequency is 0.8/day." Cool. Why? No idea. What to do about it? Figure it out yourself.
We take a different approach. Connect GitHub. Five minutes max. Immediately: "Your PRs are stuck because Sarah's reviewing 78% of them. Here's what three other teams did to fix this exact bottleneck."
No categories. No YAML. No perfect Jira hygiene. Just answers.
The Board Meeting Problem
It's Tuesday. Board meeting is Thursday. They want metrics.
You fire up LinearB (or Jellyfish, or Swarmia). Beautiful dashboards everywhere. DORA metrics. Velocity trends. Your cycle time is 5.2 days. Sprint completion is 67%. Change failure rate trending up.
The board asks: "Why is velocity down? What are you doing about it?"
You don't know. The dashboard doesn't tell you. Now you're making educated guesses in front of people who control your budget.
With us? Different story.
"Velocity dropped because we added manual security reviews that take 3 days on average. Teams who automated these specific checks maintained velocity. Here's the implementation plan."
Now you sound like you know what you're doing. Because you actually do.
The Money Talk
Let's talk about what this actually costs. Spoiler: it's ridiculous.
LinearB? "Contact sales." Translation: $50K minimum, probably more. Annual contract. Can't cancel when you realize it's just dashboard theater.
Jellyfish won't even return your call with less than 20 developers. When they do? Hope you've got $75K lying around. For wrong data that requires perfect Jira hygiene you don't have.
Swarmia's more reasonable at $240/dev/year. Still adds up fast. 30 developers? That's $7,200 for metrics that tell you what but not why.
Our pricing? $29/developer/month. Transparent. On the website.
No minimums. No "contact sales" BS. Same features whether you're 3 developers or 300. Cancel anytime. Try it free for 21 days without a credit card.
Why so much cheaper? We don't have a sales team to pay. The product actually works, so we don't need them.
The 2-Minute Comparison
Because nobody reads feature matrices anyway
| Feature | TeamOnTrack | LinearB | Jellyfish | Swarmia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero Setup Required | ||||
| AI Pattern Detection | Advanced | Basic | Limited | Basic |
| Time to First Insight | < 5 minutes | 2-4 weeks | 3-6 weeks | 1-2 weeks |
| Data Labeling Automated | ||||
| Actionable Recommendations | Limited | Limited | Basic | |
| DORA Metrics | ||||
| Team Workload Analysis | ||||
| Pricing Transparency | Public | Contact Sales | Contact Sales | Public |
| Free Trial | 21 days | 14 days | Demo Only | 14 days |
| Minimum Team Size | No minimum | 10+ developers | 20+ developers | 5+ developers |
What Your Peers Are Saying
I talked to CTOs who switched. Here's what they told me.
"LinearB was the classic bait and switch. Demo looked great. Reality? Three months of setup. Categories for everything. YAML configs nobody understood. My senior engineers were literally debugging GitStream rules instead of shipping features."
"The breaking point? Board meeting. They ask why velocity is down. I've got 17 LinearB dashboards open. Beautiful graphs everywhere. But I can't answer the actual question."
"TeamOnTrack told me in 5 minutes what LinearB couldn't in 3 months: our PR reviews were the bottleneck. One senior was reviewing 80% of code. Fixed it that week."
— CTO, 45-person fintech startup (saved $52K/year)"Jellyfish wouldn't even demo for us. 18 developers? Too small. Finally hit 20, got the demo, signed the contract."
"First month: data is wrong. Everywhere. Support says we need 'better Jira hygiene.' Have you seen a startup's Jira? Perfect hygiene is a fantasy."
"Six months in, we're paying $73K for broken dashboards. My CFO is asking uncomfortable questions."
"TeamOnTrack doesn't care about our messy Jira. Works anyway. Actually finds real problems. Revolutionary concept."
— VP Engineering, Series B SaaS (25 developers)"I'll admit it - Swarmia looks nice. Clean UI. Working agreements seemed smart. Reasonable pricing too."
"But here's the thing: it's still just metrics. 'Your deployment frequency dropped 40%.' Yeah, I noticed. Why? No idea. How to fix it? Figure it out yourself."
"TeamOnTrack is different. 'Your deployments dropped because you added manual security reviews. Team X had the same problem. They automated these three specific checks. Deployments went back up. Here's how.'"
"That's not a metric. That's a solution."
— Engineering Manager, 30-person startupI Know What You're Thinking
These are the exact objections I hear on every call
"We already paid for LinearB/Jellyfish..."
Look, I get it. Sunk cost feels real. You spent $50K and three months getting it set up. Your CFO will ask questions if you cancel now.
But here's what I've seen: teams waste 6 more months trying to make it work. Meanwhile, your actual bottleneck - the one killing velocity - stays unfixed.
Run both for three weeks. Costs nothing. See which one actually helps. The sunk cost of a tool nobody uses is infinite.
"Another tool means more context switching"
You're right to worry about this. Tool sprawl is real. Login fatigue is real.
But think about it differently: you're already bouncing between GitHub, Jira, your current metrics tool, and probably three Slack channels trying to figure out why PRs are stuck.
We replace that chaos with one place that actually has answers. Most teams check us once a week, see what's broken, fix it. Done. Less tool usage, not more.
"My team will hate this surveillance crap"
Honestly? This is the objection that matters most. If your team thinks you're spying, you've already lost.
We don't do individual metrics. Period. Sarah reviews a lot of PRs? We flag the system bottleneck, not Sarah. We never show "Sarah took 4 days to review this." That's surveillance. We show "Reviews are taking 4 days because distribution is uneven."
Your team sees everything you see. Same dashboard. No hidden manager views. It's about fixing broken processes, not blaming people. Most developers actually like it because it finally gives them ammunition to push back on impossible timelines.
"AI recommendations are probably generic garbage"
Fair skepticism. Most "AI recommendations" are just Mad Libs templates. "Increase velocity by improving code quality!" Thanks for nothing.
Here's how we're different. When we say "teams who automated security checks deployed 3x more," we mean actual teams. With names. From our database. We'll show you which teams, what they changed, and how long it took to see results.
Try it. If the recommendations are generic, call us out. We'll either show you the data or admit we're wrong. But I'm pretty confident you'll find them useful.
How to Switch in 15 Minutes
Seriously. 15 minutes.
1
Connect GitHub (2 minutes)
OAuth flow. Click, authorize, done.
2
Connect Jira/Linear (3 minutes)
Same deal. We pull your project data.
3
Get your first insight (instantly)
"Your PR reviews take 4.2 days. Here's why and how to fix it."
4
Cancel your old tool (whenever)
Most teams know within 48 hours. 21-day trial gives you time to be sure.