Sleuth vs. GetDX vs. Jellyfish

In this article, we will be comparing three of the best Engineering Intelligence tools (also known as Software Development Analytics tools): Sleuth, Jellyfish, and GetDX.

Whether you’re looking to use such a tool to improve developer productivity, developer experience, or simply to do reporting for executives or the business, we hope you'll find this article useful.

What is Engineering Intelligence?

Engineering Intelligence (EI) is a fancy word to describe Business Intelligence (BI) but for software engineering data. You can thank Gartner for using that term.

EI tools provide visibility specifically into the work of a software Engineering organization - from delivery and operational progress and status, to efficiency, morale, and resource allocation.

EI tools do so by gathering data and metadata from developer tools, such as issue trackers like Jira, version control systems like GitHub, incident management tools like PagerDuty, and the rest of the toolchain.

Evaluating EI tools

We begin by defining the comparison criteria, divided into four categories:

Delivery Progress

Delivery Progress is all about the status and progress of currently ongoing Engineering work. This data is primarily captured in issue trackers and source control tools.

We grade EI tools on Delivery Progress based on how well they can use such data to answer questions like:

How are we doing overall?
Are our in-flight projects on track?
Are we shipping with operational excellence?

Execution Quality

While Delivery Progress tells us how work is going at present, Execution Quality tells us how well we're doing the work - i.e. how efficient the team has been in the software development process.

We grade EI tools on Execution Quality based on how well they can surface insights that lead to identification of improvement opportunities, both from productivity and DevEx perspectives.

Examples: how long PRs stay open and get reviewed, how big or mature the PRs are, team morale, and more.

Alignment

Alignment is about seeing the forest from the trees to answer questions like "are we working on the right things?" and "are we making the most out of resources?".

We grade EI tools on Alignment based on how well they track things like the type of work being done, the resources being allocated to the work, and the impact of the work in terms of goals and outcomes.

Ease of Adoption

Ease of Adoption goes way beyond ease of implementation. In this day and age, any SaaS tool worth its salt shouldn’t require days or weeks in man-hours to "install" anyway.

When we say Ease of Adoption, we mean features that make it much easier for everyone to trust the data and start building a data-driven culture.

Examples include features that improve data hygiene, and features that instill habits of using data for decision making.

Comparing Sleuth, Jellyfish, GetDX

Let's compare the top three EI tools in the market using the categories described above.

Delivery Progress

Feature	Sleuth	GetDX	Jellyfish
Projects overview	✅	✅	✅
Project planned vs. completion	✅	🟧 Maybe possible by writing SQL query against data lake	✅
Pull Requests by status	✅	✅	✅
Issue Tickets by status	✅	✅	✅
PRs or Issues by project, epic, initiative	✅	✅	✅
Incidents by status, severity	✅	🟧 Maybe possible by writing SQL query against data lake	✅
Bugs by status, severity	✅	🟧 Maybe possible by writing SQL query against data lake	✅
Escalations by status, severity	✅	🟧 Maybe possible by writing SQL query against data lake	✅
Story points-based view	❌	✅	❌

Sleuth and Jellyfish are very similar in terms of the ability to report on Delivery Progress, the bread-and-butter of tools in this space. Both have extensive features to slice and dice planned and current Engineering work (captured in the form of issue tickets and pull requests) by status, project, severity, and the like.

GetDX, on the other hand, only supports basic visibility into Delivery Progress out of the box. They do however offer a BI-like interface for you to write SQL queries to potentially get to the same views provided turnkey by Sleuth and Jellyfish.

Execution Quality

Feature	Sleuth	GetDX	Jellyfish
PR open time	✅	✅	✅
PR coding time	✅	✅	🟧 Yes but only via issue ticket status
PR review lag time	✅	✅	🟧 Yes but only via issue ticket status
PR review time	✅	✅	🟧 Yes but only via issue ticket status
PR deployment time	✅	🟧 Yes if using GitHub tags as proxy for deploys	🟧 Yes but only via issue ticket status
PR batch size	✅	🟧 Yes but sizing is based on LOC only	✅
PR maturity score	❌	❌	❌
PR review depth	❌	❌	❌
Active vs. done branches	❌	❌	❌
Rework rate	❌	❌	❌
Scope creep	❌	❌	❌

Execution Quality rates tools on their ability to provide deeper visibility into the development work, which practically revolves around pull requests. For example, PR Review Time is how long a PR is in review. If the value of this metric is high, it may indicate that reviewers are too busy or distracted to focus on the PR reviews.

All three tools are similar in their ability to provide insights into Execution Quality - plentiful for leaders and teams looking to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.

However, it is worth noting that with Jellyfish you’d need to be tracking PR progress using an issue tracker, which isn’t going to be the case for all Engineering organizations.

Alignment

Feature	Sleuth	GetDX	Jellyfish
Work by type (e.g. new features, bug fixing)	✅	✅	✅
Work by category (e.g. New, KTLO, Security)	✅	✅	✅
Work by planned vs. unplanned	✅	❌	✅
Resource allocation by headcount	✅	❌	✅
Projected investment effort	❌	❌	✅
Expense categorization (CapEx vs. OpEx)	✅	❌	✅
Survey-based DevEx scorecard	✅	✅	✅
Goals tracking	✅	❌	✅
Impact of initiatives on metrics	✅	🟧 Only for impact of Gen AI	✅
Headcount and developer effort in dollar terms	✅	❌	✅
Developer effort in FTE terms	✅	✅	❌

Alignment is a management concern, so invariably metrics in the category are focused on resources (people), how they are allocated, how they translate to dollars, and their morale and impact on the business.

Jellyfish leads this category, with Sleuth following slightly behind. Jellyfish specifically offers a feature geared for Finance use: categorization of R&D expenses, but if you don’t need that, Sleuth is sufficient. GetDX is lacking a lot of features to compete effectively in this category.

Ease of Adoption

Feature	Sleuth	GetDX	Jellyfish
"View source" to verify data	✅	❌	❌
Automate PR hygiene	✅	❌	❌
Automate Issue hygiene	✅	❌	❌
Automate report summary writing	✅	✅	❌
Automate scorecard generation	✅	🟧 Only for DevEx scorecard	❌
Auto-surface insights on outliers	✅	✅	❌
Auto-surface insights on bottlenecks	✅	✅	❌
Auto-generate reviews (e.g. Weekly Planning)	✅	❌	❌
View and compare teams	✅	✅	✅
Compare to industry benchmarks	✅	✅	✅
View individual-level data	🟧 Individual data can be explored via slice and dice, but no individual-view dashboard	✅	✅
Custom integration via webhook	✅	❌	❌
Enterprise ready features (e.g. SAML, SSO)	✅	✅	✅

One important driver of Ease of Adoption is data trustworthiness. Features such as “view source” to peek at the data behind a metric or chart, and those that improve data hygiene - such as the ability to auto-notify codeowners of PRs without issue keys - help build trust.

Another important driver is manual burden. Time spent doing monitoring and reporting is time not spent on development or alignment. Features that automate manual things like writing report summary, generating scores, and surfacing outliers in the data can help here.

Finally, habit-forming features are critical for building a data-driven engineering culture. Features such as auto-creation of pre-populated templates for review meetings, such as Monthly CTO Reviews or Weekly Sprint Planning,

Sleuth leads this category by far given its coverage of features that drive Ease of Adoption, followed by GetDX. Both these tools have invested in AI-powered features to automate value-adding activities like report summary, scorecard, and insight generation.

Conclusion

We’ve just evaluated the top three tools for Engineering Intelligence through four categories: Delivery Progress, Execution Quality, Alignment, and Ease of Adoption. Here's where we end up:

	Delivery Progress	Execution Quality	Alignment	Ease of Adoption
Sleuth	A	B+	A	A+
Jellyfish	A	B	A+	B-
GetDX	B	A	B	A-

Sleuth and Jellyfish are pretty much even on Delivery Progress, but GetDX lags behind as it lacks out-of-the-box support to get at the same data.

All three tools are similar in the Execution Quality category, though there is a caveat with Jellyfish.

In the Alignment category, Jellyfish and Sleuth are the leaders. GetDX hasn’t historically focused on this category with the exception of survey-based DevEx scorecard, which GetDX is primarily known for.

Sleuth has invested the most in Ease of Adoption. Among all four categories, Ease of Adoption is arguably the most important - the success of your productivity initiative or metrics program ultimately depends on how much value the teams are getting from using the tool.

Hopefully this article has given you the head start on your research for the best tools for the job, and the confidence to engage with vendors in this space.

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If you’d like to learn more about Sleuth, you can request a demo here.