If you’re a development team choosing between Surmado Code Review and Greptile, the decision comes down to what kind of problems keep you up at night. Surmado anchors every review to your STANDARDS.MD for $15 per month. Greptile indexes your entire codebase and traces bugs across files for $30 per developer per month. They solve fundamentally different problems.
TL;DR
Surmado Code Review is the better choice for small teams (2-10 developers) on GitHub that want consistent, standards-based review on every PR for $15 per month. It enforces your team’s conventions, includes a human reviewer brief, and has zero data retention. Greptile is the better choice for engineering teams working on complex, interconnected systems where cross-file dependency bugs are the biggest risk. Greptile indexes your full codebase and achieved an 82% bug catch rate in independent benchmarks. It costs $30 per developer per month and requires codebase indexing.
| Surmado Code Review | Greptile | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Small teams, standards enforcement | Complex systems, deep bug detection |
| Price (5 developers) | $15/month total | $150/month (before overages) |
| Review approach | Diff vs STANDARDS.MD | Full codebase context, dependency graph |
| Bug catch rate | Not independently benchmarked | 82% (independent benchmark) |
| Data retention | Zero | Indexes and stores codebase |
| Git platforms | GitHub | GitHub, GitLab |
Pricing
Which is cheaper, Surmado Code Review or Greptile?
Surmado Code Review is 10x cheaper for a 5-person team and the gap grows with team size.
Surmado Code Review: $15 per month for 100 PRs. Another $15 for another 100. No per-seat pricing. Unlimited reruns per PR. Unlimited repos within one GitHub account or organization.
Greptile: $30 per developer per month. Base price includes 50 reviews per seat. Additional reviews cost $1 each. For a developer opening 3 PRs per day (roughly 65 per month), the monthly cost per seat rises to about $45 with overages. Self-hosted and enterprise pricing is available on request. No free tier. 14-day free trial.
| Team Size | Surmado Code Review | Greptile (base, no overages) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 developers | $15/month | $60/month |
| 5 developers | $15/month | $150/month |
| 10 developers | $15-30/month | $300/month |
Verdict on pricing: Surmado wins on cost at every team size. The biggest downside of Greptile’s pricing for small teams is the per-seat model combined with per-review overages. A fast-shipping team can see costs climb past the base rate. Surmado’s flat-rate model means your bill is predictable regardless of velocity.
Core Features
How Surmado Code Review handles PR review
On every push, Scout reads the diff against your STANDARDS.MD. Reviews include what’s good, what needs work (tied to your standards), questions to consider (edge cases and trade-offs), a human reviewer brief (tells the teammate doing final review where to focus), a data contract check (flags schema and data layer changes), and suggested improvements.
Follow-up commits get context-aware re-reviews referencing prior findings. PII detection in logs is included. Setup is two clicks: connect GitHub, set standards. Scout helps write your STANDARDS.MD if you don’t have one. Reviews arrive in about 2 minutes. This is v7, running across 14 Surmado repos internally.
How Greptile handles PR review
Greptile indexes your entire repository and builds a code graph. When a PR opens, it doesn’t just analyze the diff. It traces dependencies, checks git history, and follows leads across files using multi-hop investigation. Version 4 (early 2026) uses the Anthropic Claude Agent SDK for autonomous investigation.
Every flagged issue includes evidence from the codebase: the source file, the dependency chain, and the reasoning behind the finding. Greptile focuses on logic errors, boundary conditions, API misuse, and subtle regressions that depend on understanding how different parts of the codebase interact.
In independent benchmarks conducted across 50 real-world pull requests from open-source projects, Greptile achieved an 82% bug catch rate. That’s nearly double CodeRabbit’s 44% and ahead of GitHub Copilot’s 54%. The tradeoff: Greptile also had a higher false positive rate (11 false positives vs CodeRabbit’s 2 in the same benchmark).
Greptile offers self-hosted deployment in your own AWS environment with the option to use your own LLM providers. The company raised a $30M Series A at a $180M valuation led by Benchmark.
Verdict on core features
These tools solve different problems. Where Greptile clearly wins is catching bugs that live between files: a change in module A that breaks an assumption in module B, a schema migration that conflicts with a query pattern three directories away, a naming inconsistency that would cause lookup failures across the codebase. No other tool matches Greptile’s depth here. Where Surmado clearly wins is consistent standards enforcement: catching drift from your team’s conventions, flagging data contract changes, and producing a human reviewer brief that makes the senior developer’s review faster.
Ease of Use
How it actually feels to use Surmado Code Review
Two clicks. OAuth to GitHub. Set your STANDARDS.MD (Scout helps you write it). Every push triggers a review. Output is structured and consistent: what’s good, what needs work, reviewer brief. About 2 minutes per review. No codebase indexing, no waiting for repository analysis to complete.
How it actually feels to use Greptile
After connecting your repository, Greptile indexes the full codebase. This takes time depending on repo size. Once indexed, reviews are thorough but take longer than Surmado due to multi-hop analysis. The evidence chains showing source files and dependency reasoning are detailed and useful, but they require more reading than Surmado’s structured summary format.
The higher false positive rate (11 vs 2 in benchmark testing) means some findings require dismissal. Greptile’s v4 improved this significantly: addressed comments per PR went up 74% and positive developer reactions increased 68%. The tool is getting better at signal-to-noise, but it still flags more non-issues than simpler alternatives.
Verdict on ease of use
Surmado is simpler to set up, faster per review, and produces lower noise. Greptile requires more initial setup and produces more output per review (both valid findings and false positives). If your team values speed and simplicity, Surmado wins. If your team values thoroughness and can tolerate higher volume, Greptile wins.
Integrations
Surmado Code Review: GitHub only. No IDE extension. API included.
Greptile: GitHub and GitLab. Integrations with Slack, Jira, Notion, Google Drive, Sentry, and VS Code. Self-hosted option for air-gapped environments.
Verdict on integrations
Greptile has broader integration support and a self-hosted option that Surmado doesn’t offer. For teams on GitLab or with strict deployment requirements, Greptile is the only option of the two.
Support and Reliability
Surmado Code Review: direct email support. Zero data retention. Reviews in about 2 minutes.
Greptile: Y Combinator-backed, Benchmark-led Series A. About 20 employees in San Francisco. Used by teams at Stripe, WorkOS, PostHog, Raycast, and YC’s internal team. 14-day free trial.
Verdict on support and reliability
Greptile has stronger enterprise credibility and notable customer logos. Surmado’s zero data retention is a differentiator for teams with strict security requirements. Greptile indexes and stores your codebase, which is necessary for its full-context analysis but may not be acceptable for all teams.
Who Should Choose Surmado Code Review
Small teams (2-10 developers) on GitHub that want every PR reviewed against their standards for $15 per month. The cost doesn’t scale with headcount.
Teams where standards drift is the biggest risk. If your primary concern is keeping the team aligned on conventions, architecture patterns, and data contracts as you grow, STANDARDS.MD as an enforced contract on every commit is the right approach.
Teams that require zero data retention. Diffs are never stored. If your team handles sensitive code or works under compliance requirements that prohibit codebase storage, Surmado is the safer choice.
Budget-conscious teams. Greptile at $30/seat/month with potential overages is 10x or more the cost of Surmado for a 5-person team. If the budget is tight, Surmado delivers meaningful value at the lowest price point in the category.
Who Should Choose Greptile
Engineering teams working on complex, interconnected systems where cross-file dependency bugs cause real production incidents. If your codebase has deep dependency chains, legacy modules, and architectural complexity, Greptile’s full-context analysis catches bugs that diff-level tools miss entirely.
Teams that need self-hosted deployment. Greptile offers air-gapped AWS VPC deployment with your own LLM providers. For organizations with strict compliance, data sovereignty, or security requirements that prohibit sending code to external services, this is critical.
Mid-to-large teams (10+ developers) where a single production bug costs more than a year of Greptile subscriptions. When the cost of a missed regression far exceeds the tool cost, Greptile’s 82% catch rate justifies the investment.
Teams that already have mature code standards and need a tool focused on catching logic bugs, not enforcing conventions.
The Bottom Line
Pick Surmado Code Review if you need consistent, standards-based review on every PR for $15 per month. Zero data retention. Human reviewer brief. No per-seat pricing. This is the right tool for small teams building engineering culture and keeping conventions aligned as they grow.
Pick Greptile if cross-file dependency bugs are your biggest risk and you need the deepest codebase analysis available. Greptile catches things no other tool catches. The cost and noise are real tradeoffs, but for complex systems, the depth is worth it.
They solve different problems. Many teams could benefit from both: Surmado for standards enforcement on every commit, and Greptile on high-risk PRs touching critical infrastructure.
Get started with Surmado Code Review at surmado.com/review. $15/month. Your standards, every commit.