layout: home title: Buddy vs Greptile description: Greptile indexes your whole codebase to give reviews cross-file context. Buddy stays diff-scoped, keeps the code on your side, and carries the dependency half too.

hero: name: "buddy vs greptile" text: "Whole-repo context, or no repo upload" tagline: "Greptile's bet is that a good review needs to understand the whole codebase, so it builds an index of it. That is a genuinely different design, and the trade it implies — your source, indexed on their infrastructure — is the whole comparison." actions: - theme: brand text: AI code review link: /features/ai-code-review - theme: alt text: Your CI, your keys link: /features/self-hosted - theme: alt text: All comparisons link: /compare/ code: - file: "what leaves your network" lang: "ascii" content: | __ (,------'()'--o buddy, per review (_ ___ /~" ()) ())

      out   the diff + surrounding context
            → the provider you configured
      out   registry metadata queries
            → npm, PyPI, crates.io, OSV
      out   nothing else. no telemetry,
            no vendor backend, no index.

      with --light:
      out   nothing at all.

features:

• title: "Diff-scoped, deliberately" icon: "📍" span: 2 details: "Buddy reviews the lines a change touched with enough surrounding context to judge them. That keeps a review's cost proportional to the change rather than the checkout, and it means there is no repository index to build, store, invalidate or protect."
• title: "No index means no copy" icon: "🔒" details: "Nothing about your codebase is retained anywhere. Each run reads the workspace on your own runner and sends only what the review needs to the provider you chose."
• title: "Your model, your bill" icon: "🧠" details: "Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint inside your own network. Tokens are billed to you at your rate."
• title: "Dependencies included" icon: "📦" details: "Scanning, grouping, changelogs, advisories, dashboard and auto-merge across eleven ecosystems — a second tool you do not have to buy."
• title: "House rules, written down" icon: "✍️" details: "Review guidelines live in your repository, and @buddy remember ... appends a note later runs read back. Standards come from your team, not from a vendor's tuning."
• title: "A free floor" icon: "🦴" details: "--light runs the analyzers with no key and no network, so every repository gets secret scanning and a workflow audit whether or not it justifies a licence."

Side by side

Product capabilities change; check Greptile's own documentation before deciding on any single row.

Where Greptile is the better choice

Be honest about this one, because the architectural difference is real:

• Findings that need the whole codebase. "This duplicates a helper three packages away", "this breaks a caller you did not touch", "this contradicts a convention used everywhere else". A diff-scoped reviewer will miss some of those. If that class of finding is the one you are buying, an index-backed reviewer is the design that produces it.
• Large, old, unfamiliar codebases where the context that matters is rarely adjacent to the change.
• You want a hosted product, with a dashboard, support and no CI work.

Buddy narrows the gap with repository guidelines and remembered notes, but it does not close it, and pretending otherwise would not help you choose.

Where Buddy is different

• Nothing is indexed, so nothing is stored. For organisations where uploading a copy of the source is the blocking objection, this is not a preference — it is the requirement.
• Cost scales with changes, not with repository size. A million-line repository does not cost more to review than a small one; a big pull request does.
• Two categories in one tool. Review and dependencies and merge gates and the workflow audit.
• An offline floor. Secret scanning and the workflow audit run with no key at all, in a pre-commit hook.

Related

AI code review · Your CI, your keys · Buddy vs CodeRabbit · All comparisons