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CommitBrief vs Greptile — how they differ

CommitBrief is a local, bring-your-own-provider CLI. Greptile is a hosted AI code review agent that indexes your repository, with a self-hosting option. Sourced.

Last verified October 13, 2026

CommitBrief is a command-line tool that reviews a git diff with the LLM provider you choose. Greptile is an AI code review agent that, in its own words, automatically reviews every pull request and builds a graph of your whole repository. One reviews the change you hand it; the other is a service that keeps context about the codebase around the change.

Checked on 2026-10-13 against Greptile’s documentation and pricing page, listed under Sources. CommitBrief is written by the people who make it, so weigh it accordingly.

At a glance

Question	CommitBrief	Greptile
Where it runs	Your terminal, a git hook, or CI through the official GitHub Action	Greptile Cloud, or self-hosted with Docker Compose or Kubernetes (Helm), including air-gapped environments; connects to GitHub and GitLab, and the docs also list Bitbucket and Gitea (docs)
What leaves your machine	The diff, sent to the provider you configured; with Ollama it stays local. No telemetry. `--show-prompt` prints the exact outgoing prompt (docs)	The introduction page does not address code storage, retention or training; it lists SOC 2 Type II for Greptile Cloud (docs)
Model and provider choice	Ten providers, your own key, including local Ollama (docs)	The introduction page does not name its models; the self-hosting card mentions “custom LLMs” (docs)
Pricing model	Free CLI; you pay your provider, or nothing with a local model	Starter free for one active developer with 50 credits a month; Pro $30 per seat per month with 50 credits per seat and extra credits at $1; Enterprise by quote. A base review uses 1 credit, Plus 3, Apex 10 (pricing)
Licence and source	GPL-3.0-or-later, source on GitHub (license)	Commercial service; self-hosting is listed on Enterprise, and Greptile is free for qualified non-commercial projects with an OSI-approved license (pricing)
CI gate	`--fail-on` exit code, or a per-severity policy with `commitbrief guard` (docs)	The introduction page describes findings posted as pull request comments and does not address merge blocking or status checks
MCP and agent use	`commitbrief mcp` exposes one `review` tool over stdio for an agent’s self-review (docs)	An MCP server lets AI coding assistants fetch review comments, apply fixes and manage coding patterns from the editor (docs)

When to pick Greptile

Pick Greptile when the quality of a review depends on knowing the rest of the repository, and you want a service to maintain that index for you. It reviews each pull request automatically, supports several Git platforms, and offers a self-hosted deployment, air-gapped included, when your security team will not allow a SaaS. Its MCP server is built for the opposite direction from CommitBrief’s: pulling the review comments that already exist into your editor so an assistant can act on them.

When to pick CommitBrief

Pick CommitBrief when you want the review before the pull request, on your machine, with a provider and key you control. There is no repository index to build, no seat to buy and nothing running between you and the provider. The cost is your provider’s token bill, or zero with a local model; the cache makes a re-run on an unchanged diff free.

CommitBrief’s commitbrief mcp is a gate an agent runs on its own diff before submitting, which is a different job from Greptile’s MCP server.

What neither replaces

Both flag likely defects. Neither can tell you the design is wrong for your product. By default CommitBrief reviews the diff you give it plus the project rules you write in COMMITBRIEF.md; it does not maintain a graph of your repository, so a finding that depends on code far from the change is less likely to appear. That is the trade for staying small, local and inspectable.

For the wider picture, see AI code review tools: CLI vs GitHub App vs IDE.

Sources

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