5 Best Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms to Try Now

If you deal with complex software projects, juggling deadlines, expectations, and quality standards, it’s easy to feel like there’s never enough time or clarity. But what if you could see exactly where your development cycles slow down, how your resources are being used, and what’s blocking your team from reaching its full potential?

In this article, you’ll learn how software engineering intelligence can transform how you work. From actionable insights to improving developer experience and engineering performance, you’ll gain the tools to make data-driven decisions that align your engineering processes with your business goals.

Whether you’re an engineering manager, team lead, or software developer, you’ll see how to bring efficiency, focus, and success to your projects.

What Is Software Engineering Intelligence?

Software engineering intelligence is the practice of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from your software development lifecycle to make better decisions.

It gives you the ability to understand the health of your engineering systems, the efficiency of your processes, and how effectively your team works toward achieving your business goals. This intelligence helps you uncover patterns, identify bottlenecks, and address potential issues before they grow into major roadblocks.

Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms (SEIPs) are the tools that make this possible. These platforms provide data-driven visibility into your workflows, resources, and progress.

SEIPs give you a unified view of your engineering activities by integrating with version control systems, communication tools, and other software development processes. They allow you to track engineering metrics, improve team health, and align your efforts with business priorities.

50% of software engineering organizations will use software engineering intelligence platforms to measure and increase developer productivity, compared to 5% in 2024. - Gartner

As engineering leaders seek smarter, data-driven engineering practices, SEIPs are becoming important for improving operational efficiency and delivering consistent business outcomes.

What Do SEI Platforms Do?

SEI platforms give you the power to understand and improve your software development process. They connect seamlessly with your existing tools and give you critical visibility into your team’s workflows, resources, and project progress.

With these platforms, you can make informed decisions, improve engineering efficiency, and align your operations with business goals.

Here’s how SEIPs help you:

• Connect to your existing development tools: You can link your version control systems, project management platforms, and communication tools. This integration ensures all your data is accessible in one place.
• Easily query data and identify trends: With these platforms, you can access actionable insights into your engineering activities. Use them to spot patterns, track delivery metrics, and measure progress toward your goals.
• Provide contextual insights: They allow you to understand how time and effort are spent across your team. These insights guide process improvements and enhance operational excellence.
• Help you manage time effectively: You can also see where bottlenecks occur and prioritize tasks that move your team closer to predictable software delivery.

SEIPs allow you to make smarter business decisions and meaningful improvements in your software delivery lifecycle. This approach changes your engineering operations into a well-aligned system that drives positive business outcomes.

ALT: Diagram of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) in 5 key steps: scope, design, development, testing, and maintenance.

Why Use Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms?

The challenges you face in software development are staggering. Did you know that 65% of software projects fail to meet their budget, timeline, or quality goals? U.S. companies alone lose over $260 billion annually due to these failures. These numbers highlight just how much is at stake for engineering teams and business leaders like you.

Software engineering intelligence platforms can help you turn this around. These platforms help you overcome bottlenecks, improve processes, and deliver quality software on time by providing you with data-driven insights and actionable strategies.

How SEIPs Help You Succeed

Software engineering intelligence platforms give you the tools to tackle common challenges in software development head-on. Here’s how SEIPs help you succeed:

• See where you’re spending time: Gain a clear view of how your team spends time. SEIPs let you pinpoint delays and unblock workflows to ensure predictable progress.
• Improve code quality: You can use DORA metrics to predict delivery performance and identify trends that impact software quality. These insights can help you make better engineering decisions and keep standards high.
• Unblock bottlenecks through value streams: Axify’s Value Stream Mapping helps you find and fix flow interruptions. This ensures smoother processes and faster delivery cycles. According to the 2023 DORA State of DevOps report, teams that shorten their code review times can see up to 50% better performance in software delivery.
• Centralize your data: SEIPs create a single source of truth for your engineering operations. This transparency simplifies resource allocation and decision-making.
• Communicate engineering value: SEIPs help you share progress clearly with stakeholders and connect engineering work to business goals. Projects with strong stakeholder engagement succeed 78% of the time, compared to just 40% when engagement is low. This shows that your impact makes a real difference.
• Increase team health: A study found that 83% of software developers experience burnout, often due to increased workloads. You can avoid it by balancing workloads and fostering developer retention. Axify helps you monitor work in progress so you can prevent tiredness in your team.

The Business Impact

When your team works more smoothly and efficiently, everything gets better. Plus, you set the foundation for continuous improvement. Decisions are smarter, projects move faster, and your business wins.

Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms (SEIPs) help you connect what your engineers are doing with what the business actually needs. That means fewer wasted efforts, more impact, and real value for your customers.

They also give your dev team the tools to level up, turning day-to-day work into real momentum. And that’s why more companies are getting on board: because when you see clearly what’s working and what’s not, every decision has more impact.

What to Look for in an Engineering Intelligence Tool

Choosing the right software engineering intelligence platform means looking beyond dashboards and graphs. The right tool helps your teams work better, not just report on what went wrong.

It needs to surface real insights, reduce overhead, and give you the flexibility to align technical work with business priorities. Here are the key areas you should evaluate - and what Axify brings to the table in each one.

Engineering Metrics That Show the Full Picture

To truly measure success, you need metrics that go beyond vanity numbers. The right software engineering intelligence tools should help you assess the health and performance of your team and support smarter, strategic decisions. Here’s how these metrics play a role:

• DORA metrics measure deployment frequency, lead time for changes, failed deployment recovery time, and change failure rate. These indicators highlight your team’s speed, code stability, and responsiveness. When used well, DORA metrics help reduce review times, speed up delivery, and identify process gaps early.
• Flow metrics track how work moves through your system, from planning to production. They help you measure progress, spot delivery slowdowns, and connect development speed to broader business objectives. Tools typically gather this data from your version control and project management tools.
• The SPACE framework covers satisfaction, performance, activity, communication, and efficiency across your team. Together, these offer a more humanized view of engineering health and collaboration. Tracking these areas can help modern engineering teams balance delivery with developer well-being. Teams that lean into data-backed decisions are up to three times more likely to see real improvements in how they operate and make calls.

Axify's perspective: Axify helps you focus on delivery performance by tracking key metrics across these categories. We give you the right insights so you can streamline your processes, reduce delays, and improve your team’s overall efficiency.

Capacity Planning with Forecast

Planning isn’t just about knowing what’s next but about knowing whether your team has the time and capacity to deliver. A strong software engineering intelligence platform helps you anticipate risks early, allocate resources wisely, and stay aligned with broader business objectives.

Unfortunately, 66% of organizations do minor capacity planning. In turn, this leads to loss in productivity and an inability to prove ROI. Here's which tools you can use to avoid those problems:

Value Stream Mapping in Axify

Axify’s value stream mapping feature gives you a clear, visual overview of how work moves through your delivery process. It helps you identify where time is being lost, whether it’s in handoffs, waiting for reviews, or unclear priorities. With these insights, you can adjust workloads and streamline delivery stages before problems grow.

The Value Stream Mapping (VSM) we did has immense value. The team sees what happens, the impact of their actions, and areas for improvement. - Josée Gagnon, Manager at Business Development Bank of Canada

Software Forecast Delivery

Axify uses probabilistic forecasting models to predict delivery timelines and capacity requirements. Whether you're planning an upcoming sprint or coordinating cross-team initiatives, these forecasts help you predict blockers and avoid over-committing.

That means you get a clearer view of where your team may hit resource limits, so you can make better strategic decisions before deadlines slip. And while you're debating it, 68% of organizations already use planning software to get ahead on forecasting. They're moving faster, planning smarter, and if you're not, you're falling behind.

Time Investment Metric

Not all hours are equal. Axify helps you track how time is actually spent across different activities, teams, and projects.

Are developers focused on high-impact work, or spending too much time on QA or rework? These insights, pulled directly from your project management tools and codebase activity, help you rebalance efforts and improve team performance.

Together, these features allow you to manage your engineering efforts with precision. This, in turn, can lead to better resource allocation and smoother delivery cycles.

Axify’s perspective: Axify gives you the tools to plan with confidence. With value stream mapping, you can pinpoint where work gets stuck. With forecasting, you get clear, data-driven predictions about delivery timelines and resource needs. And with time investment metrics, you can see exactly where your team’s efforts are going. That way, you can spot risks early, make smarter decisions, and keep your delivery process running smoothly.

Intuitive Dashboards

Data only helps when it’s easy to understand. That’s why Axify offers intuitive, role-specific dashboards that turn raw metrics into clear, actionable insights. Whether you're a team lead, engineering manager, or executive, you get a view that matches your priorities, without needing to dig through complex reports. Here's what Axify offers you:

• Three levels of views: Axify has tailored views for individual teams, multiple team groups, and the full organization. Each level surfaces relevant data based on your scope, so team leads can track delivery metrics, while executives see investment trends and progress toward strategic goals.
• CIO dashboard: The CIO dashboard helps you connect engineering work to broader business objectives. This dashboard connects your engineering efforts to broader business outcomes and helps leaders like you make informed decisions.
• DORA metrics dashboard: Track DORA metrics in real time, spot bottlenecks, and benchmark performance with automated, error-free data from your tools. Save time, increase reliability, and deliver better software, faster. It’s also perfect for management presentations or deep-dive reviews.
• Value Stream Mapping: This dashboard helps identify aging tasks, blockers, and delivery slowdowns early, so teams can take action before issues grow.

Axify’s perspective: Axify’s dashboards are designed to give you the right level of visibility, no matter your role. You can switch between team, group, and organizational views, apply custom filters, and instantly surface the metrics that matter most to you. Whether you're tracking progress, spotting blockers, or aligning delivery with business goals, Axify turns your engineering data into clear next steps.

Ease of Implementation

The best tools fit into your workflow, not the other way around. A good software engineering intelligence platform should be quick to adopt, easy to use, and able to work with your current project management tools and development stack.

Axify keeps the setup simple. You don’t need weeks of onboarding or technical expertise to get started. Whether you're a product manager, engineering lead, or developer, you can connect your existing tools, such as GitHub, GitLab, or Jira, and start seeing insights almost immediately.

There’s no coding required, no complicated configuration, and no disruption to your team’s routine. The interface is clean, the onboarding is guided, and the value shows up quickly, so your team can focus on improvement, not setup.

And it’ll help you stay ahead of the competition. According to Forrester, 84% of businesses are already adopting low-code or no-code tools to close technical gaps fast. Tools that are easy to implement are now a priority, not a luxury.

Axify’s perspective: Axify is built to integrate seamlessly with the tools you already use, including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Jira. You can connect everything in just a few clicks and start viewing real insights right away - no code, no hassle. It’s designed to fit into your workflow without slowing anyone down.

Organizational Efficiency and Developer Experience

Your team’s productivity isn’t just about speed but also about sustainability. A good software engineering intelligence platform helps you reduce developer overload by giving you visibility into work-in-progress (WIP), task distribution, and handoff delays.

You can use these insights to rebalance work, adjust priorities, and avoid team burnout. Tracking these patterns also helps you spot signs of fatigue before they impact delivery. And that matters since 83% of software developers have experienced burnout, with 79% still feeling it as of late 2023.

Some platforms even offer burnout alerts or developer experience signals such as motivation, focus, and workload clarity. These give you a better feel for how your team is doing beyond the numbers, and let you step in when needed to support morale and retention.

Axify’s perspective: Axify helps you track WIP limits and workload trends while also giving you visibility into team sentiment metrics such as motivation, security, and resilience. This makes it easier to manage delivery without losing sight of your team’s well-being.

Benchmarking and Progress Tracking

Tracking metrics in isolation only gets you so far. To really understand performance, you need to compare current data against past trends and industry benchmarks. This helps you set realistic goals, define what “good” looks like, and measure whether your team is actually improving.

Whether it’s delivery speed, review times, or throughput, having a reference point lets you focus on what needs work and celebrate progress when you see it. You can also use historical trends to spot patterns, such as recurring delays during certain project phases, or to show stakeholders how your team is evolving over time.

According to a PwC survey, data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report better decision-making. When you ground your calls in real metrics, you give your team a strategic edge.

Axify’s perspective: Axify gives you access to historical trends and timeline views that show how your key metrics have changed. You can see past performance by team, sprint, or timeframe, which makes it easy for you to track progress and guide meaningful improvements.

Work Item Visibility and Tracking

You can’t fix what you can’t see. A strong software engineering intelligence platform gives you full visibility into each work item, from backlog to deployment. You’re able to trace how tasks move across your workflow, spot anything stuck or stalled, and identify unlinked branches that might be flying under the radar.

This level of tracking helps you keep delivery aligned with planning and prevents work from slipping through the cracks. You can also break down performance by labels, epics, or services to understand how different initiatives are progressing. This makes your tracking more focused and helps you manage resources more effectively.

Axify’s perspective: Axify lets you follow every work item through its life cycle, showing gaps, delays, or missing links. You can filter performance by project, epic, or task type, which makes it easier to manage work at both the team and organizational levels.

Best 5 Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms

Engineering intelligence platforms play an important role in helping you understand and improve your software development processes. Let’s talk about the five of the best tools available today and how they compare.

1. Axify: Your Comprehensive SEI Solution

ALT: Axify - the best software engineering intelligence platform.

Axify can help you turn engineering data into actionable improvements. With Axify, you gain powerful insights into delivery performance, resource allocation, and team health. Here’s what makes Axify stand out:

• Delivery performance focus: You can track critical metrics such as lead times, deployment frequency, and flow efficiency to identify delays and maintain predictable software delivery.
• Forecasting and planning: Axify’s probabilistic forecasting models predict outcomes for sprint planning, deployment schedules, and resource allocation.
• Intuitive dashboards: Whether you’re managing a team, multiple teams, or an organization, Axify’s dashboards translate engineering metrics into clear insights.
• Fast implementation: Axify is quick to set up with no coding skills required so that you can experience minimal disruption to your workflows.

Axify goes beyond monitoring - it gives you insights so you can make informed decisions and align engineering activities with business goals.

2. GitLab: A DevSecOps Powerhouse

GitLab is a DevSecOps platform that integrates security and automation into every phase of the software delivery lifecycle. Here’s what you can expect:

• AI-powered workflows: GitLab Duo enhances your engineering processes with AI-driven code suggestions, continuous integration (CI), and delivery automation.
• Comprehensive toolchain: All essential DevSecOps tools are combined into one platform to simplify your workflows.
• Security features: Built-in security ensures your software is protected from vulnerabilities while maintaining speed.

While GitLab excels at DevOps automation and security, it may focus more on broad DevSecOps practices rather than offering deep insights specific to engineering productivity or team health.

3. Swarmia: Streamlined Developer Productivity

Swarmia focuses on improving developer experience, productivity, and alignment with business goals. Key features include:

• Engineering metrics: Swarmia helps you measure lead time, cycle time, and throughput to spot bottlenecks in your development processes.
• Developer experience surveys: These surveys provide actionable feedback on team sentiment and collaboration.
• Business alignment: The platform connects engineering metrics to business outcomes so you can meet your strategic goals.

Downside: Swarmia only integrates with a limited set of tools (e.g., Jira, Linear, GitHub), which may limit its flexibility for teams using diverse platforms. Axify surpasses Swarmia by offering broader integrations and deeper visibility into value streams.

4. Jellyfish: Engineering Insights with a Focus on Comparisons

Jellyfish positions itself as a tool that offers engineering teams visibility into performance, resource allocation, and progress. It combines data from issue tracking and source code management (SCM) systems to help you evaluate team health and productivity.

Key features include:

• Team metrics: Track throughput, lead time, and deployment frequency to measure and improve performance.
• Resource allocation: Understand how engineering effort is distributed across initiatives to better align with business goals.
• Developer experience: Conduct surveys to uncover issues impacting team satisfaction and productivity.

Downside: Jellyfish tends to focus more on individual performance and comparative metrics than on addressing systemic challenges. This approach might not align with teams aiming to improve processes holistically.

In contrast, Axify focuses on streamlining workflows and unblocking bottlenecks across your value stream. This can help you achieve meaningful and sustainable improvements.

5. LinearB: Pull Request-Centric Metrics with Limitations

LinearB is a popular choice for engineering leaders who want to track developer productivity and improve delivery. It provides tools to measure developer experience, forecast outcomes, and report on cost allocation.

Notable features include:

• Developer experience: Highlight bottlenecks in delivery pipelines to minimize wait times and improve flow efficiency.
• Cost reporting: Automate resource allocation reporting to align with budgetary goals.
• Predictive models: Use simulated forecasts to identify risks in delivery timelines.

However, LinearB’s heavy reliance on pull request (PR) metrics limits its ability to address broader systemic challenges. Here’s where it falls short:

• Incident management: LinearB simplifies incident tracking, typically relying on issue trackers like Jira. This approach can leave you with an incomplete picture. Axify, on the other hand, aggregates incident data from multiple sources and provides deeper visibility into production issues.
• Security concerns: LinearB clones entire repositories to calculate metrics, which potentially exposes sensitive code. Axify avoids this risk by extracting only the necessary metadata, so you'll have a more secure and streamlined process.
• DORA metrics: LinearB’s limited approach to incidents impacts its instrumentation of DORA metrics, which is crucial for measuring engineering efficiency.

By comparison, Axify offers a more comprehensive approach because it focuses on system-wide bottlenecks and predictive insights. This ensures you’re not just focusing locally but driving improvements that benefit your entire engineering operation.

Are you ready to take the next step to transform your engineering processes with Axify? Book a demo today and see how you can streamline workflows, boost team health, and deliver with confidence.