Quick answer: GitDailies is the best engineering metrics tool for agencies on GitHub: one project per client, each with its own dashboard, report content, and alert rules, and users are unlimited on every tier, so client stakeholders cost nothing. Screenful builds the branded client-facing report. Keypup meters repositories rather than seats. Swarmia has the strongest org-wide model. Apache DevLake is the free self-hosted route.
Every Friday morning a report goes out to the product director at your largest account: pull requests merged this week, reviews turned around, the three branches still waiting on somebody. She has not opened it since March, and she has never once replied.
Stop sending it and you will hear about it by Monday lunchtime. The weekly report is not information, it is a heartbeat — entirely ignored until the week it is missing, at which point it becomes the only thing anybody in the account wants to discuss.
That is the agency condition, and no metrics tool built for a product company is shaped for it. You have four clients and nineteen repositories, two of which sit inside a GitHub organization the client owns and you merely hold a seat in. Your engineers move: two are on the fintech account until the quarter closes, then they are on the retail one. And every client wants visibility, which in practice means logins for people who will never write a line of code. Tools priced per developer answer that reasonable request with an invoice.
Repository sprawl inside one company is a different problem, and Top 6 Multi-Repo Analytics Tools covers it; the artifact itself belongs to Top 10 GitHub Reporting Tools. This article asks the question only an agency asks: where does one client end and the next begin, and who has to pay for a login. It starts with GitDailies.
GitDailies
GitDailies organizes everything around projects, and for an agency the project is the client. A project aggregates repositories and teams, and owns its own dashboard, its own report content, and its own alert rules. The fintech account becomes one project: six repositories, the four engineers staffed to it, one weekly report, and one rule that fires when a review request sits unanswered for two days. The retail account is a different project, with a different report and a different definition of urgent.
Report content is configurable per project, because clients do not want the same things. Each report carries a Summary, Pull Requests, Reviews, and Commits, in whatever combination that client actually reads, on a daily, weekday, weekly, every-nth-week, or monthly cadence. One account gets a page on Friday; another gets the review queue every weekday morning.
Then the thing that decides the purchase. Users are unlimited on every GitDailies tier, including the free one, and the meter runs on pull requests per month rather than seats. Put four of the client's stakeholders on the report, and hire three engineers in September, and the bill does not move. It moves when the work moves — which, for a business that sells the work, is the only meter tracking anything real.
Where it stops is worth stating plainly. There is no white-labelling: no logo, no branded PDF, no per-client billing export. If your contract obliges you to hand over a branded document, Screenful does that and GitDailies does not. The repository caps are tier-shaped and real, too: Community, free, covers 2 repositories and 50 pull requests a month; Pro, at $49 a month, covers 50 repositories and 250 pull requests; unlimited repositories and multiple GitHub organizations both arrive at Max, at $299 a month with 1,000 pull requests. An agency working inside client-owned GitHub organizations is therefore on Max — a flat $299, however many people read the output.
Honest take: an agency pays for two things it cannot control — headcount that moves and clients who want to see inside — and GitDailies charges for neither. One project per client, each with its own dashboard, report, and alerts, delivered to Slack, email, or Telegram from a read-only install that changes nobody's workflow. Unlimited users means the client's stakeholders are free; per-pull-request metering means the invoice follows delivery rather than the roster. For a dev shop running client work on GitHub, no tool on this list fits the shape of the business more exactly.
Screenful
Screenful is the tool an agency should look at hardest, because it does the one job GitDailies refuses. Its scheduled reports go out by email on the cadence you set, with the PDF attached and a link to the live report, and custom branding is available on the higher tiers. That is precisely the artifact a client-facing engagement lead is asked for: a document that looks like it came from your agency, landing in a stakeholder's inbox without anyone remembering to build it. For that single job Screenful beats us, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
The meter suits this reader too. Screenful charges per data source with unlimited users on every tier: Starter is $39 a month for 6 sources, Pro is $79 for 15, Scale is $149 for 60, and Enterprise is $399 for 200. Nobody pays for a login, so a client's whole stakeholder group reads the report at no cost. The catch is that Screenful does not publish how a repository maps onto a data source, so do not pick a tier from your repository list — connect one client on the trial and count what it consumes.
It also pulls from Jira, Trello, Asana, monday.com, ClickUp, and Linear as well as GitHub, and an agency rarely reports on code alone. There is no free tier, no DORA, and no code-review analysis: this is reporting rather than engineering depth, and for an agency whose deliverable is the branded document, that trade is the right one.
Keypup
Keypup runs the meter an agency should understand before choosing anything. It bills by unit, where a unit is a connected repository or project, and it does not charge per seat at all — the vendor states it in as many words on its own pricing page: unlimited users and contributors, no charge per seat. Entry is from $99 a month billed annually, and additional units are tiered on annual billing at $11 each for units 3 through 30, $10 for units 31 through 60, $9 for units 61 through 100, and $8 for units 101 through 200. The vendor does not publish clearly how many units the entry tier includes, so establish that on the trial rather than modelling it.
Read that against an agency and the answer depends on which number is growing. A consultancy of thirty people running four clients on two repositories each is eight units: the entry tier plus a handful of adders, with logins for thirty engineers and every client stakeholder included. A shop of eight people running twenty accounts with five repositories apiece is a hundred units, and the arithmetic turns against you fast. Count the repositories in your client portfolio, not the names on your staff list.
Keypup ships more than eighty pre-built metrics and a natural-language agent that takes a bottleneck metric down to the underlying pull request — useful when a client asks why a release slipped. There is no free tier, only a fourteen-day trial, and no native Slack integration was found.
Swarmia
Swarmia has the strongest org-wide model in this list, and that is not a courtesy. It aggregates git activity with Jira or Linear, plus Slack and incident data, into one coherent view across teams and repositories, and its Working Agreements turn a metric into a commitment the team has actually made rather than a chart somebody glanced at. If your agency runs a standing engineering practice with its own norms — a review turnaround your teams hold to on every account — nothing here is better equipped to hold them to it.
The meter is the problem. Below ten software developers Swarmia costs nothing; above that line the bill is struck per developer, per month. For a product company that is a fair deal. For an agency it is the wrong unit twice over: it charges for people whose allocation changes every quarter, and it charges nothing for the client count, which is the thing that actually multiplies your reporting burden. The subcontractor you bring on for one sprint is a seat, so is the engineer sitting between engagements, and a client stakeholder who wants the numbers is a seat as well.
Delivery is Slack and Microsoft Teams only, with no email, which is a real constraint here: your client's product director is almost certainly not in your Slack workspace. Swarmia suits an agency that wants one internal rollup across its own practice, and is content to build the client-facing view elsewhere.
Hatica
Hatica has the most generous free plan in this comparison, and for a small shop that is not a consolation prize. The free plan carries unlimited members and unlimited data sources, with one month of history. A five-person dev shop can put every engineer, every founder, and every client contact on it and pay nothing, which is a useful place to start when the reporting habit is new and nobody has yet decided what the client wants to see. Scheduled reports go out by email, and the platform reaches past code metrics into developer experience, with focus-time tracking and surveys.
The paid tiers change the shape. Pro is $19 per member per month and Business is $29 per member per month — a per-seat meter with all the consequences an agency already knows: every stakeholder you add is a line item, and the bill tracks the roster instead of the work. Deeper DORA views, custom dashboards, and exports sit at Business, and one month of history is short for a quarterly client review, which tends to be the moment the free plan stops being enough. Hatica suits the small shop that wants real dashboards today at no cost and is prepared to reprice the decision as the client list grows.
Apache DevLake (incubating)
Apache DevLake (incubating) is free under the Apache 2.0 license, self-hosted, and completely uncapped: the same cost across four clients or forty, with no per-seat and no per-repository ceiling in it anywhere. It ingests from well beyond GitHub, ships pre-built Grafana dashboards for DORA and delivery metrics, and lets you write custom SQL for any cross-client question you can express as a query. It also carries an argument no hosted tool can make to an agency: the client's data never leaves infrastructure you control, which is a shorter conversation with a security-conscious customer than any vendor questionnaire.
The cost is engineering time, and it is not small. You run Docker Compose or Kubernetes, a MySQL database, and Grafana, with no managed option to fall back on, while the project remains in incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. There is no native Slack digest either: DevLake is a place you go, not a report that finds you, so the client-facing report is still yours to build. For an agency with a platform capability and spare cycles, it will do anything you are prepared to build.
FAQs
As an agency owner, how do I keep client data separate?
Use one project per client. A project aggregates the repositories and teams for one account and owns its dashboard, report content, and alert rules, so the fintech report never carries retail's pull requests. Be precise about that separation: it is an organizational boundary, not a separate tenancy. If a contract requires a client's data to sit nowhere near another's, install inside that client's own GitHub organization; multiple organizations are supported at Max.
As a delivery lead, what do I actually show a client?
Show throughput and review health: pull requests opened and merged, how long changes took to clear review, what is waiting now, and whether the trend is moving. Never show individual output. The objection is sharper in an agency than anywhere else, because the client is paying for named people's time and will eventually ask which of them is producing least — and the moment you answer that with a chart, you have handed a customer a performance-management instrument aimed at your own staff. GitDailies produces no individual scores and no leaderboards, by design, and that is a feature to sell rather than apologise for. Team-level flow tells the client whether their money is buying delivery, which is the question they are actually paying you to answer.
As an agency CTO, is per-seat or per-project pricing cheaper?
Do the arithmetic once and it stops being a matter of taste. Take twenty-five engineers across eight clients, with twelve client-side stakeholders who want to read a report. On a per-member tool at $19 a month, such as Hatica Pro, the engineers alone are $475 a month, and adding those twelve stakeholders takes it to $703 — you are paying $228 a month for people who will never open a pull request. Swarmia is priced per developer per month above nine developers, so it moves the same way. GitDailies Max is $299 a month, flat, with unlimited users, so all thirty-seven logins are included and the meter only responds to pull requests. Keypup and Screenful also charge nothing per user, metering repositories and data sources instead. The rule is simple: buy the meter attached to the number that is not growing.
Which one should you pick
An agency is a business whose headcount moves and whose clients want to look inside — the two facts a per-seat tool punishes, and the two GitDailies does not charge for. One project per client, each with its own dashboard and its own report content. Unlimited users on every tier, so the stakeholders are free. Metering by pull request, so the invoice follows the delivery. Community covers 2 repositories and two shared alert rules; Pro covers 50 repositories at $49 a month and lifts the alert rules; Max at $299 covers unlimited repositories and the multiple GitHub organizations that client work drags you into. Any real agency is on Pro at least, and one working inside client-owned organizations is on Max.
If the deliverable is a branded PDF, buy Screenful and be happy. If your repository count is small and stable, price Keypup carefully, because it may well win. For everyone else running client engineering on GitHub, GitDailies separates the clients without charging you for the people on either side of the line.
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