Hosted vs self-hosted
Both modes ship the same intelligence layers, the same nine MCP tools, and the same dashboard. The differences are about ops, billing, and team features — not about what the agent can do.
The intelligence engine is one codebase. Self-hosted and hosted run the same Python — same parsers, same git analysis, same wiki generation, same MCP tools. Pick whichever fits your team.
Side-by-side
| Self-hosted | Hosted (repowise.dev) | |
|---|---|---|
| Install | pip install repowise | None — sign in with GitHub |
| Storage | Local SQLite + LanceDB under .repowise/ | Managed Postgres + R2 |
| MCP server | Local stdio process | Hosted HTTP endpoint, one URL for any editor |
| Auto-sync | Hooks, watch, your own webhook server | GitHub App push-sync (automatic) |
| Multi-repo workspaces | Yes | Yes |
| Cross-repo intelligence | Yes (per workspace) | Yes (federated across all your repos) |
| Dashboard | repowise serve on localhost:3000 | repowise.dev/dashboard |
| Auth | None (local) | Supabase (GitHub OAuth, email magic link) |
| Team features | — | Seats & roles, pooled repos/credits, shared workspaces, portfolio health & ownership, engineering-leader dashboard |
| Billing | Free, AGPL | Free / Pro / Teams / Enterprise |
| GitHub App for private repos | — | One-click installer |
| Security suite | Local pattern scan | Full suite: CVE scanning + reachability triage, secrets across git history, SBOM/VEX, nightly refresh, compliance reports, audit trail |
| Alerting | — | Bell + email + signed Slack-compatible webhooks for security events and engineering signals |
| PR review bot | — | Blast-radius + reviewer suggestions on pull requests |
| Privacy | Code never leaves your machine | Stored encrypted in our infrastructure; BYOK keeps LLM calls direct |
| Pro-only on hosted | — | Semantic search, docs explorer, coverage page, federated workspace chat |
Same agent experience
Whichever you pick, your AI agent gets:
- The same nine MCP tools.
- The same proactive
PreToolUse/PostToolUsehooks (if you're using Claude Code). - The same auto-generated
CLAUDE.md(withgenerate-claude-mdon self-hosted, automatic on hosted).
The hosted MCP endpoint adds federated workspace queries —
repo="all" against your entire org's repos in one call.
Pick self-hosted if
- Your code can't leave your network.
- You're an individual or small team and don't want a billing relationship.
- You want full control over the LLM provider, model, and embedding pipeline.
- You're comfortable with a Python install and one of the auto-sync options.
Pick hosted if
- You want zero ops — managed indexing, managed webhooks, push-sync.
- You want federated cross-repo intelligence across your whole org without coordinating workspace setup yourself.
- You want the security suite — CVE scanning with reachability triage, secret detection across git history, SBOM/VEX, nightly refresh, compliance reports, audit trail.
- You're running a team: seats and roles, pooled repos and credits, portfolio health and ownership rollups, and the engineering-leader dashboard with drift alerting into Slack.
- You want the Pro analysis pages (semantic search, docs explorer, coverage, federated chat) and the PR review bot.
Hybrid is fine. Run self-hosted on a laptop for one private repo and hosted for everything else — same MCP protocol, same tool names. Your agent doesn't care which server answers.
Self-hosted under the hood
The hosted frontend (Next.js + Supabase Auth) talks to a hosted
FastAPI backend over a typed REST client; it imports presentational
components from @repowise-dev/ui and types from @repowise-dev/types,
the same packages the OSS web UI uses. There's no fork — both modes
share the engine.
Hosted platform
Everything the managed platform adds on top of the OSS engine — zero-ops indexing, push-sync, AI docs and chat, the security suite, team portfolio intelligence, and alerting — with a plan ladder from free to enterprise.
Dashboard tour
What lives behind sign-in at repowise.dev/dashboard — the hosted control plane for your indexed repos, workspaces, MCP keys, billing, and team.