Open source alternative to Graphite
Graphite made stacked pull requests usable for teams that are not Meta, and its reviewer, Diamond, catches real bugs. It is a review workflow product: it makes small pull requests easy to create and easy to move through. What it does not change is that the diff under review is still text, and the agent that wrote it is still the one summarising it.
Closed source, hosted.
Web, CLI, GitHub.
Per-seat subscription, with a free tier for small teams and open source.
Why people replace Graphite
Hosted and closed
Your repository metadata and diffs go through Graphite. Some organisations cannot do that, and there is no self-hosted build.
Per seat, across the whole team
Stacking only works if everyone is on it, so the seat count is the team count.
GitHub only
The product is built around GitHub pull requests.
Smaller diffs are not the same as understood diffs
Stacking splits a change into readable pieces. It does not tell you whether the pieces add up to the thing that was asked for.
The layer above your agents
Review at the logic level
Aura reads a change as an AST graph. A rename shows as a rename, a move shows as a move, and what is left is the part that actually changed.
The goal is part of the review
Each branch carries the goal it was meant to deliver, and the verdict says which parts are wired. That is the question a reviewer is really trying to answer.
Any forge, self-hostable
GitHub, GitLab, or a bare repository on your own machine. The engine runs locally and the sync server can be yours.
Free and Apache 2.0
No seats to count.
Aura is not better at everything
- Aura does not do stacked pull requests. If stacking is the reason you use Graphite, keep it.
- Graphite's merge queue has no equivalent here.
- Its GitHub integration is deeper and older.
The other open-source options
If Aura is the wrong shape for what you need from Graphite, these are the projects worth reading first.
How the move actually goes
- 01Keep Graphite if you stack. Aura reviews the same branches from a different angle.
- 02Open the repository in Aura and let it index.
- 03Give each branch a goal sentence, so the review has something to check against.
- 04Read the semantic diff alongside the Graphite stack; they answer different questions.
- 05If you need to drop the subscription, git-town covers the stacking mechanics.
Aura and Graphite
Does Aura support stacked PRs?
No. It is a semantic review and proof layer, not a branch-stacking workflow. git-town and git-branchless are the open-source projects for stacking.
Can it review a pull request?
Yes: layer violations, unexplained deletions, security issues and drift from the stated goal, computed from the AST rather than from a model reading the diff.
Does it work with GitLab?
Yes. It works against any Git repository.
Where does the review run?
Locally, or on your own server if you host the sync service. There is no requirement to send diffs to us.