CodeRabbit alternative

A different kind of CodeRabbit alternative

CodeRabbit and similar bots comment on your pull request after the fact. deck is the step before: your own agent shows you each decision on the lines, and you decide. Free and open source.

If you are searching for a CodeRabbit alternative, you probably have a specific complaint. The most common ones are too many comments, comments that miss the point, or a feeling that the bot reviewed the code and nobody on the team did.

Tools like CodeRabbit, Greptile, GitHub Copilot code review, Graphite's reviewer, Qodo and Cursor BugBot all do a similar job: they read a pull request and leave comments on it. They are useful for catching things. They are not designed to make you understand what changed.

A different question

A review bot answers "is anything wrong with this diff?". The question that is usually harder, when an agent wrote the change, is "what did we just decide, and do I agree?".

deck answers that one. It is not a bot and it is not a service. It is a window on your machine that the agent you already use (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Amp) opens to show you its work: one claim at a time, with the lines that prove it lit beside it, and a chart when the point is about behaviour. You push back on the line; the same agent answers with its full context.

How they compare

• When it happens. A review bot runs after the PR is open. deck happens before, while the agent still holds everything it just read.
• Who explains. A bot explains its own findings. With deck, the agent that wrote the code explains the code, and answers your questions.
• What you get. A bot gives you comments to triage. deck gives you the decisions to agree with or change.
• Cost. deck is free and open source, with no account and no seats.

Use both, if you like

Nothing stops you running a review bot on the PR and using deck before it. Many teams will want both: a bot to catch slips, and a way for the person approving to actually understand the change.

Try a real deck in your browser, or install it.