Forge vs Sourcegraph Cody: Filling the Gap Left by the Indie Tier Shutdown
Sourcegraph discontinued free and Pro plans in July 2025, leaving individual developers and small teams without a self-hosted code intelligence option. Forge fills that gap.
In July 2025, Sourcegraph discontinued their free and Pro tiers for Cody. Individual developers and small teams who had been using Cody for code intelligence were moved to enterprise-only pricing or left to find alternatives. This is not a criticism of Sourcegraph — enterprise-only is a rational business decision for a company that has raised over $100M and needs to justify that capital through enterprise contracts. It is, however, a real gap in the market that Forge was built to fill.
This post is an honest comparison. Sourcegraph Enterprise is a mature, well-funded product. Forge is new and smaller. The question is which one fits your situation, not which one is objectively better.
Prices and product features accurate as of April 2026. Sourcegraph’s product lineup changes; verify current offerings at sourcegraph.com.
What Sourcegraph Enterprise Does
Sourcegraph Enterprise is a full code intelligence platform built for large organizations. Its core capabilities:
- Code search at scale. Sourcegraph’s regex and structural search handles monorepos of millions of files across dozens of repositories. This is genuinely hard infrastructure work that Sourcegraph has spent years building.
- Cody AI assistant. An AI coding assistant that uses Sourcegraph’s code graph for context. Works in VS Code, JetBrains, and web.
- Cross-repository intelligence. Find all usages of a function across 200 repositories in one query. Enterprise teams with fragmented codebases across GitHub orgs need this.
- Enterprise compliance. SSO (SAML, OIDC), audit logs, RBAC, SLA-backed support, compliance reporting. These are real features that take real time to build and maintain.
- Deployment options. Sourcegraph Cloud (hosted) or self-hosted on your infrastructure. Self-hosted requires Kubernetes and meaningful DevOps investment.
The bottom line: Sourcegraph Enterprise is excellent for large organizations with complex code portfolios, compliance requirements, and the infrastructure budget to operate it.
Where the Gap Is
Sourcegraph Enterprise starts at prices designed for teams of 50+. Their sales process involves contracts and procurement workflows. Their self-hosted deployment requires Kubernetes. None of this is wrong — enterprise tools are priced for enterprises.
What disappeared in July 2025 was the path for individual developers and small teams: a tool that gave you code intelligence, local or near-local processing, and predictable pricing without an enterprise contract. Sourcegraph’s free tier used to fill this. Pro used to fill this. Now it does not.
What Forge Does
Forge is a single static binary — no Kubernetes, no cloud infrastructure, no API keys. You download it, point it at a repository, and it indexes the codebase locally. The 21 MCP tools become available to any MCP-compatible AI coding client (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Zed, Windsurf) immediately.
Forge targets the developer who:
- Uses AI coding agents daily
- Wants structured codebase context without sending code to cloud infrastructure
- Does not need enterprise features like SSO and audit logs
- Wants flat, predictable pricing
Honest Comparison
Code intelligence depth
Sourcegraph Enterprise has a more mature code graph at scale. Their infrastructure is designed for codebases that are orders of magnitude larger than what Forge currently targets. If you have 500 repositories, Sourcegraph is the right tool.
Forge targets small-to-medium codebases — individual projects, mono-repos, small team repositories. On a 500-10,000 file codebase, Forge’s AST-level analysis is precise and fast. The dependency graph, health checks, and semantic search perform well at this scale. We have not benchmarked at the 1M+ file scale that Sourcegraph is designed for.
Deployment model
| Forge | Sourcegraph Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Single binary, local | Cloud (hosted) or Kubernetes self-hosted |
| Infrastructure required | None | Cloud or significant on-prem |
| Network dependency | Weekly license hash check only | Ongoing for cloud; managed for self-hosted |
| Air-gapped support | Contact sales | Enterprise contract |
| Setup time | ~5 minutes | Hours to days (self-hosted) or immediate (cloud) |
If your code cannot leave your network due to regulation or policy, Forge’s local-first architecture is directly compatible. Your code never leaves your machine during normal operation. The only network call is a weekly license health check that transmits a license hash — never code, queries, or file paths. Full details in the privacy policy.
For teams that need full network isolation, Forge offers an air-gapped deployment option (contact sales) where the heartbeat is compiled out entirely.
Pricing
Sourcegraph Enterprise pricing is available on request — enterprise contracts with custom pricing per seat. This is appropriate for large organizations with procurement workflows but out of reach for most individual developers and small teams.
Forge:
- Solo: $199/year (1 developer)
- Pro: $349/year (multi-repo, CI mode, SCIP ingestion)
- Team: $349/user/year (3 seats minimum)
- 14-day free trial on all paid tiers — card required, not charged until day 15
AI integration approach
Sourcegraph Cody is an AI assistant — it bundles the LLM with the context engine. One subscription covers both. This is convenient if you want a single tool.
Forge is a context engine only. It does not include an LLM. You bring your own AI coding client (Claude Code, Cursor, whatever you prefer) and Forge provides the codebase intelligence via MCP. This means:
- You choose which LLM you use without being locked to one provider
- Forge works with any MCP-compatible client, including ones that do not yet exist
- You pay for AI model access separately (Claude Code subscription, Cursor subscription, etc.)
- Forge’s pricing does not change based on how much you use your AI coding tool
Enterprise features
Sourcegraph Enterprise has SSO, audit logs, RBAC, SLA support, and compliance reporting. Forge has none of these. If your organization’s security team requires these features before approving a developer tool, Forge is not the right choice today.
Who Should Pick Which
Pick Sourcegraph Enterprise if:
- Your organization has 50+ developers with a complex, multi-repository code landscape
- You need SSO, audit logs, RBAC, or compliance reporting
- You want a bundled AI assistant rather than a separate context engine
- You have the infrastructure budget and DevOps capacity for enterprise deployment
- You need SLA-backed support
Pick Forge if:
- You are an individual developer or small team (1-20 developers)
- You want flat, predictable pricing without enterprise contracts
- Code privacy is a priority — local-first processing with no cloud dependency
- You already use multiple AI coding tools and want a context engine that works with all of them via MCP
- You want to be up and running in minutes, not days
Honest Caveats About Forge
Forge is newer and smaller than Sourcegraph. I will not pretend otherwise:
- No enterprise features. No SSO, no audit logs, no RBAC. Teams that require these features for security approval cannot use Forge today.
- Scale ceiling. Forge has not been benchmarked on codebases of millions of files. At that scale, Sourcegraph is likely the better choice on technical merit alone.
- One maintainer. Sourcegraph has a full engineering team. Forge is a solo-developer product. Feature velocity reflects that difference.
- Younger codebase. Sourcegraph has been running in production for years. Forge is launching commercially in 2026.
If any of these are blockers, Sourcegraph Enterprise is probably the better fit.
The Market Reality
Sourcegraph’s enterprise-only pivot left a gap that they chose not to serve. That is their business decision to make. Forge exists precisely to fill that gap — not to compete with Sourcegraph at the enterprise tier where they excel, but to serve the individual developers and small teams they moved off.
If you were using Sourcegraph Cody on the free or Pro tier and are now looking for an alternative, Forge is worth a 14-day free trial. The evaluation criteria are simple: does it help you ship better code, faster? Try it on your actual codebase and see.