MergeWhy vs Kosli
Kosli pioneered the change-evidence category and is the only other serious player in this space. We respect the work — they made enterprises take cryptographic compliance evidence seriously. The honest difference: Kosli is built enterprise-down (Deutsche Bank-style pilots, custom pricing, long sales cycles). MergeWhy is built developer-up (free GitHub App, public pricing, install in 60 seconds). Below is a specific, no-fog comparison.
At a glance
Kosli
- Mature production deployments at Deutsche Bank-scale orgs
- $13.45M raised, established sales motion
- Deeper integrations with bespoke CI/CD setups (Jenkins, Bamboo)
- Strong artifact/flow tracking model with named environments
- Custom enterprise pricing — no public free tier
- No public CMMC SPRS calculator or DoD-specific tooling
- No OSCAL 1.1.2 export announced
- Long enterprise sales cycle to first DER
- No GitHub-Marketplace one-click install
MergeWhy
- Free Pilot tier — install GitHub App, first DER in 60 seconds
- OSCAL 1.1.2 SSP / Assessment Results / POA&M export
- Free public CMMC SPRS calculator at /cmmc-score
- 26 frameworks evaluated, including SOX ITGC, FedRAMP, NIST 800-53
- AI sovereignty: SaaS, AWS Bedrock, fully air-gapped Ollama
- In-browser SHA-256 verify + public Sigstore Rekor anchoring
- Younger company — 2025 vs Kosli's 2019 founding
- Smaller installed base today
- Less depth on bespoke Jenkins/Bamboo CI vs Kosli's pre-built kits
- No published case studies at the Deutsche Bank scale (yet)
Feature comparison
Verified May 2026 against Kosli's public docs + product pages. ✓ ships, ⚪ partial / requires upgrade, ✗ not available.
Pick Kosli if…
- • You're a Tier-1 bank or 50,000-engineer enterprise needing white-glove rollout
- • Your CI is heavy Jenkins/Bamboo with bespoke pipelines
- • You want named environment promotion semantics as the core model
- • You have a $200k+/yr compliance-evidence budget and want a long pilot
- • You don't care about CMMC, OSCAL, or DoD-specific tooling
Pick MergeWhy if…
- • You're GitHub-native and want a free start before committing
- • You need CMMC L2/L3 SPRS scoring or OSCAL 1.1.2 export
- • You want public, real pricing and self-serve onboarding
- • You want every layer cryptographically verifiable, including in-browser by your auditor
- • You need the AI provider choice (SaaS, Bedrock GovCloud, or air-gapped)
The honest take
Kosli is excellent if you're a multi-thousand-engineer bank with a dedicated compliance team and a long pilot timeline. We're excellent if you're a GitHub-native team — anywhere from Series B SaaS to a DoD contractor — that wants to install something in 60 seconds and see cryptographic evidence flowing on every PR by tomorrow morning. We both believe change-evidence is the future of compliance. We just built different doors into the same building.