10 Awesome GitHub Apps for Engineering Teams
The GitHub Marketplace offers 500+ Apps that can help teams manage pull requests, code review, dependencies, CI pipelines, and more. There are also 12k+ Actions to automate development workflows, such as build and deployment pipelines.
While building the Software.com GitHub app, we explored a lot of different tools available and came to appreciate this growing ecosystem as a way to improve team productivity.
GitHub Apps integrate directly with your individual or team GitHub account. They can help your team extend GitHub’s functionality with powerful new workflows, such as scanning pull requests for vulnerabilities or enabling rich search capabilities.
Here’s a quick list of included apps:
Keep reading to learn more about each GitHub app and how teams can benefit from using them.
Axolo
Axolo is a Slack and GitHub integration that helps teams collaborate on pull requests directly from Slack. With Axolo, your team can organize, discuss, and prioritize your work in progress so you can move faster while staying on top of ongoing code reviews.
Key features:
- Creates ephemeral Slack channels with each pull request to keep track of ongoing reviews
- Syncs discussions between GitHub and Slack with its bi-directional integration
- Centralizes GitHub notifications in Slack so team members can see who is waiting for reviews
Try Axolo if your team:
- Relies heavily on Slack for team communication
- Frequently splits discussions between GitHub and Slack
- Struggles with stale pull requests and context switching
Alternatives to Axolo: Slack + GitHub
Neat
Neat adds GitHub notifications to your macOS menu bar. Get notified of your team’s activity in GitHub and take action with options to open or preview pull requests, copy links to discussions on GitHub, dismiss notifications, and more.
Key features
- Control over what notifications you receive — merges, pull requests, etc.
- Keyboard shortcuts and quick actions, e.g. open up a new pull request in just a few keystrokes
- Stores data locally and built with privacy in mind
Try Neat if your team:
- Doesn’t use Slack and chooses not to manage pull request notifications in Slack
- Prefers a dedicated channel for GitHub notifications, especially for personal or open source projects
Alternatives to Neat: DevHub
Slapdash
Slapdash is a unified search and shortcut tool. By indexing across your team’s tools and integration, Slapdash helps you search GitHub and find exactly what you need, faster.
Key features
- Search GitHub with filters for issues, pull requests, projects, and more
- Create GitHub issues and Gists with just a few keystrokes from the desktop
Try Slapdash if your team:
- Loves shortcuts and fast navigation
- Wants to search across a lot of different apps, such as Figma, Gmail, Notion, Stack Overflow
Alternatives to Slapdash: Raycast
CodeScene
CodeScene helps teams visualize and manage code quality and technical debt. With CodeScene, teams can see ‘code health’ — a measure of quality, maintainability, and risk.
Key features
- Helps automate code reviews by flagging issues around code complexity, file size, and more
- Detects technical risks based on branching activity and merge conflicts
- Maps your team's knowledge by analyzing who works on various parts of the codebase
Try CodeScene if your team:
- Wants to pinpoint ways to decrease technical debt
- Wants to manage code quality beyond linters and formatters
DeepSource
DeepSource is a static analysis tool that provides fast code reviews for engineering teams.
Key features:
- Provides advanced static analysis
- Autofixes code issues with one click
- Automatically formats code so you can avoid breaking CI pipelines
Try DeepSource if your team:
- Is searching for ways to automate more of their code review process but want something that works out-of-the-box and is lightweight
- Doesn’t want styling issues breaking CI pipelines
- Wants a static analysis tool that works across many languages
Alternatives to DeepSource: SonarCloud
Doppler
Doppler is a secrets management and app configuration tool. With Doppler, your team can share secrets and environment variables securely and easily.
Key features:
- Single source of truth for secrets
- Syncs secrets with GitHub Actions
- CLI for faster use of secrets in local development environments
Try Doppler if your team:
- Shares secrets over Slack or email and wants a more secure workflow
- Needs help keeping track of changing environment variables
Foresight
Foresight provides your team with better observability into your CI pipelines. By analyzing your team’s GitHub Actions, Foresight offers insight into the health of pipelines and builds.
Key features
- Monitors workflow status, success rate, and duration for GitHub Actions
- Identifies failed and flaky tests
Try Foresight if your team:
- Primarily uses GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipelines
- Wants a lightweight tool to manage GitHub Actions
Alternatives to Foresight: Meercode
Snyk
Snyk helps your team find, fix, and prevent vulnerabilities. Snyk’s platform tracks vulnerabilities in over 800,000 open source packages and uses that information to intelligently scan your code for potential issues.
Key features:
- Runs on pull requests to notify you if your changes have introduced new vulnerabilities
- Requires lightweight and minimal configuration
Try Snyk if your team:
- Uses a lot of open source tools and wants to improve security
- Needs a more efficient way to automatically manage dependencies earlier in the SDLC
FlyCode
FlyCode frees up developer time by empowering everyone on your team to make product and content edits. FlyCode scans repositories for text, image, and configurations, which it makes editable in a user-friendly interface. All changes integrate directly into your team’s existing git workflows.
Key features:
- Makes content changes possible in your app without needing to know how to code or use git
- Fast setup and minimal configuration
- Syncs changes directly with GitHub
Try FlyCode if your team:
- Currently juggles too many requests from product and design teams to make content changes in your app
- Wants to empower more team members to make content changes without breaking your developers’ workflows
Software.com
Software provides your team with key engineering and DevOps metrics, including lead time and deployment frequency. You can more easily find and fix bottlenecks in your delivery pipeline, helping you ship faster and more efficiently.
Key features
- Fast onboarding, typically less than 10 minutes
- Lead time visibility, from review and approval to merge and release
- Automated reporting with key development metrics
- Monitors that alert you to stale or delayed pull requests
Try Software.com if your team:
- Faces frequent delays or bottlenecks when writing and shipping code
- Wants to streamline code reviews and other team workflows
Improving the developer experience
Choosing the right tools for the right job is an important task for any engineering team. Too many tools solving the wrong problems can create more bottlenecks, not fewer.
When added purposefully, better development tools can help streamline workflows or improve quality at specific stages in the software delivery life cycle. Over time, they provide your team with a way to improve your organization’s developer experience, so developers can save time, minimize context switching, reduce burnout, and improve security.
