Sourcegraph Cody Alternative: Code Graph over MCP

This page is for teams that evaluated Cody and want to know where it stands now, what Amp is, and what Sourcegraph offers AI agents. Three products share one origin and they are not interchangeable: Cody is the assistant, Amp is an independent company, and the Sourcegraph MCP server is the platform's agent-facing surface. This page separates them, then compares the agent-facing option with Symvanta. For the platform comparison as a whole, read Sourcegraph alternative. For the MCP server in detail, read Sourcegraph MCP server compared. For the commercial shape, read Sourcegraph pricing.

Three products, one origin

What Cody is today

Cody is an AI coding assistant that uses Sourcegraph's Search API to pull context from local and remote codebases. It runs in VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and the web app, and the documentation lists it as supported on Sourcegraph Enterprise (Cody docs).

The consumer and prosumer plans are historical. Cody Free and Cody Pro were discontinued on July 23, 2025, new signups stopped on June 25, 2025, and the Enterprise Starter plan no longer includes Cody. Cody Enterprise customers were not affected by that change (Sourcegraph, changes to Cody Free, Pro, and Enterprise Starter plans). If you used Cody Free or Pro, that product path ended in July 2025, and any per-seat Cody price you see in an older article describes a plan that is no longer sold.

Where Amp fits

On December 2, 2025, Sourcegraph and Amp became independent companies. Dan Adler became CEO of Sourcegraph, which focuses on code search and code understanding for large codebases, and Sourcegraph co-founders Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu founded Amp as a separate research lab (Sourcegraph, why Sourcegraph and Amp are becoming independent companies, Amp Frontier Corporation).

Amp is not a rebrand of Cody. It is a separate company with a separate agentic coding product, and Sourcegraph documents Amp as one of the MCP clients its server supports (Sourcegraph MCP client integrations). If Amp is the agent you use, the Amp integration guide shows how to point it at Symvanta's endpoint.

Sourcegraph's platform MCP server

Sourcegraph's MCP server is a separate surface from Cody. It connects external agents to an instance's code search, navigation, and analysis capabilities. It went generally available on February 25, 2026 with OAuth Dynamic Client Registration enabled by default and a dedicated mcp OAuth scope, in Sourcegraph Cloud and self-hosted 7.0 (Sourcegraph changelog, MCP server GA).

A client points at https://your-sourcegraph-instance.com/.api/mcp; the docs list the server as supported on Enterprise plans, and split the tools across three endpoints so a client loads only what it needs (Sourcegraph MCP server docs). The MCP server comparison covers the endpoints, tool sets, and access controls.

How each one gives an agent context

Sourcegraph's context stack is search plus precise navigation. Code Search handles keyword, regular expression, and structural queries; Precise Code Navigation resolves definitions and references from SCIP indexes, which Sourcegraph uploads per repository, and falls back to search-based navigation when a precise index is not available (Precise Code Navigation docs). Cross-repository navigation joins a reference to a definition through the symbol's package name and version in the SCIP index (Cross-repository code navigation).

Symvanta parses each repository into a graph of symbols and typed relationships: calls, imports, implements, and instantiates, plus transport edges such as HTTP call to route, SQL access to ORM model, and queue producer to consumer. An agent asks who calls a symbol with relate and kind: callers, what it depends on with kind: dependencies, and what a change affects with kind: blast_radius. It gets resolved edges with source locations rather than a ranked list of matches. Semantic search and text search remain available for discovery, and diff_impact covers a whole change set. Branch-aware indexing keeps the graph pointed at a tracked feature branch or a working-tree overlay instead of only the default branch.

One difference worth stating precisely: Sourcegraph's public documentation describes search, navigation, history, and analysis tools, and it does not name a transitive blast-radius tool as a first-class primitive. That is a statement about what the docs present, not a claim that Sourcegraph cannot support impact analysis through search and code intelligence combined.

Deployment

Sourcegraph deploys as a single-tenant cloud instance, where private dedicated instances are provisioned and managed by Sourcegraph (Sourcegraph Cloud docs), or self-hosted on Docker Compose or Kubernetes (Sourcegraph self-hosted docs). Both deployment paths run on Enterprise plans.

Symvanta is hosted by default. Pro and Enterprise workspaces can bring their own encryption key, and the Enterprise plan adds an on-prem bundle for teams that need the pipeline inside their own infrastructure.

Side by side

Who should pick which

Pick Cody if you want an AI assistant inside your IDE, backed by the Sourcegraph platform and its search and code navigation, and your organization already runs Sourcegraph Enterprise. Pick Amp if you want an agentic coding tool from the team that built Amp, independent of the Sourcegraph platform. Pick Sourcegraph's MCP server if your agents should query the same instance and indexes your engineers use, under the same permissions.

Pick Symvanta if the agent, not the human, is the consumer. Symvanta is an MCP endpoint for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Amp, or any MCP client, and it answers relationship questions directly: exact callers, dependencies, HTTP routes, and blast radius, across repositories, with branch and working-tree awareness. It is self-serve from $19 a month, so you can test it on one repository without a platform rollout. See pricing for the plans.

Frequently asked questions

If you are choosing a context layer for an agent you already run, test it on a symbol you maintain. Start a free 7-day trial, or read the MCP server page to see the connection steps.