Sourcegraph Cody Alternative: MCP Code Graph

This page is for engineering teams who evaluated Cody before it went enterprise-only, or who are now staring at a six-figure Sourcegraph quote and wondering what else gives an AI coding agent real code context. If you want a second opinion after a Sourcegraph sales call, read on.

What happened to Cody

Cody Free and Cody Pro are gone. Sourcegraph stopped new signups on June 25, 2025, and cut off access entirely on July 23, 2025, folding what remained into Cody Enterprise (Sourcegraph, changes to Cody Free, Pro, and Enterprise Starter plans). Enterprise Starter workspaces created after that date no longer include Cody at all, only Code Search.

Then on December 2, 2025, Sourcegraph and Amp split into two independent companies. Amp, the agentic coding product built by Sourcegraph co-founders Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu, is now its own company. Cody stayed with Sourcegraph as an Enterprise product. Cody was not rebranded to Amp: they are two separate products from two separate companies now, sharing a common origin and little else going forward.

If you evaluated Cody a year ago and lost track of it, that is the whole story: a consumer and pro tier that no longer exists, an enterprise tier that remains, and a spun-out agent product that is not the same thing.

What Sourcegraph costs today

Sourcegraph publishes one number: Enterprise pricing "starting at $16K," scaling with AI feature credits and team size, quote-only past that (Sourcegraph pricing). There is no self-serve tier and no public per-seat rate, as of July 2026. If you have seen a $59/user/month figure floating around older blog posts, that was the discontinued Cody Pro tier: it does not exist anymore and Sourcegraph does not publish anything like it today.

That is a deliberate positioning choice, not a mistake on their part. Sourcegraph sells to organizations that already run procurement processes for infrastructure this size. It is a mismatch for a five-person team that wants to wire an MCP server into Claude Code this afternoon.

How each one gives an agent context

Sourcegraph's engine is code search plus code graph: keyword, regex, and structural search over the codebase, layered with SCIP-based code intelligence for precise go-to-definition and find-references (Sourcegraph, code graph context). Cody Enterprise's own documentation describes this search-and-graph combination without describing an embeddings-based retrieval path, which lines up with Sourcegraph's public messaging that Search replaced embeddings as the default context mechanism for Cody.

Symvanta takes a different bet. It parses each repository into a live graph (nodes are symbols, edges are calls, imports, implements, and instantiates, each with a confidence score), stores embeddings in Qdrant for semantic search, and keeps literal text search as a third path. An agent asking "who calls this function" gets a graph traversal it can act on without re-deriving anything. That distinction is the subject of why AI coding agents fail on large codebases: the failure mode is rarely a missing search index, it is an agent that finds a plausible-looking match and guesses the rest. We go deeper on the tradeoff itself in code embeddings vs. code graph: search and embeddings tell you what looks related, a graph tells you what is actually connected.

One place Sourcegraph's documentation is quiet: neither the Cody nor the Search docs describe a named blast-radius or transitive-impact primitive, the kind of "what breaks if I change this" answer that comes from walking edges outward from a symbol. That does not mean Sourcegraph cannot answer that question through search and code intel combined; it means their public docs do not describe it as a first-class tool the way callers, dependencies, and blast radius are first-class relate operations in Symvanta.

Sourcegraph's MCP server

Sourcegraph ships its own MCP server, and it moved quickly through 2026. It went generally available on February 25, 2026 with OAuth Dynamic Client Registration on by default and a dedicated mcp OAuth scope, in Sourcegraph Cloud and self-hosted 7.0 (Sourcegraph changelog, MCP server GA). You point a client at your own instance, at https://your-sourcegraph-instance.com/.api/mcp. Sourcegraph access tokens work alongside OAuth, and the docs name Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, OpenCode, and Amp among the clients it supports (Sourcegraph MCP server docs). Sourcegraph pitches it as "code context for any AI agent" (Sourcegraph MCP).

The tool set is search-and-navigation shaped. Since March 30, 2026 the default endpoint serves a curated eight: read_file, list_files, keyword_search, nls_search, list_repos, commit_search, diff_search, and deepsearch_read. The full suite, including go_to_definition and find_references, moved to /.api/mcp/all, to keep the default tool list from eating context window (Sourcegraph changelog, curated default MCP tools). Those primitives map onto what Sourcegraph has always been strong at: find the text, open the file, jump to the definition, read the history. Cody sits on the other side of the protocol as a consumer, so a Cody Enterprise seat can call external MCP servers of its own (Sourcegraph supports the Model Context Protocol). Amp, its own company since the December 2025 split, appears on Sourcegraph's supported-client list.

The gating is the part to plan around. Sourcegraph's docs say the MCP server is "Supported on Enterprise plans" (Sourcegraph MCP server docs), which puts it behind the same starting-at-$16K floor as the rest of the platform, and it answers against an instance someone has already stood up and indexed. There is no self-serve path to try it on one repository this afternoon.

Symvanta is MCP-first by design: the whole product is an authenticated MCP endpoint (OAuth 2.0 with PKCE, URL-based) plus a dashboard for managing what is indexed, self-serve from $19/month. It works with Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop, or any MCP client, same as Sourcegraph's server does. The tool shapes diverge where an edit is at stake. find_references answers "where is this symbol mentioned"; relate with kind blast_radius answers "what breaks if I change it", walked outward through calls, imports, and implementations across every repository linked in the project. nls_search and deepsearch_read hand the agent passages to read; find_node, relate, and find_http_route hand it edges to act on.

Cross-repo and on-prem

Multi-repo context is core to Sourcegraph, and the mechanism behind it is worth understanding, because the same design that makes it work also bounds it. Sourcegraph's precise cross-repo navigation runs on SCIP, where a symbol is a string. The grammar is explicit: a symbol is a scheme, then a package written as manager package-name version, then a descriptor path that fully qualifies the symbol inside that package (SCIP symbol grammar, scip.proto). Cross-repo navigation treats that package name plus version plus qualified symbol as a unique id, so a reference indexed in one repo resolves to a definition indexed in another whenever the two ids match (scip-clang cross-repo docs).

That design means each repository is indexed independently, and cross-repo is a lookup that joins a reference to a definition on package identity at query time (Sourcegraph, cross-repository code navigation). The join lands only when both sides are indexed at matching package versions. When the versions differ or an index is missing, precise navigation is unavailable and Sourcegraph automatically falls back to search-based (fuzzy) results, as of July 2026 (Sourcegraph precise code navigation docs). The fallback is quiet: you still get an answer, it just comes from text search instead of the resolved symbol.

The identity has to come from somewhere, and where there is no package manager there is nothing to derive it from. For C and C++, users hand-write a package-map.json to supply the package names and versions themselves, and a version must never be reused over time or the ids collide (scip-clang cross-repo docs). Cost also climbs with dependency depth: Sourcegraph's own C++ documentation describes the indexing work as scaling quadratically with the depth of the dependency graph, since a shared dependency is reindexed once for every dependent that pulls it in (scip-clang cross-repo docs).

The structural point is simple: anything a package manager names is reachable by the precise tier, and anything it does not name falls to text search. A service calling another over HTTP, a queue producer and the consumer that drains its channel, two services reading and writing the same database table: a package manager assigns none of those relationships a manager package-name version id. Symvanta links repositories in a project by that coupling directly. It matches HTTP call sites to the route definitions they hit across repos, SQL table access to the ORM model that owns the table, and queue producers to consumers on the same channel, alongside project-wide symbol resolution and library import and call edges. And as of July 2026 Symvanta runs the package join too: when one repository in a project defines an internal package and a sibling consumes it, the reference resolves to the real definition by package identity, matched name-first so a version bump never silently demotes you to text search. The version gap that match reveals (a consumer pinned at 1.1.0 while the sibling ships 1.2.0) is reported as drift in the index health check instead of being swallowed. Sourcegraph draws the boundary of connected at the package; Symvanta draws it at the package and the transport.

On-prem is Sourcegraph's strongest ground. Self-hosted deployment covers Docker Compose and Kubernetes/Helm, with air-gapped, bring-your-own-key deployments supported for regulated environments (Sourcegraph self-hosted docs). This is a mature, years-old deployment story. Symvanta has a hosted MCP endpoint plus an on-prem bundle for enterprise customers, and hosted Pro and Enterprise workspaces can bring their own encryption key (AWS KMS, GCP Cloud KMS, Azure Key Vault, or a key endpoint you run), but Sourcegraph has more field experience running fully air-gapped.

What evaluating each one actually looks like

With Sourcegraph, evaluation starts with a sales conversation, because there is no public per-seat price and no self-serve signup to try against your own repository first. That is normal for infrastructure sold at this scale, but it means the first real signal you get is a demo someone else drives; pointing the tool at your own codebase on your own schedule comes later, if at all.

With Symvanta, the path is the reverse: connect a repository, get an MCP endpoint, point your agent at it, and ask it a real question about your own code before anyone from Symvanta talks to you. That is a smaller test than a full Sourcegraph rollout, and it is meant to be: the goal is to see whether the graph answers correctly on the codebase you actually maintain.

Side by side

Who should pick Sourcegraph

If you are a large organization that already needs air-gapped deployment, a mature multi-repo search platform, and a procurement process that can absorb a five- or six-figure annual contract, Sourcegraph Enterprise is a legitimate, battle-tested choice. Their code intelligence and search infrastructure predate the current wave of AI coding agents by years, and that maturity shows in the self-hosted story.

Who should pick Symvanta

If you want an MCP endpoint your agents can call this week, at a per-seat price a small team can expense without a sales call, and you want the agent asking "what calls this" or "what breaks if I change this" to get a graph answer instead of a search result it has to interpret, that is the gap Symvanta fills. Graph not grep, without the six-figure floor.

Frequently asked questions

The fastest way to see the difference is on your own repository. Book a 15-minute demo and bring a real question about a real codebase.