Faros AI: hosted vs Community Edition
The OSS-or-SaaS choice in the DORA-vendor market. CE under Apache 2.0; hosted is quote-only.
Recent changes
Faros Community Edition still maintained at github.com/faros-ai/faros-community-edition. Hosted Faros AI ships an LLM layer for natural-language metric queries.
The DORA / CFR module
Faros's strength is connector breadth: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, PagerDuty, Jira, Linear, ServiceNow, Workday and others. CFR detection is driven by the deploy + incident signal graph. CE requires engineering time to operate; hosted is the zero-ops option.
When CE beats SaaS
When you already operate a Snowflake / dbt warehouse and have one engineer who can own the Faros stack. At 200+ engineers the operational cost amortises and you keep your data in-house.
When hosted wins
When time-to-first-CFR-number matters more than data-residency or LLM-question-answering is the buying signal. The hosted LLM layer is genuinely useful for ad-hoc executive questions.