SourceVault vs. Cursor, Copilot, and Cody
A private, self-hosted alternative for teams that can't send source code to the cloud.
Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Sourcegraph Cody are excellent tools, and for most teams the cloud is a fine place to do this work. This comparison is for the teams where it isn't — regulated industries, defense and ITAR, IP-sensitive firms, and anyone whose security review ends the conversation at "your source code is transmitted to a third party." If that's not you, one of the tools below is probably a better fit than SourceVault. If it is you, the difference is architectural, and it matters.
The core distinction: contractual vs. architectural privacy
Every cloud assistant offers privacy — as a promise. Copilot's enterprise data controls and Cursor's privacy mode pledge not to train on or retain your code; that's a contract, and you're trusting a pipeline you can't see. SourceVault offers privacy as an architecture: the code is never transmitted in the first place. Retrieval, embeddings, and answer generation all happen on infrastructure you control, and you can verify nothing egresses by watching the network. "We won't keep your code" and "your code never left" are different answers to a security team — and only one of them survives an air-gap requirement.
Side by side
| Cursor | GitHub Copilot | Sourcegraph Cody | SourceVault | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where code is processed | Cloud | Cloud | Self-host index; cloud LLM | Fully local |
| Privacy model | Contractual (privacy mode) | Contractual (data controls) | Contractual / deployment | Architectural, verifiable |
| Air-gap capable | No | No | Not in practice (cloud LLM) | Yes |
| Git-history answers ("why did this change?") | No | No | No | Indexed & cited |
| Cited answers | Partial | Partial | Yes | File-and-line + commit |
| Retrieval quality measured on your code | Not exposed | Not exposed | Not exposed | Eval report per install |
| Works across AI tools | Its editor | Its surfaces | Its interfaces | MCP — any client |
| Pricing model | Per seat / month | Per seat / month | Per seat / month | One-time, no per-seat |
Competitor capabilities change; this reflects their public positioning as of mid-2026, and we aim to keep it fair — if something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it. The durable distinctions are the architectural ones: where code is processed, and whether privacy is a property of the design or a clause in a contract.
Where each tool wins
Cursor is the most polished AI-native editing experience, and if cloud processing is acceptable, its inline flow is hard to beat. Copilot has the deepest IDE and ecosystem reach and the backing of GitHub. Cody brings Sourcegraph's strong code search to the assistant and can self-host its index, which gets it closest to the privacy posture — though its answering models are typically reached through cloud LLM providers, so a true air-gap remains out of reach.
SourceVault wins on exactly one axis, and only that axis matters to its buyers: nothing leaves. It's not an IDE and it won't autocomplete your keystrokes. It's the private code-memory layer that gives whatever AI you already use — Hermes, Claude Code via MCP, your own agents — grounded, cited answers about code and its history, with a privacy guarantee you can verify rather than trust. For a team that has been told "no" by their security org on every cloud assistant, that's not a better option. It's the only one.
The thing none of them do
Cloud assistants index the current state of your code. SourceVault also indexes your commit history — locally — so it can answer "why was this changed?" and "when did this break?" with citations that reach the commits themselves. That's coverage a cloud indexer structurally lacks, because making history queryable would mean uploading the most sensitive narrative your repository holds. We wrote about why that matters →
See it measured, then prove it on your code
SourceVault's retrieval is benchmarked at 100% grounded answers with zero source-code egress, and the same harness ships in every install — reproduce the measurement on your own repositories during the free 7-day trial.