Rearview vs Sleuth
Sleuth is the closest thing to Rearview that exists: it already puts deploys, feature flags and manually-posted changes onto one timeline. The differences are who it is for and where the data comes from. Here is where each one fits, and why Sleuth is the better choice for a lot of engineering teams.
Sleuth is the closest thing to Rearview that exists. It is not a monitoring tool that added a change feature — it starts from the same premise we do, that the useful artifact is one timeline of everything that changed. If you are choosing between the two, you are choosing between audiences and data models, not between philosophies.
What Sleuth does well
- Deploys, feature flags and manual entries on one timeline, with a free-form change API so anything you are willing to plumb in yourself can land there.
- DORA metrics computed from that timeline, which is the thing engineering leaders are usually asked for and Rearview does not do at all.
- It is a real, mature product you can buy today. Rearview is pre-launch. That difference matters more than any feature comparison on this page.
Where the two diverge
| Sleuth | Rearview | |
|---|---|---|
| Deploys and code | ✅ native | ✅ native |
| Feature flags | ✅ native | ✅ native |
| Billing, CMS, storefront, ops changes | ⚠️ only if you build it via the manual change API | ✅ the core data model |
| Who it is built for | Engineers and engineering leaders | Whoever gets asked what changed |
| Asking it a question | Slack notifications | Plain-English query in Slack |
| DORA metrics | ✅ a focus | ❌ not attempted |
| Availability | Available now | Pre-launch waitlist |
The row that matters is the third one. Sleuth can hold a Stripe price change or a CMS publish, through its manual change API. Somebody has to write and maintain that integration, and in practice the changes that are hardest to find are exactly the ones nobody got round to plumbing in, made by people outside engineering who were never going to call an API.
Choose Sleuth if…
- Your audience is engineers, and the question is usually about a deploy or a flag.
- You want DORA metrics, and want them from the same timeline.
- You need something you can buy and use this week.
- Your non-code changes are few enough that plumbing them in by hand is realistic.
Rearview is the better fit if…
- The person asking “what changed?” is a founder, a PM or someone in ops, and they do not have accounts in your engineering tools.
- The changes that hurt you are a price in Stripe, a republished CMS page, an app that updated itself, a shipping rule. Things that never become a commit.
- You want to ask the timeline a question in plain English rather than read a feed.
They are not really substitutes
A team that runs Sleuth for deploy and flag intelligence and wants a non-engineer to be able to answer “what changed yesterday?” is not double-buying. The overlap is real but the audiences barely intersect, and the data models point in different directions: Sleuth deepens around the software delivery lifecycle, Rearview widens across the tools that are not in it.
Related reading: compared to Datadog Change Tracking, compared to New Relic, and why a clean deploy log is not a quiet week.
Never wonder “what changed?” again.
Rearviewputs every production change on one timeline, so anyone on the team can ask. Join the waitlist and we'll let you know when it's ready.
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