Intencion vs Selvedge

Intencion and Selvedge are both inference engines & infra tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Intencion

The scraped page content provided does not match the tool described in the structured data — the page describes a travel photography app called Spotter, not an AI agent observability platform. No production details, integration specifics, or architectural constraints for this tool can be sourced from the supplied content. Accordingly, this listing cannot be completed to AIDiveForge accuracy standards without verified source material. All fields below are constructed from the structured tool data and validator context only, and any claims beyond those inputs would be fabricated.

Selvedge

Selvedge is a local MCP server that AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) call as they work, logging the reasoning behind every change into a SQLite file that lives next to your code under .selvedge/. Queries are entity-scoped — you ask about users.email or deps/stripe, not line numbers — so the answer surfaces in the same terms you search in. The vendor describes zero telemetry, no accounts, and no external servers; everything stays on disk. The wall appears when your team needs cross-repo provenance or wants to pipe this data into an existing observability stack — Selvedge emits records but does not integrate with those systems out of the box.

Attribute	Intencion	Selvedge
Pricing	Paid	Free
Price	$90/mo	—
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Web-based SaaS; SDKs for Python and Node.js/TypeScript	Linux, macOS, Windows (via Python)
Released	—	2026-05
Pros	Session-level intent tracking across multi-turn conversations, so you can see not just that a user dropped off but what they were trying to do at the moment they left — without which most teams are guessing at failure causes from aggregate drop-off rates alone. No seat licensing model, which means the full product, data science, and engineering team can access conversation analytics without the tool becoming a bottleneck every time a new stakeholder needs visibility. Self-hosted deployment option, so teams in regulated industries or with strict data residency requirements can run observability on their own infrastructure instead of routing sensitive conversation data through a third-party cloud. API access, which means session and intent data can be pulled into existing data warehouses or BI tooling rather than requiring the team to context-switch into a separate analytics interface. Free tier covering 10,000 sessions per month, so a team running a pilot-scale production agent can validate whether the observability layer delivers signal before committing budget.	Reasoning is captured in the same context window that produced the change — not reconstructed from the diff afterward — which means the intent survives even when the original prompt, the developer who wrote it, and the model version are all gone. Entity-scoped queries (selvedge blame payments.amount, selvedge diff users --since 30d) let you ask about the things you actually search for rather than hunting through line-level history, so a schema audit that would take an afternoon takes a single command. Fully local storage in a SQLite file with no accounts, no telemetry, and no external servers, which means sensitive schema and API change history never leaves the machine — a hard requirement in compliance-heavy environments. Provider-agnostic MCP integration wires into Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot through a single setup command, so teams already using any of those agents get provenance logging without changing their workflow. Full-text search across all logged events (selvedge search "stripe") and changeset grouping (selvedge changeset add-stripe-billing) mean you can reconstruct the full scope of a feature build after the fact, which is the audit trail that git log alone cannot provide.
Cons	The product is built exclusively for monitoring conversational agents — teams that need observability across non-conversational pipelines (batch inference, document processing, structured output chains) will find no coverage here and will need a separate tool, at which point maintaining two observability layers becomes the new problem. Because this is a passive analytics layer rather than a testing or evaluation framework, it cannot catch failure modes before they reach real users — teams that need pre-production red-teaming or automated regression testing will hit that wall immediately and typically look at dedicated eval platforms instead. At the scale where session volume justifies the platform, the absence of disclosed SLA details and integration depth documentation (not surfaced in available source material) creates procurement risk for enterprise teams that need contractual uptime guarantees before sign-off.	Selvedge has no API and no export integration — teams that need to push reasoning records into an existing compliance platform, a data warehouse, or a centralized observability system must write their own pipeline against the SQLite file, adding a maintenance surface that grows with audit requirements. The store is scoped to a single local project directory; teams running multi-repo codebases where an agent change in one repo depends on a change in another get no cross-repo provenance, and at that point teams managing compliance across repositories will move to a dedicated audit-log solution that operates at the organization level. Selvedge only captures what the agent explicitly logs through the MCP tool call — if an agent skips the log_change call, makes changes outside a supported tool, or the MCP connection drops mid-session, that change has no recorded reasoning and the gap is invisible in the history.

Bottom line

Intencion is paid while Selvedge is free; Selvedge is open source; only Intencion exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Intencion and Selvedge?

Intencion is Paid, while Selvedge is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Intencion better than Selvedge?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.