Hex is a notebook product where embedding requires every external viewer to hold a Hex account — there is no true embed portal. Qrly is BI + AI in one self-hostable platform: natural-language Ask (NL→SQL) on your choice of local LLM (Ollama, LM Studio) or cloud (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure), live dashboards, and embedded analytics via signed-JWT for unlimited customer tenants — no external accounts required.
Hex is genuinely great inside its intended scope. The question is not which tool is better in the abstract — it is which shape fits the work in front of you. Here is where each tool is stronger, in plain language, with no marketing fluff.
The features teams actually evaluate when Hex starts to hit its ceiling.
From real migration conversations with engineering leaders. Hex is a great starting point — and a ceiling.
A customer hits a bug. To report it, they need a Hex Tech account. For a B2B product — especially one whose buyers are legal, finance, HR or procurement — that is a non-starter. You cannot route support into a tracker that requires your users to sign up for a developer platform they have never heard of, agree to a third-party terms of service, and then figure out where your public repo actually lives.
Qrly ships with a dedicated customer portal plus native scheduled subscription. Customers reply to an email and a question appears, attached to the right project, Alert clock already running. No account creation, no external identity provider, no learning curve. Just a web form for people who want one, and an inbox for people who do not.
Labels are strings. "priority: high" is indistinguishable from "priority: hihg" to the system. There is no enforcement, no ordering, no escalation when a P1 question sits for six hours, and no way to say "this field is required before a question can be closed". Hex simply was not designed to enforce business policy on top of engineering work — that was never its job.
Qrly has first-class priority, severity and type fields with real validation, required-field rules per workflow state, and a native Alert engine that auto-fan-outs breaches before a customer has to write a second email. You can finally answer the question "which P1 questions are currently past due" with a single query instead of a spreadsheet.
Issues live in a repo. Priorities, labels and milestones are per-repo. Cross-repo queries are painful and slow. Hex Tech Projects aggregates across repos, but it cannot enforce policy: if you have 50 repos, you have 50 places where a label can drift, a priority can mean something different, or a required field can silently vanish after a maintainer edit.
Qrly's tenant → project → question hierarchy is the actual shape of a business. Priorities, types, severities and Alerts are defined once at the tenant level and respected everywhere below. New projects inherit the rules automatically. You spend the time on the work, not on keeping 50 repo configurations in sync.
Hex Tech Enterprise sits at roughly €21/user/month (as of 2026-04). That number does not buy you "better Issues" — it buys Issues plus repos plus Actions minutes plus Copilot Pro plus Packages plus advanced security, all folded into one line on the invoice. If your goal is a company-wide tracker and a embedded analytics, you are paying for five things you do not need to get the one thing you actually want.
Qrly is priced as a flat license for unlimited users. You pay for the tracker and the embedded analytics because that is what you want. The rest of your Git infrastructure — Hex Tech Free, Hex Tech Team, or a fully self-hosted Git server — stays exactly where it is, at exactly the price you already pay.
List prices as of 2026-04. 50-user team, 3-year total cost of ownership.
Most teams can lift and shift in a couple of days, and many keep Hex alive for pure dev work. The migration below is the one we recommend when customer-facing work, Alerts or cross-repo reporting are the pain point.
Qrly's Hex Tech importer talks directly to the REST and GraphQL APIs. No ETL pipeline required.
It can, but it does not have to. Many teams keep Hex for pure repo-level dev work — PR-linked bugs, chores, refactors — and route everything else (customer reports, incidents, cross-repo epics, Alerts) through Qrly. Qrly integrates with the same Git workflow, so commits and PRs still link cleanly back to questions.
Yes. Qrly's Hex Tech importer reads the REST and GraphQL APIs and pulls issues, comments, labels, milestones, assignees and cross-repo references. Repos become projects (or tenants), labels become labels, milestones become releases. Original Hex Tech links are preserved as external references so old Slack and commit deep-links keep working.
Qrly's Git integration supports the same commit-message syntax for closing and linking issues across Hex Tech, GitLab and self-hosted providers. Teams that want the absolute tightest PR view still keep Hex open for the dev-only repo board and mirror customer-facing work into Qrly. The two are complements, not substitutes, for most engineering orgs.
Hex Tech Enterprise Server self-hosts the whole Hex Tech platform — repos, Actions, Packages, Copilot and Issues together — with Hex Tech Enterprise pricing attached. If you only need a tracker and a embedded analytics, GHES makes you pay for four other products plus the annual commit. Qrly self-hosts just the tracker, on any Linux box, with no per-seat pricing.
Yes. Qrly ships with a dedicated customer embed portal and native scheduled subscription from four delivery channels. Your end users file a question with their work email — no Hex Tech login, no public repo visibility, no risk of a procurement team accidentally commenting on your open-source project.
€1,875 per year per tenant on the cheapest tier (The Pulse), with unlimited users & projects inside the tenant — €5,625 over three years for a single tenant, with embedded analytics, Alert and on-prem AI already included. Hex Tech Enterprise at roughly €21/user/month lands near €37,800 over three years for 50 users, but that bundles repos, Actions and Copilot — so it is not a clean apples-to-apples comparison.
Priorities, Alerts, embed portal, QQL, scheduled subscription. Self-hostable. Flat pricing. Made in Belgium.