AI code review tools promise faster, more consistent feedback on every PR. But not all of them integrate the same way into your workflow, and the differences add more friction than you might think.
CodeRabbit is a popular standalone option that's been around since 2023. Code Reviews in Kilo takes a different approach: it's part of a broader agentic engineering platform, built to close a gap that's been bothering developers for years.
The Problem that AI Code Reviews Solves
We've all been on both sides of the code review bottleneck.
As a junior engineer, you push a PR and watch it sit for days. Your reviewer is in meetings. Or firefighting production. Or just buried under their own work. By the time feedback comes back, you've already context-switched twice and have to re-read your own code to remember what you were thinking.
As a senior engineer, you see the other side. You have 15 PRs waiting for your attention, and you skim the smaller ones just to get through the queue. You know you're missing things. Everyone does. But there's only so many hours in a day.
Since reviews can take a long time to process, engineers end up adding more content to every PR, hoping to get multiple things reviewed in one clean shot. But when every engineer does this, it has a compounding, resource-devouring effect on the reviewer.
Code review is supposed to be a learning moment, a quality gate, a place where knowledge transfers across the team. Instead, it's often a waiting room.
The Agentic Engineering Disconnect
Most engineers are using AI at some point in their workflow now. 72% of developers who've tried AI coding tools use them every day, and roughly 41% of all commits are now AI-assisted.
But here's the problem with the traditional workflow: you're building in your IDE with an AI coding agent, you push, and then suddenly you're in a completely different platform. Different account. Different subscription. You switch context and wait for a human to find time.
This fragmentation has real costs. Research from 2025 found that engineers using AI tools were actually 19% slower to complete tasks, despite believing they were 20% faster. The tools promise speed, but the friction between them kills it.
AI coding tools are supposed to accelerate development, not slow you down. If you have to switch platforms and manage administrative overhead just to access the full workflow, is AI really helping? Or just creating more drag?
That's the question Code Reviews was built to answer.
Quick Comparison
CodeRabbit | Kilo | |
Type | Standalone code review tool | End-to-end agentic engineering platform |
Model selection | Vendor-selected | Choose freely between 500+ AI models |
Pricing | $24/seat/month (Pro) | Per-token pricing with no markup on provider rates |
Platform features | Code review only | Reviews + Coding Agents + Cloud Agents + App Builder + Deploy + More |
IDE | No | VS Code, JetBrains, CLI |
Codebase indexing | Yes | Yes |
Custom instructions | Yes | Yes |
Default Review Styles | No | Yes |
The Core Difference
CodeRabbit is a dedicated AI code review product. It connects to your repo and reviews your PRs with a subscription pricing model.
Code Reviews in Kilo is part of the Kilo agentic engineering platform. Reviews happen in the same place as the rest of your AI-assisted development workflow, using the same models, with the same pricing. No separate tool, no separate account, no separate subscription.
Model Flexibility
CodeRabbit picks the model for you. They decide what's "good enough," when to upgrade it, and you work with whatever they've configured. That works fine - until it doesn't.
Maybe their default model struggles with your stack. Maybe you need faster feedback on routine PRs but deeper reasoning for security-critical changes. Maybe a better model drops next month, and you're stuck waiting for CodeRabbit to adopt it.
Kilo lets you choose from 500+ models and switch between them based on the job:
- Fast feedback on routine PRs? Use a lightweight model like MiniMax M2.1.
- Security-critical infrastructure? Switch to deeper reasoning with Claude Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3.
- Cost-conscious reviews on high-volume repos? Pick an efficient model that fits your budget.
The model that's great for reviewing React components might not be ideal for legacy Rust systems. With Kilo, you don't have to pretend one size fits all.
Pricing
CodeRabbit uses traditional SaaS seat-based pricing:
- Free tier: Limited to public repos, basic features
- Pro: $24/seat/month (or $19/month billed annually)
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
You pay per developer, regardless of how many reviews they actually run. Heavy users and light users cost the same.
Kilo uses per-token pricing at the rates set by model providers. You pay for the reviews you actually run, with no invisible rate limits or throttling.
Kilo for Teams is $15/seat/month and includes access to the entire platform:
- Complete agentic engineering platform in your IDE or CLI (with specialized Code, Ask, Debug, Architect, Orchestrator modes)
- Code Reviews
- Cloud Agents
- App Builder
- Kilo Deploy
- Usage analytics and AI ROI scores
- Shared agent modes and centralized billing
- Team management
- Priority support
- All usage-based features are charged per-token, exactly at model provider's costs
CodeRabbit Pro | Kilo Teams | |
Monthly cost | $24/seat | $15/seat |
Code reviews | Yes | Yes |
AI coding agents | No | Yes |
Cloud Agents | No | Yes |
App Builder | No | Yes |
One-click deploy | No | Yes |
Usage analytics | Basic | Advanced + AI ROI |
Here's how the numbers break down. A 10-person team pays $240/month for CodeRabbit Pro. The same team pays $150/month for Kilo plus their AI usage at model provider cost, and gets significantly more functionality.
Platform Cohesion
CodeRabbit is a standalone tool. It does one thing well, and everything else in your workflow lives somewhere else.
Code Reviews in Kilo lives inside the same platform where you're already writing code with AI. That creates compounding benefits:
- No Tool Switching: Reviews, coding, debugging, and deploying all happen in one place.
- Sessions Sync Everywhere: Kilo Sessions persist across VS Code, JetBrains, CLI, and Cloud Agents. Start a task on your laptop, check the review status on mobile, finish up in a different IDE.
- Ship When It Passes: Kilo Deploy lets you go from approved PR to live deployment in one click.
- The Full Platform: Your reviews happen alongside agentic coding with specialized modes, Cloud Agents, Parallel Agents, App Builder, and Autocomplete.
Review Customization
CodeRabbit lets you configure reviews through a .coderabbit.yaml file or their dashboard: review instructions and focus areas, path-based filtering, language-specific settings, and team-level configurations.
Kilo gives you control through the dashboard and custom instructions:
- Review Styles: Strict flags everything for production services and security-critical code. Balanced is the sweet spot for most teams, catching what matters without drowning you in noise. Lenient is a light touch for prototypes, WIP branches, and exploratory work.
- Focus Areas: Pick what the reviewer prioritizes: security vulnerabilities, performance issues, bug detection, code style, test coverage, or documentation gaps.
- Custom Instructions: Add your own rules. Your team's conventions, domain-specific patterns, edge cases the reviewer should catch.
When to Choose CodeRabbit
CodeRabbit makes sense if:
- You want a standalone tool and are happy with your current AI coding setup (or don't use one).
- You prefer to keep your AI tools separated.
- You prefer fixed pricing.
- You don't need model flexibility.
When to Choose Code Reviews in Kilo
Kilo's Code Reviews makes sense if:
- You're using a variety of AI coding tools and want them in one platform.
- You want model flexibility to pick the right model for each job.
- You prefer usage-based pricing that scales with actual use.
- You value open source. (Check out our OSS Sponsorship program if you are an open-source maintainer!)
- You want to consolidate accounts, billing, and credit pooling.
The Bigger Picture
The choice between CodeRabbit and Kilo's Code Reviews isn't just about code review features. It's about how you think about your AI development stack.
CodeRabbit fits the traditional model: specialized tools, each doing one thing well, stitched together into a workflow.
Kilo represents a newer realization: that the friction of context-switching between AI tools costs more than the perceived flexibility of mixing and matching. That the agentic engineering future is cohesive, not fragmented.
Getting Started with Code Reviews in Kilo
Code Reviews is available now in the Kilo Dashboard. Sign up with a free account to try it today:
- Sign up/Log in to Kilo
- Connect your repo via the Integrations tab
- Enable AI Code Review in the Code Reviews tab
- Choose your model, review style, and focus areas
- Select which repositories should receive automatic reviews
That's it. The agent handles the rest.
Kilo is the #1 app on OpenRouter with 1M+ active users and 25.1T tokens processed. Code Reviews is one of the latest additions to the all-in-one agentic engineering platform. Build, review, ship, all in one place, all with the same model freedom and open pricing.
Try Kilo today, and let us know what you think in our Discord Community!