searchcode vs Understand

searchcode provides code-intelligence dossiers for public GitHub repositories, covering languages, complexity, technology stacks, code quality, and secrets. Its MCP server exposes six tools for AI assistants, and each tool is also available as JSON over HTTP through the REST API. Analysis reports language breakdowns, complexity metrics, detected technologies, quality findings, and credentials such as API keys, tokens, and private keys with file, line, and confidence details. Search supports full text, boolean logic, regular expressions, and structural filters for declarations, usages, strings, and comments. File retrieval can return complete files, line ranges, or named symbols with nearby declarations; batch retrieval handles up to 10 files. The free beta plan covers public GitHub repositories without signup, an API key, or installation. Enterprise deployment runs on customer infrastructure as a Docker image with a Kubernetes Helm chart. Private repositories can authenticate with SSH keys or HTTPS tokens.

Understand is a static analysis and code-comprehension tool from SciTools. It builds a cross-referenced model of source code without executing it, then helps users explore relationships through its Information Browser, call trees, dependency analysis, and visual graphs, including butterfly and control-flow views. It also provides metrics, CodeCheck, version comparison, APIs, a command-line interface, and AI chat. Supported languages include C/C++, C#, Fortran, Java, Python, Rust, VHDL, Visual Basic, and web languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, and XML. It runs on Windows 11, specified Linux distributions, and macOS Monterey or later; command-line automation, CI, and an official Docker image are also available. The VS Code extension is separately licensed. Local AI keeps code and prompts on the user's hardware, while cloud AI sends requests with code context to the selected provider. Offline use is supported with offline licensing. Pricing includes a free plan and paid subscriptions from $100/user/mo (annual).