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Prior Art / Alternatives

If Kodiak doesn't suit your current needs, there are plenty of implementations of pull request (PR) automation and efficent branch updating and merging.

Name	Works With Branch Protection	Auto Merging	Auto Update Branches	Update Branches Efficiently	Open Source	Practice Dogfooding	Language
Kodiak	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	Python
Bors	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	Python
Homu	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	Python
Shipit	❌	✅	✅	❌	✅	❌	Ruby
Gullintanni	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	Elixir
Popuko	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	Go
Bors-ng	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	Elixir
Marge-bot	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	Python
Bulldozer	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅	❌	Go
Mergify	❌	✅	✅	❌	✅	✅	Python
Autorebase	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅	✅	TypeScript
Auto Merge	❌	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌	JavaScript
Merge when green	❌	✅	❌	❌	✅	✅	JavaScript
Always Be Closing	🤷‍	✅	✅	🤷‍	❌	🤷‍	🤷‍
Auto Merge	🤷‍	✅	🤷‍	🤷‍	❌	🤷‍	🤷‍
Ranger	✅ ‍	✅	❌ ‍	❌ ‍	❌	🤷‍	🤷‍

Explanations

Works With Branch Protection

• PR mergeability is determined by GitHub Branch Protection settings and app configuration
• doesn't require changing continuous integration (CI) tools
• doesn't create separate test branches for merging that would circumvent the GitHub PR workflow

Auto Merging

• automatically merges PR once up to date with master and all required statuses and checks pass

Auto Update Branches

• ensures branches are automatically updated to the latest version of master

Update Branches Efficiently

• an improvement upon Auto Update Branches where branches are only updated when necessary, as opposed to updating all branches any time their target branch (usually master) updates