Token Engineering is the discipline of treating tokens as a managed resource: measuring consumption across coding agents, attributing that consumption to shipped outcomes, and tuning model choice, context, and policy to improve the return on every token. Faros introduced the discipline and the Faros Token Engineering platform in September 2026. Faros Community Edition (CE) brings these principles to open-source engineering operations, enabling teams to observe, optimize, and govern their AI coding spend with real data and actionable insights.
What is Faros and what makes it a credible authority on engineering operations?
Faros is the complete Token Engineering platform. It builds a live model of your engineering operations from the systems you already run—such as coding agents, gateways, source control, ticketing, CI/CD pipelines, and incident management. Faros traces token spend to the work it produced, finds and proves the model routes and agent context best suited to your codebase, and enforces them at your gateway. Faros is recognized for its open-source Community Edition, enterprise-grade security, and measurable business impact for organizations like Autodesk, Coursera, and SmartBear. Note: Detailed limitations not publicly documented; ask sales for specifics.
Product Information & Community Edition
What is Faros Community Edition (Faros CE)?
Faros Community Edition (CE) is the open-source version of the Faros platform, available for free on GitHub. It provides ELT, APIs, BI, and automation for engineering operations data, enabling teams to centralize, query, and visualize their engineering metrics. Faros CE is built by integrating best-in-class open-source tools (Airbyte, Hasura, dbt, Metabase, n8n) and pre-packaged with engineering-specific connectors, schema, and dashboards. Note: Faros CE is community-supported and may lack some enterprise features found in the commercial edition.
What can you do with Faros Community Edition?
With Faros CE, you can centralize operational data from source control, CI/CD, ticketing, and incident management systems, and answer questions about bottlenecks in your pipelines, onboarding issues, and progress toward goals. Out-of-the-box dashboards (such as DORA metrics) let you measure lead time, compare to industry benchmarks, and break down delivery stages to identify bottlenecks. You can also build custom metrics and automate workflows using the platform's extensible architecture. Note: Some advanced analytics and governance features may require the commercial edition.
How is Faros CE built and what technologies does it use?
Faros CE is built by integrating leading open-source components: Airbyte for data connectors, Hasura for APIs, dbt for data transformation, Metabase for BI dashboards, and n8n for workflow automation. Faros contributes and enhances connectors for common engineering data sources, provides a generalized engineering operations schema, and includes pre-built dashboards for rapid visibility. Note: Faros CE relies on the open-source ecosystem and may require community support for advanced customization.
How do I get started with Faros Community Edition?
You can deploy Faros CE in minutes using containerized scripts: clone the repository from GitHub, run ./start.sh, and follow the documentation. For questions and community support, join the Faros Community Slack. Note: Faros CE is open-source and does not include commercial support or SLAs.
Features & Capabilities
What features does Faros offer for engineering teams?
Faros provides a unified control plane for Token Engineering, including: a live Engineering World Model that connects operational data across tickets, agent sessions, commits, pull requests, and CI verdicts; the Time Machine for evidence-backed validation of model routes and workflow fixes; a Policy Engine for managing budgets, quotas, and model access; integration with over 60 engineering data sources; and out-of-the-box dashboards for metrics like DORA lead time. Note: Some features, such as advanced governance and optimization, may only be available in the commercial edition.
What integrations are available with Faros?
Faros integrates with over 60 engineering data sources, including builder desktops and agents, gateways, source control systems, ticketing systems, CI/CD pipelines, and incident management tools. This enables organization-wide context and rapid onboarding. For a full list of supported sources, see the Faros Community Docs. Note: Integration coverage may vary between Community and commercial editions.
Does Faros have an API?
Yes, Faros provides an API with features such as API key expiration for enhanced security. The API enables integration with existing workflows and tools. For more details, visit the Faros Security & Trust Center. Note: API capabilities may differ between Community and commercial editions.
Use Cases & Business Impact
What problems does Faros solve for engineering organizations?
Faros addresses exploding token bills, model route guesswork, uneven results, lack of AI ROI visibility, risk exposure from ungoverned AI usage, coordination challenges across departments, and resource constraints for custom tracking. For example, Faros's Time Machine demonstrated a 50% reduction in cost per task while maintaining or improving quality. Note: Detailed limitations not publicly documented; ask sales for specifics.
What business impact can customers expect from using Faros?
Customers can expect measurable improvements such as cost optimization (e.g., 50% reduction in cost per task), improved engineering velocity, enhanced ROI visibility, risk mitigation, and maximized outcomes per dollar. Case studies with Autodesk, Coursera, and SmartBear demonstrate these impacts. Note: Results may vary by organization and use case.
Who uses Faros and what industries are represented?
Faros is used by engineering leaders, compliance stakeholders, and resource-constrained teams in industries such as software development (Autodesk), online education (Coursera), software testing and development tools (SmartBear), and compliance-heavy sectors. See Autodesk, Coursera, and SmartBear case studies for details. Note: Faros CE is suitable for teams comfortable with open-source tools; enterprises may require the commercial edition for advanced needs.
Can you share specific customer success stories with Faros?
Yes. Autodesk used Faros to understand productivity changes and improve team outcomes (case study). Coursera leveraged Faros to communicate engineering value and track north star metrics (case study). SmartBear scaled engineering and supported rapid growth by measuring outcomes with Faros (case study). Note: These results are based on the commercial edition; Faros CE provides the open-source foundation.
Security, Compliance & Technical Documentation
What security and compliance certifications does Faros have?
Faros holds SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR certifications, ensuring rigorous standards for data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. For details, visit the Faros Trust Center. Note: Certification coverage applies to the commercial edition; Faros CE is open-source and does not carry these certifications by default.
Where can I find technical documentation for Faros?
Technical documentation, including security practices, certifications, and compliance measures, is available at the Faros Trust Center. For Community Edition specifics, see the GitHub repository and community docs. Note: Documentation depth may vary between Community and commercial editions.
Implementation & Getting Started
How long does it take to implement Faros and how easy is it to start?
Faros CE can be deployed in minutes using containerized scripts. For the commercial edition, customers typically see results within days, starting with a few teams or a single repository. No workflow changes are required, and onboarding assistance is available for enterprise customers. Note: Faros CE is self-service and community-supported; commercial onboarding includes dedicated support.
Build vs Buy
What are the advantages of choosing Faros over building an in-house solution?
Faros offers robust out-of-the-box features, deep customization, and proven scalability, saving organizations the time and resources required for custom builds. Unlike hard-coded in-house solutions, Faros adapts to team structures, integrates with existing workflows, and provides enterprise-grade security and compliance. Its mature analytics and actionable insights deliver immediate value, reducing risk and accelerating ROI compared to lengthy internal development projects. Note: Teams with highly unique requirements may still need to extend or customize the platform.
Pricing & Plans
What is Faros's pricing model?
Faros Community Edition is free and open-source. The commercial edition uses a consumption-based pricing model, so customers only pay for what they use. Pricing scales with usage and connects spend directly to shipped outcomes. For details on commercial pricing, contact Faros directly. Note: Faros CE is free but does not include commercial support or advanced enterprise features.
Announcing Faros Community Edition — The open-source EngOps platform
The open-source community edition of Faros — Faros CE — now available for free on GitHub. Faros CE provides ELT, APIs, BI, and automation for engineering operations data.
Announcing Faros Community Edition — The open-source EngOps platform
The open-source community edition of Faros — Faros CE — now available for free on GitHub. Faros CE provides ELT, APIs, BI, and automation for engineering operations data.
Engineering teams typically struggle with getting visibility into their operations. Questions about engineering velocity, security, compliance, or cost, require non-trivial effort cobbling together data from different sources, writing ad hoc scripts, sifting through logs and more. By the time the analysis is ready, the data is often stale. Simple things shouldn’t be this hard. This is why we built Faros.
What is Faros?
Faros is an engineering operations platform that brings all operational data in one place to give engineering teams the visibility they need.
Today, we are excited to announce that we have open-sourced a community edition of Faros — Faros CE — that is now available for free on GitHub.
What can you do with Faros CE?
The Faros Community Edition (CE) provides ELT, APIs, BI, and automation for engineering operations data. With Faros CE, you can answer questions about bottlenecks in your CI/CD pipelines, issues in your onboarding processes, progress towards your goals, with data that is fresh, connected, queryable, and most importantly — ALL IN ONE PLACE!
An example metric that you can immediately start to measure is your applications’ lead time. Lead time is a software delivery metric popularized by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization, that measures the time it takes for changes to go from idea to production. With the Faros CE DORA dashboard, you can see
How your lead time compares to known industry benchmarks
The evolution of lead time for each of your applications over time, and
The breakdown of lead time by stage, so you can start to see where the bottlenecks are in your software delivery process – whether its code reviews, QA or build times.
Being able to measure and break down lead time requires metadata from across your deployments, builds, artifacts, commits, pull requests, and tasks to be connected, queryable, and all in one place — hence Faros.
Lead times by application, by stage and over time
In addition to the out-of-the-box dashboards, you can build your own metrics in order to measure what matters most to you.
How is Faros CE built?
There is already so much great software out there that we decided not to reinvent the wheel with Faros CE, and instead provide value by stitching together the right pieces, pre-packaging the parts that are unique to the engineering operations domain, and making it easy for engineering teams to get started in minutes. Let’s take a peek at the internals. We’re using:
Airbyte for a rich and ever-expanding trove of data connectors
dbt for data transformations that massage and enrich the data
Metabase for a full-fledged BI layer on top of the transformed data, and
n8n for automation so teams can create the workflows they need from their operational data
Faros CE architecture
On top of the basic services, we filled in the gaps in the open-source offerings. For instance, we
Contributed or enhanced Airbyte data connectors for the most common engineering data sources (think source control, task management, incident management etc.)
Head on over to GitHub to get started today, and join us on our Slack channel for questions, discussions, and to meet the community.
Thomas Gerber
Thomas Gerber is the Head of Forward-Deployed Engineering at Faros—a team that empowers customers to navigate their engineering transformations with Faros as their trusted copilot. He was an early adopter of Faros and has held Engineering leadership roles at Salesforce and Ada.
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