adr-tools alternative
An adr-tools alternative? Read this first.
If you searched for this, you're probably writing ADRs by hand and wondering what else is out there. The honest answer: WhyChose isn't a drop-in replacement for adr-tools — it's the layer above it. Here's the difference, and when each one earns its keep.
Why people look for an adr-tools alternative
- It's a writing tool, not a thinking tool.
adr new "Use Postgres"creates the file; the contents still come out of your head, six months after the actual decision was made. The reasoning is already cold by then — usually buried in a Slack thread or a ChatGPT conversation. - The folder goes stale within months. Most teams ship 30–80 durable decisions a quarter. They write five into
/doc/decisions/, the rest live in tickets and chat. Six months in, the ADR folder is a misleading sample, not a record. - No release since 2018. The npryce CLI works fine — it's a 200-line bash script — but the ecosystem stalled. Nothing is wrong with that; it just means people are looking for whether anything new in the space is worth their attention.
How WhyChose is different
WhyChose isn't a tool you reach for when you sit down to write a decision. It's a tool you point at the decisions you already made — in your ChatGPT and Claude conversation history. Paste your export JSON; get back a structured log of every "we should pick X over Y" you reasoned through with AI assistance, with the original chat snippet attached and the rejected alternatives preserved. That output looks a lot like an ADR — five sections, status, context, alternatives, decision, consequences — but you didn't have to remember to write it. The act of thinking with the model already produced the input; we just lift the structure out of it.
For an active project, that means: keep using adr-tools (or a Markdown template you copy-paste) for new decisions you're making consciously. Run WhyChose once a quarter against your chat export to catch the 25–40 decisions you made in passing and never wrote up. The two are complementary. The output formats are compatible enough that a WhyChose record can be promoted to a manually-edited ADR with one paste.
Feature comparison
| adr-tools | WhyChose | |
|---|---|---|
| Captures decisions you're actively making | ✓ (you write them) | — |
| Captures decisions you already made in chat | — | ✓ (extracted from export) |
| Writing format | Nygard 5-section Markdown | Nygard-shaped record + original snippet + alternatives |
| Indexing / supersedes-tracking | ✓ (CLI commands) | — |
| Source-of-record | /doc/decisions/*.md in repo | Searchable log + Markdown export |
| Team share | Whoever has repo access | Private share-link |
| Pricing | Free, MIT | Free tier (1 export); Pro $9/mo |
| Maintained | Stalled since 2018, but stable | Active; v1 launching 2026 |
When adr-tools is still the right choice
If your team is committed to writing ADRs at decision time — meaning you actually pause, write the file, get it reviewed, and merge it as part of the PR that implements the decision — adr-tools is the right tool, and WhyChose has nothing to add. Same answer if your decisions don't happen in AI chat (you're a security team that pair-programs verbally; you're a small team that still does whiteboard sessions). adr-tools is also the answer when you want a zero-dependency, in-repo tool with no external service involved at all.
WhyChose is for a different cohort: senior engineers and solo CTOs who already use ChatGPT and Claude as their primary thinking-out-loud surface, who shipped 100+ decisions through that channel over the last year, and who don't have an existing ADR habit to defend. If that's you, WhyChose is what catches the work the writing-tool was never going to capture. If it isn't, stick with adr-tools — it's good, and it's free.
Honest summary
- adr-tools = writing-time tool for decisions you're actively making. Use it when you've already built the habit.
- WhyChose = extraction-time tool for decisions you already made in chat and never wrote up. Use it once per quarter against your export.
- Best together: adr-tools for the next 30 decisions, WhyChose for the last 300.
Try WhyChose
Free tier covers your first export, up to 50 extracted decisions. No credit card. The extractor itself is open source — read the source before you upload anything.