DeepWiki for Private Repos: Your Options in 2026

We looked at every way to get a DeepWiki-style wiki for a private repo, and there are three. Public DeepWiki is free for public repositories only, so for private code you either use a Devin account, run an open-source wiki generator on your own machines, or use a hosted tool that reads the repo through a GitHub App.

We checked prices and features on each vendor's own page on 6 October 2026. We also build repowise, which is one row in this table, so read that row knowing who wrote it.

DeepWiki and private repos today

Most of us met DeepWiki through the URL trick: you replace github.com with deepwiki.com in a repo link, and a generated wiki with diagrams and a chat box appears. Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent, runs it, and it also runs a public MCP server at mcp.deepwiki.com with three tools (read_wiki_structure, read_wiki_contents, ask_question). MCP is the Model Context Protocol, the standard way a coding agent like Claude Code or Cursor calls an outside tool. That server needs no login, and it only covers public repositories.

The private route goes through Devin. Cognition's own help article says to sign up for a Devin account and add your repos, and once they have been indexed "the wikis will be accessible for free". Starting Devin sessions on top of that needs a paid plan. If you want an agent to read the private wiki, the DeepWiki MCP docs send you to a different server, the authenticated Devin MCP server at mcp.devin.ai, which takes a Devin API key.

I went looking for two more things and could not find either one documented, which matters if your team plans to depend on the wiki:

• Cognition does not publish how often a private wiki refreshes. For public repos, guides that quote DeepWiki's FAQ say a wiki refreshes automatically (weekly) only when the repo carries the DeepWiki badge in its README, and I found no equivalent statement for private wikis.
• The help center article on wiki export says, as of today, "it is not possible to export the wiki contents". If you want the docs in your own repo or your own docs site, plan around that.

Pricing changed in April 2026, when Cognition replaced the old Core and Team plans with Free, Pro ($20/month), Max ($200/month), a usage-based Teams plan with an $80/month minimum, and custom Enterprise. The announcement says DeepWiki stays free with the existing generation experience, and that new premium wiki options using stronger models are billed by usage. VPC deployment sits in Enterprise, so if your security team needs the processing inside your own cloud, that means talking to sales because no self-serve plan includes it.

If your team already pays for Devin and your security review has approved Cognition as a processor, the private wiki is close to free and the generated pages are good to read. Most of the decision comes down to whether you are in that situation.

Three questions that decide it

Engineers like to compare feature tables, and I am no exception, but these three questions settle more than the tables do.

Where the code is allowed to go

If code cannot leave your network, every hosted option is out, including DeepWiki, Google's Code Wiki and hosted repowise. You are then choosing between self-hosted tools, and the next thing to check is which model each one calls. A self-hosted wiki generator that sends every file to a hosted model API is only half self-hosted. deepwiki-open and repowise can both run against a local model through Ollama, and repowise can also build its graph, git history and health data with no model at all.

How stale the docs can get

Generated documentation that describes last quarter's architecture is worse than no documentation, because people trust it the same way they trust a green build. Look for a tool that re-indexes on push, or that at least tells you how old each page is. Manual regeneration works for a small repo that changes slowly, but it falls apart on a monorepo with twenty merges a day.

Who reads the wiki

In 2026 the main reader of codebase documentation is often a coding agent, and the new hire comes second. If your agents can query the wiki over MCP, they stop spending tokens grepping for structure they could have looked up. Check whether the private-repo route gives you an MCP endpoint, and whether that endpoint works from wherever you run the agent: a local Claude Code session, or Claude.ai in the browser, which cannot reach a server on your laptop.

Self-hosted options

deepwiki-open (AsyncFuncAI, MIT, about 18,000 GitHub stars) is the best-known open re-implementation of DeepWiki. You run it with Docker, paste a GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket URL, and add an access token for private repos. It supports Google Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Azure OpenAI and local Ollama models, and it generates a wiki with diagrams and a chat over it. It does not keep the wiki current for you, so you regenerate when the code moves. The English README now mostly points to a successor desktop app called Grok-Wiki, and the full setup instructions live in the translated READMEs and the repo's docs files.

OpenDeepWiki (AIDotNet, MIT, about 3,600 stars) is a C# and TypeScript platform with an admin console, users and roles, GitHub App imports, and background workers for scheduled incremental updates. It serves MCP endpoints per repository. Of the open options it behaves most like a full platform, which also makes it the most work to operate.

OpenWiki (LangChain, MIT, about 17,000 stars) runs inside the coding agent you already use (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others), uses that agent's model session, and writes a Markdown wiki into an openwiki/ folder in your repo. It tracks which facts came from which source lines, so an update can focus on what changed. Because the wiki is plain files you own, the export problem disappears. The trade-off is that generation spends your agent's tokens, and the wiki describes what the agent read, with no parsed dependency graph behind it.

repowise (AGPL-3.0) is what we work on, and it is the option for people who also want the dependency graph and git history next to the wiki. repowise init parses the code into a dependency graph, reads the git history for hotspots (files that change often and are complex), ownership and files that change together, and writes a wiki on top. It runs without an API key, a model only writes the prose pages if you give it one, and Ollama works. It writes an .mcp.json so Claude Code, Cursor and other agents can query it locally. It is weaker in two places: the prose pages are less narrative than DeepWiki's, and the open-source version has no polished multi-user admin console.

Choosing a hosted tool

Plenty of teams are allowed to send code to a vendor and mostly want to know what happens to it afterwards. Before you pick any hosted wiki, read its data handling page for four things: how it gets access (an OAuth token with write scope, or a read-only GitHub App), whether the clone is kept, which model providers see code excerpts, and whether the stored output (pages, graph, embeddings) is separated per account.

For hosted repowise, those answers are on the data handling page: a read-only GitHub App, a clone in a short-lived container that is deleted at the end of every run, raw source not kept, and model features (AI-written pages, chat) sending excerpts to OpenAI or Google Gemini through business API accounts. The graph, git analysis, health and dead-code scans call no model at all. Pro re-indexes about 30 seconds after each push and gives each repo an MCP address you can add to Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, or as a connector in Claude.ai. That last part is why I would pick hosted over self-hosted for many small teams, because a local MCP server cannot be reached from a chat in the browser or on your phone.

My picks by situation

• If you already pay for Devin and Cognition is an approved processor, use the private DeepWiki that comes with it, and accept the refresh and export unknowns.
• If code cannot leave your network, self-host. Pick OpenWiki if you want docs as files in the repo and are happy to spend agent tokens, OpenDeepWiki if you want a multi-user platform, and repowise if you also want the dependency graph, git history, health signals and agent access without a model bill.
• If code can leave and you want it to stay current with no ops work, use a hosted tool that re-indexes on push. I would put hosted repowise there, but compare it with DeepWiki on one of your own repos before deciding.

For a broader list, see DeepWiki alternatives in 2026, and for the one-tool comparison, repowise vs DeepWiki and the DeepWiki alternative page.

How we checked

On 6 October 2026 we read each vendor's own pricing page, docs and help center, and each open-source project's README and repository metadata on GitHub (stars, license, last push). We did not sign up for a paid Devin plan, so the Devin rows describe what Cognition documents, and we did not observe them on a private repo. Star counts move daily and are rounded.

If something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it, which is the same thing I would ask of any wiki.