BMAD-METHOD is MIT-licensed and free.
That is a stronger position than ours.
BMAD-METHOD gives you agent definitions, workflow scripts and document templates you install into a project, under an MIT license — fork it, change it, ship it commercially, never ask anyone. A $99/mo subscription has to justify itself against that, in specifics. Here is the attempt, including the part where BMAD wins.
What BMAD-METHOD genuinely does well
Written from BMAD's own description and from independent reviews of it, not from our marketing.
Where BMAD wins outright
- MIT license. Not merely free — permanently yours. Fork it, modify it, build a product on it. No subscription can beat that on ownership.
- The planning workflow is its strongest idea. Distinct agent roles hand work to each other in sequence instead of one assistant improvising the whole project.
- It installs into the project and runs through the assistant you already use — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI. No new surface to learn.
- Document templates make the process legible. The artefacts are inspectable, diffable, and reviewable by a human.
- An active community that publishes real usage patterns, which is how most people actually learn a method.
What it leaves to you
- The documents ship empty. The method is supplied; the content is your job.
- The roles are software-project roles. Non-engineering work has no first-class place in them.
- Learning the ceremony is a real cost, paid in your time rather than in dollars.
- Keeping a fork current with upstream is manual, and diverges further the more you customize.
BMAD gives you the process. Brainfile gives you the rules the process runs on.
BMAD-METHOD is a method: roles, hand-offs, documents. It is genuinely good at making an AI project proceed in a defined order rather than as one long improvisation. What it does not do — because it is not trying to — is tell the assistant how to behave when a check cannot run, when a claim is unverified, or when the cheapest path to a green result is to quietly narrow what is being checked.
Those are the rules Brainfile ships: verification discipline, failure-class rules, refusal conditions, and 15 role packs for people whose work is not a software project. They were not designed in the abstract. They were written by running a system unattended, watching it report success it had not earned, and hardening each failure into a rule.
The comparison, without the adjectives
| Dimension | BMAD-METHOD | Brainfile |
|---|---|---|
| Price and license | Free, MIT — permanently yours | $99/mo · 30-day free trial, no card |
| What it supplies | Agent definitions, workflow scripts, document templates | Written operating rules plus 15 role packs |
| Who fills in the content | You do | Already written; you edit if you disagree |
| Role model | Software project roles: PM, architect, developer, QA | Business roles: consultant, lawyer, accountant, marketer, operator |
| What it governs | How a project is planned and handed between agents | How the assistant verifies, reports and refuses |
| Staying current | You reconcile your fork with upstream | Cloud pull; keeping it current is the product |
| Review of your setup | Community | Optional one-time AI-Ops audit, $249 |
| Cost of adoption | Your time, learning the method | Your money; the method is already decided |
Ask which half of the problem you have
Almost everyone comparing these two has one of two problems, and they have opposite answers.
Take BMAD-METHOD if…
- Your work is a software project with a plan, a build and a review.
- You have opinions about how it should run and want to encode them.
- Ownership matters more than time — MIT means nobody can take it back.
- You would rather spend an evening learning a method than $99 a month.
Take Brainfile if…
- Your work is not a software project and the role names do not describe you.
- You want rules that already exist rather than documents to fill in.
- You want the upkeep to be somebody else's job as the tooling changes.
- You would rather judge a written artefact than evaluate a method.
Read our actual operating file before you decide
Every claim on this page is checkable in one click. BMAD-METHOD lets you read every line of its repository before you install it — that is one of the best things about it, and we are not going to ask you to trust us with less. The operating file that runs our own system is published in full, sanitized, with no email gate and no signup.
If the writing in that file is not obviously better than what you would write in an afternoon, then BMAD-METHOD is your answer and you should stop reading here. That is the whole test.
FAQ
Try it against BMAD-METHOD for 30 days
Start free for 30 days — no card. Keep BMAD-METHOD installed while you compare; nothing here asks you to remove it. If our operating rules do not out-perform what you already have, cancel and you have lost nothing but a pull command.
30-day money-back guarantee. Team and enterprise setups: reach out.