The microscope and the survey are not the same instrument.

NDepend is the deepest .NET-native analyser there is: custom CQLinq rules, 100+ metrics, hands-on exploration inside Visual Studio. Watchdog measures the same architectural core and draws the same pictures — a module dependency graph and a dependency-structure matrix, alongside Martin coupling, cycles, complexity, abstractness and its own emitted-IL read (Mono.Cecil) — plus a debt model that prices a fix against what not doing it costs per year.

The difference is where the graph comes from: NDepend reads compiled .NET assemblies, so its graph is bounded by that ecosystem; Watchdog builds it from a language-neutral code model, so the same graph, matrix and cycle detection apply to every language it models deeply. Around that it adds git and process mining, security and supply chain, domain-intent lenses and an ADR maturity ladder — none of which NDepend has an equivalent for.

CodeScene pioneered behavioural code analysis, and its ACE auto-refactoring and method-level X-Ray go deeper than we do. But the overlap runs almost entirely one way: hotspots, change coupling, ownership concentration and knowledge loss are Watchdog dimensions too — and where CodeScene attributes ownership from git blame, Watchdog uses decayed commit attribution, so a mechanical reformat cannot silently reassign a file's owner.

That churn signal drives the roadmap itself: the same fix ranks higher on code the team edits every week than on code nobody has opened in three years. The remediation split is open vs closed: CodeScene fixes inside its own ACE engine; Watchdog stays read-only, hands every finding to whatever agent you already run — then re-measures.