How Reviewpad Protect Works

Reviewpad is simpler, faster and more secure than GitHub Actions.
Reviewpad is a GitHub App that automatically reacts to events on your repositories and runs a set of actions to enforce your code review policies based on a YML configuration file. This YAML file is defined in a domain specific language designed specifically for this purpose and comes with a large set of pre-defined rules that you can use to enforce your code review policies.
GitHub Actions is a general CI/CD platform where you need to understand the GitHub Actions syntax, the events that are relevant to your workflows and write your own code to enforce your code review policies. You can use some existing GitHub Actions to get some of Reviewpad's functionalities, but they are usually single purpose and you will need to combine and maintain them while Reviewpad provides them out-of-the box.
We also found Reviewpad to be ~10x faster and cheaper than GitHub Actions.

Reviewpad is much more flexible and powerful than CODEOWNERS since you can control not only the reviewers but also the mergeability of the PRs.
Even when it comes to reviewer assignment, Reviewpad is more powerful than CODEOWNERS. While CODEOWNERS allows you to define reviewers based on changes to file paths, in Reviewpad you can define dynamic reviewers based on other parameters such as the PR author, creation time, labels, status of other CI checks and more.
Reviewpad is also simpler to use that CODEOWNERS which requires you to setup GitHub teams and permissions in your GitHub organization to work properly.

Reviewpad is more powerful and transparent to use than GitHub branch protection rules.
Reviewpad follows a GitOps approach where you define your code review policies in a YAML file that is versioned in your repository. This means that you can easily see the code review policies that are in place for a given repository and branch. Branch protection rules are defined in the GitHub UI and do not offer the level of customization that Reviewpad offers.
For example, you can define a rule in Reviewpad to block a PR from being merged based on its size. This is not possible with GitHub branch protection rules.
Finally, it is hard to reuse a set of branch protection rules across multiple repositories while in Reviewpad you simply need to extend a YAML file.

Reviewpad should be seen as part of your CI system. While you might already have CI tools to build and test your code, Reviewpad is the tool that will enforce your code review policies.
It can be used to understand which additional CI checks should be triggered and also which CI checks are a requirement to mergeability based on the code review policies that you want to enforce.

You could build your own GitHub Action to enforce your code review policies. However, this requires a lot of effort and maintenance. Reviewpad is a GitHub App that is already built and maintained by us. You simply need to install it and configure it to enforce your code review policies.
You might also be concerned about the security of a tool you did not build. Reviewpad's core not only is open source so you can review the code but we're also undergoing a SOC-2 Type-2 audit to ensure that we follow the best security practices.