SAFe Agile vs Agile - what are the differences? Pros and cons?

[Crystal M]

Hi there me again! Working with a new team and we are getting ready to ramp up and use SAFe Agile vs the waterfall like environment that is currently being used. What is your experience with using SAFe Agile and what are the pros and cons you may have observed? 

Thanks in advance !! 

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_]

They are not directly comparable.

Agile is a set of guidelines that give you a time-boxed iterative approach to developing things. 

SAFe is the "Scaled Agile Framework".  This is easiest to think of as one approach to handling multiple Agile teams.

The Agile framework is all about one single team working together to develop something.  In real life, organisations have many teams, often with interactions (for example, team A is relying on Team B to build something before they can commence on one of their stories).  Agile says nothing about how Team A and Team B should interact, or how people can plan and reprioritise across all the teams.  SAFe is one approach to getting a load of Agile teams to work (and report, and plan) together.

In a perfect SAFe world, you could implement SAFe on a load of Agile teams without changing anything they do, other than adding the required SAFe get-togethers.