Codacy vs SonarQube

From $21 per user/month (indicative, Pro)

From €32 per year per 100k lines of code (Developer Edition, indicative)

Per-developer pricing rather than lines of code, which suits small teams with large codebases.

Licensed by lines of code, which makes cost predictable but expensive on large monorepos. Branch and PR analysis requires a paid edition.

Free for open-source projects and small teams.

Community Build is free and self-hosted, covering the main languages without branch analysis.

Established

Codacy · since 2014

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

• Per-developer pricing is cheaper than SonarQube for small teams on big repositories.
• Bundles quality and security scanning in one PR check.
• Very quick to set up — connect a repository and it works.

• Clean-as-you-code is the only quality-gate model that reliably works on legacy codebases.
• Very broad language coverage from one tool and one gate.
• Self-hosting satisfies organisations that cannot send source code externally.

• Wrapping open-source linters means analysis depth depends on those tools.
• Configuration across many languages becomes fiddly.
• Less established than SonarQube in enterprise procurement.

• Branch and pull-request analysis — the feature most teams actually need — is paid only.
• Default rule sets are noisy until tuned to the team.
• Self-hosted instances need real resources and maintenance.

Small and mid-sized teams wanting quality and security checks in PRs without running a server.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.