Qodana vs SonarQube

From $8 per user/month (indicative, Ultimate)

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

Priced per active contributor; cheaper than SonarQube for JetBrains-centric teams.

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

Community linters are free; Ultimate has a trial.

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

Established

JetBrains · since 2021

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

• Identical inspection results locally and in CI — no arguing with the pipeline.
• JetBrains' Java and Kotlin analysis is exceptionally good.
• Licence auditing included.

• 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.

• Value is highest for teams already using JetBrains IDEs.
• Fewer languages than SonarQube.
• Younger product with a smaller community.

• 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.

JetBrains-standardised teams, especially in Java and Kotlin.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.