SonarQube vs Biome

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

Free and open source

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

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

Widely used

Biome / OSS community · since 2023

• 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.

• Dramatically faster than ESLint plus Prettier, which matters on pre-commit hooks.
• One binary and one config replaces two toolchains.
• Very good ESLint rule migration tooling.

• 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.

• Rule coverage does not yet match ESLint's plugin ecosystem.
• No support for framework-specific plugin ecosystems at ESLint's depth.
• Young project, so expect churn.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.

New JavaScript projects and teams frustrated by lint performance.