SonarQube vs Codacy

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

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

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

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

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

Free for open-source projects and small teams.

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

Established

Codacy · since 2014

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.

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