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Biome vs SonarQube

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

From $34 per month (SonarQube Cloud Team, up to 100k lines of code)

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

SonarQube Cloud Team starts at $34/month for 100k lines of code and scales in LOC increments. Self-managed SonarQube Server (Developer, Enterprise, Data Center) is licensed per instance per year by lines of code, and SonarSource no longer publishes those figures — you have to ask sales. Branch and PR analysis requires a paid edition either way.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Community Build is free and self-hosted; SonarQube Cloud is free for public projects and for private projects up to 50k lines of code.

Open source

MIT

LGPL-3.0 (Community Build)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScript
JavaJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonC#GoPHPRubyKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPIDesktop

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Biome / OSS community · since 2023

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

Strengths

  • 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.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • 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.

Best for

New JavaScript projects and teams frustrated by lint performance.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.

All of these integrate with: VS Code, IntelliJ.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.