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Codacy vs Qlty (formerly Code Climate Quality)

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

From $18 per developer/month (Team, billed annually; $21 monthly)

Free tier

From $20 per contributor/month (Pro; Enterprise $30)

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Per-developer pricing rather than lines of code, which suits small teams with large codebases. Team covers up to 30 developers and 100 private repos; beyond that Business is quote-based.

Priced per contributor. Free for K-12 and universities, 10% off for registered non-profits.

Free tier

Developer plan is free forever, and Team is free for open-source projects.

Free plan with unlimited contributors, 1,000 analysis minutes and 100 AI autofixes a month.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoPHPRubyKotlinSwift
RubyJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonPHPJavaGo

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Established

Codacy · since 2014

Established

Qlty Software (spun out of Code Climate) · since 2011

Strengths

  • 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.
  • Maintainability grading is easy to communicate to non-engineers.
  • Coverage and quality tracked together in one PR check.
  • Free for open source.

Limitations

  • Wrapping open-source linters means analysis depth depends on those tools.
  • Configuration across many languages becomes fiddly.
  • Less established than SonarQube in enterprise procurement.
  • Letter grades oversimplify and can drive the wrong behaviour.
  • The Code Climate to Qlty transition means older documentation, URLs and integration guides still say Code Climate.
  • Velocity, the companion engineering-metrics product, was sunset — do not buy expecting it.

Best for

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

Teams that want a simple maintainability signal in pull requests.

All of these integrate with: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, Jira.

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