Codacy vs Ruff
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 tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat 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.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Developer plan is free forever, and Team is free for open-source projects.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Codacy · since 2014
Category standard
Astral · since 2022
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.
- Replaces Flake8, isort, Black, pyupgrade and more with a single fast binary.
- Fast enough to run on every keystroke in the editor.
- Straightforward migration from existing Flake8 configurations.
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.
- Not every niche Flake8 plugin rule has been ported.
- Type checking is a separate concern — you still need mypy or ty.
- Rapid release cadence occasionally changes behaviour.
Best for
Small and mid-sized teams wanting quality and security checks in PRs without running a server.
Every Python project.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.