Codacy vs SonarQube

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Established

Codacy · since 2014

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.