Qlty (formerly Code Climate Quality) vs SonarQube

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Teams that want a simple maintainability signal in pull requests.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.