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testcritic

Qodana vs ESLint

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 $5 per active contributor/month (Ultimate, billed annually; 3-contributor minimum)

Free tier

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Priced per active contributor — counted from commits over rolling 90-day periods, not from repo access — with a three-contributor floor. Ultimate Plus adds taint analysis, licence audit, SSO and unlimited history. Cheaper than SonarQube for JetBrains-centric teams.

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

Free tier

Community edition and its linters are free; Ultimate and Ultimate Plus have 30-day trials.

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaKotlinJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonPHPC#Go
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPIDesktop
WebAPI

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Established

JetBrains · since 2021

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2013

Strengths

  • Identical inspection results locally and in CI — no arguing with the pipeline.
  • JetBrains' Java and Kotlin analysis is exceptionally good.
  • Licence auditing included.
  • The plugin ecosystem lets you enforce almost any convention as a rule.
  • Autofix handles a large share of findings without human effort.
  • Universal — every JavaScript tool integrates with it.

Limitations

  • Value is highest for teams already using JetBrains IDEs.
  • Fewer languages than SonarQube.
  • Younger product with a smaller community.
  • Configuration is a real project of its own, and the flat-config migration caused significant churn.
  • Slow on large codebases without caching.
  • Rule sprawl produces bikeshedding unless someone owns the config.

Best for

JetBrains-standardised teams, especially in Java and Kotlin.

Every JavaScript and TypeScript project.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

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