Qodana vs SonarQube

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

JetBrains · since 2021

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

• Identical inspection results locally and in CI — no arguing with the pipeline.
• JetBrains' Java and Kotlin analysis is exceptionally good.
• Licence auditing included.

• 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.

• Value is highest for teams already using JetBrains IDEs.
• Fewer languages than SonarQube.
• Younger product with a smaller community.

• 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.

JetBrains-standardised teams, especially in Java and Kotlin.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.