Ruff vs Codacy
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
Free and open source
Open sourceFrom $18 per developer/month (Team, billed annually; $21 monthly)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
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 tier
Everything, self-hosted
Developer plan is free forever, and Team is free for open-source projects.
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Astral · since 2022
Established
Codacy · since 2014
Strengths
- 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.
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
- Wrapping open-source linters means analysis depth depends on those tools.
- Configuration across many languages becomes fiddly.
- Less established than SonarQube in enterprise procurement.
Best for
Every Python project.
Small and mid-sized teams wanting quality and security checks in PRs without running a server.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.