Semgrep vs SonarQube

From $40 per contributor/month (indicative)

From €32 per year per 100k lines of code (Developer Edition, indicative)

The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot; paid tiers add the platform, supply chain and secrets.

Licensed by lines of code, which makes cost predictable but expensive on large monorepos. Branch and PR analysis requires a paid edition.

Open-source CLI is free and complete; hosted platform free for up to 10 contributors.

Community Build is free and self-hosted, covering the main languages without branch analysis.

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

• Custom rules are genuinely writable — you can encode your own security or architecture standards in an afternoon.
• Free CLI with a large community rule registry is immediately useful.
• Fast enough to run on every pull request without complaint.

• 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.

• Pattern matching without full dataflow misses some vulnerability classes.
• Community rule quality is uneven; expect to curate.
• Advanced dataflow and supply-chain features are paid only.

• 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 customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.