SonarQube vs Biome

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

Free and open source

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

Community Build is free and self-hosted; SonarQube Cloud is free for public projects and for private projects up to 50k lines of code.

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Sonar · since 2007

Widely used

Biome / OSS community · since 2023

• 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.

• Dramatically faster than ESLint plus Prettier, which matters on pre-commit hooks.
• One binary and one config replaces two toolchains.
• Very good ESLint rule migration tooling.

• 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.

• Rule coverage does not yet match ESLint's plugin ecosystem.
• No support for framework-specific plugin ecosystems at ESLint's depth.
• Young project, so expect churn.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.

New JavaScript projects and teams frustrated by lint performance.