SonarQube vs ESLint

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

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2013

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Polyglot organisations that need one quality gate across every repository.

Every JavaScript and TypeScript project.