We compared SonarQube and GitLab based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
SonarQube and GitLab are both praised for their reasonable pricing, flexibility in licensing, and positive return on investment. SonarQube stands out with its comprehensive code quality features, user-friendly interface, and prompt customer support. Meanwhile, GitLab excels in robust version control, CI/CD pipelines, and collaboration tools, with users highlighting its intuitive interface and strong community support. Areas for improvement include enhancing analysis speed and user interface for SonarQube, as well as improving performance and project management features for GitLab.
Features: SonarQube stands out with features such as support for multiple languages, integration with DevOps pipelines, and accurate vulnerability detection. Meanwhile, GitLab impresses users with its robust version control capabilities, efficient CI/CD pipelines, and strong integration with other development tools.
Pricing and ROI: Regarding setup cost, SonarQube is described as straightforward and easy, with users appreciating its simplicity. On the other hand, GitLab's setup cost is also reported to be easy and straightforward, but no additional details are provided., SonarQube has been highly praised for its ability to improve code quality, detect vulnerabilities, and enhance project efficiency, resulting in cost savings and increased productivity. Similarly, GitLab has also yielded positive returns, satisfying users and proving to be a valuable investment.
Room for Improvement: SonarQube may benefit from improvements in analysis speed, user interface navigation, setup instructions, documentation clarity, occasional performance issues, and integration options. GitLab could enhance its user interface, performance, project management features, code review process, and navigation intuitiveness.
Deployment and customer support: User feedback on SonarQube indicated varying durations for implementation. Some users took 3 months for deployment and 1 week for setup, while others took 1 week for both. In contrast, user feedback on GitLab varied extensively in terms of deployment and setup durations., SonarQube's customer service is praised for its prompt and knowledgeable assistance, while GitLab is commended for consistently providing effective troubleshooting and helpful guidance. GitLab also offers detailed documentation and a strong community for collaboration and problem-solving.
The summary above is based on 84 interviews we conducted recently with SonarQube and GitLab users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It is scalable."
"I like that it's easy to deploy our services over GitLab. The customer support is also good with a really active community. You have a lot of support that you can get online with your stack. That is probably one of the benefits of using GitLab. It's also really fast."
"GitLab offers a good interface for doing code reviews between two colleagues."
"The SaaS setup is impressive, and it has DAST solutioning."
"The code merging capability is something that we use very frequently."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its convenience. I am able to trace back most of my changes up to a far distance in time and it helps me to analyze and see the older version of the code."
"It is very useful for reviews. We are using branch merging operations and full reset operations. It is also very useful for merging our code and tracking another branch. The graph diagrams of Git are very useful. Its interface is straightforward and not too complex for us."
"It speeds up our development, it's faster, safer, and more convenient."
"It provides the security that is required from a solution for financial businesses."
"SonarQube is useful for controlling all of our Azure task tracking and scanning."
"This solution has the capability to analyze source code in almost all the languages in the market."
"We've configured it to run on each commit, providing feedback on our software quality. ]"
"The good thing with SonarQube is it covers a lot of issues, it's a very robust framework."
"The most valuable feature of SonarQube I have found to be the configuration that has allowed us to can make adjusts to the demands of the code review. It gives a specified classification regarding the skill, prioritization, and it is easy for me to review and make my code."
"My focus is mainly on the DevOps pipeline side of things, and from my perspective, the ease of use and configuration is valuable. It is pretty straightforward to take a deployment pipeline or CI/CD pipeline and integrate SonarQube into it."
"This solution is simple to use and can be quickly deployed."
"As GitLab is not perfect, what needs improvement in the solution is the Wiki feature of the groups or the repertories because currently, it's not searchable by default. You'll need an indexing service such as Elasticsearch to make it searchable, and that requires too much work, so for me, it's the main feature that should be improved in GitLab. In the next version of the solution, from the top of my head, the documentation could be improved. Besides the Wiki, it would be good if there's documentation that would be automatically generated based on the code repository. In other words, there should be some tutorials from GitLab for developers in the next release."
"GitLab's Windows version is yet not available and having this would be an improvement."
"This solution could be improved by adding modifications such as slack notifications."
"I would like to see better integration with project management tools such as Jira."
"GitLab can improve by integrating with more tools, such as servers with Docker."
"The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features."
"Merge conflicts and repository maintenance could improve. If there is someone new to the system they would not know if there is a conflict."
"Reporting could be improved."
"The time it took for me to do the whole process was approximately two hours because I had to download, read the documentation, and do the configurations."
"After scanning our code and generating a report, it would be helpful if SonarQube could also generate a solution to fix vulnerabilities in the report."
"We called support and complained but have not received any information as we use the free version. We had to fix it on our own and could not escalate it to the tool's developer."
"The product's user documentation can be vastly improved."
"Although it has Sonar built into it, it is still lacking. Customization features of identifying a particular attack still need to be worked on. To give you an example: if we want to scan and do a false positive analysis, those types of features are missing. If we want to rescan something from a particular point that is a feature that is also missing. It’s in our queue. That will hopefully save a lot of time."
"Expression of common vulnerabilities and exposures is not always current."
"The scanning part could be improved in SonarQube. We have used Coverity for scanning, and we have the critical issues reported by Coverity. When we used SonarQube for scanning and looked at the results, it seems that some of them have incorrect input. This part can be improved for C and C++ languages."
"We're in the process of figuring out how to automate the workflow for QA audit controls on it. I think that's perhaps an area that we could use some buffing. We're a Kubernetes shop, so there are some things that aren't direct fits, which we're struggling with on the component Docker side. But nothing major."
GitLab is ranked 7th in Application Security Tools with 70 reviews while SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security Tools with 110 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while SonarQube is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonarQube writes "Easy to integrate and has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, Tekton and TeamCity, whereas SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx One, SonarCloud, Coverity, Veracode and Klocwork. See our GitLab vs. SonarQube report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors and best Application Security Testing (AST) vendors.
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