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 very flexible and easy because you can store data on cloud."
"CI/CD and GitLab scanning are the most valuable features."
"GitLab is a solution for source code management, container registry, pipelines, testing, and deployment."
"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."
"We like that we can have an all-encompassing product and don't have to implement different solutions."
"It speeds up our development, it's faster, safer, and more convenient."
"Everything is easy to configure and easy to work with."
"It's a great toolbox where the CI/CD pipeline is the fundamental component, but there are so many other features that you can pull from, which makes it a very powerful tool. My current client is using AWS, and they can, of course, use AWS CodePipeline, but GitLab is much more mature than that, and it also gives you the freedom to decide to go to another platform or have a multi-cloud strategy and things like that. That freedom for me is also very valuable."
"The features of SonarQube that I find most valuable for identifying code smells are its comprehensive code analysis capabilities, which cover various aspects of code sustainability."
"When comparing other static code analysis tools, SonarQube has fewer false-positive issues being reported. They have a lot of support for different tech stacks. It covers the entire developer community which includes Salesforce or it could be the regular Java.net project. It has actually sufficed all the needs in one tool for static code analysis."
"I like that it covers most programming languages for source code review."
"I like that it helps us maintain our work quality and code security."
"SonarQube is a fantastic tool which saves us precious time."
"I like that it has a better dashboard compared to Clockwork. It's also stable."
"The fact that the solution does security scanning is valuable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is free."
"GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff."
"GitLab could improve by having more plugins and better user-friendliness."
"It would be really good if they integrated more features in application security."
"I've noticed an area for improvement in GitLab, particularly needing to go through many steps to push the code to the repository. Resolving that issue would make the product better. My team quickly fixed it by writing a small script, then double-clicking or enabling the script to take care of the issue. However, that quick fix was from my team and not the GitLab team, so in the next release, if an automatic deployment feature would be available in GitLab, then that would be good because, in Visual Studio, you can do that with just one click of a button."
"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 could consider introducing a code-scanning tool. Purchasing such tools from external markets can incur charges, which might not be favorable. Integrating these features into GitLab would streamline the pipeline and make it more convenient for users."
"It should be used by a larger number of people. They should raise awareness."
"We have only seen a couple of issues on Gitlab, which we use for building some of the applications."
"Their dashboarding is very limited. They can improve their dashboards for multiple areas, such as security review, maintainability, etc. They have all this information, so they should publish all this information on the dashboard so that the users can view the summary and then analyze it further. This is something that I would like to see in the next version."
"We had some issues scanning the master branch but when we upgraded to version 7.9 we noticed it does scan the master branch but we had to do a workaround for it to happen. This process could be improved in a future release."
"The reporting can be improved."
"I would like to see more options for security, beyond the basics like SQL injection."
"During the setup process, we only had one issue related to the number of available files. To perform the analysis, you have quite a lot of available file handles, so we had to increase that limit."
"Expression of common vulnerabilities and exposures is not always current."
"In terms of what can be improved, the areas that need more attention in the solution are its architecture and development."
"SonarQube can improve by scanning the internal library which currently it does not do. We are looking for a solution for this."
GitLab is ranked 7th in Application Security Tools with 70 reviews while SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security Tools with 108 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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