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 scales well."
"The scalability is good."
"The solution is stable."
"The merging feature makes it easy later on for the deployment."
"I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently."
"It is scalable."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are ease of use and highly intuitive UI and performance."
"The dashboard and interface make it easy to use."
"This has improved our organization because it has helped to find Security Vulnerabilities."
"It is very good at identifying technical debt."
"The product is simple."
"Using SonarQube benefits us because we are able to avoid the inclusion of malware in our applications."
"SonarQube is one of the more popular solutions because it supports 29 languages."
"If you want to have your code scanned and timed then this is a good tool."
"It's enabled us to improve software quality and help us to disseminate best practices."
"The initial setup is simple. It requires some security, but it's simple."
"We do face issues in our company when we run out of disk space."
"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."
"Their RBAC is role-based access, which is fine but not very good."
"I don't really like the new Kubernetes integration because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment."
"GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff."
"The documentation is confusing."
"It can be free for commercial use."
"We'd like to see better integration with the Atlassian ecosystem."
"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."
"The reporting can be improved."
"Code security scanning could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"SonarQube needs to improve its support model. They do not work 24/7, and they do not provide weekend support in case things go wrong. They only have a standard 8:00 am to 5:00 pm support model in which you have to raise a support ticket and wait. The support model is not effective for premium customers."
"In terms of what can be improved, the areas that need more attention in the solution are its architecture and development."
"There is no automation. You need to put the code there and test. You then pull the results and put them back in the development environment. There is no integration with the development environment. We would like it to be integrated with our development environment, which is basically the CI/CD pipeline or the IDE that we have."
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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