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Coverity vs Fortify on Demand vs SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Coverity is 7.5%, up from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortify on Demand is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) is 24.9%, down from 27.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Md. Shahriar Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers impressive reporting features with user-friendliness and high scalability
The solution can be easily setup but requires heavy integration due to the multiple types of port and programming languages involved. Comparing the resource requirements of the solution I would say it can be installed effortlessly. I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. A professional needs some pre-acquired knowledge to manage Coverity's deployment process, but the local solution partners provide support well enough for trouble-free deployment. The overall deployment process of Coverity took around two and a half hours in our organization. The deployment duration depends upon the operating system and resources including high-end RAM and CPU processors.
Jonathan Steyn - PeerSpot reviewer
Source code analyzer, FPR file generation, reduction of false positives and generates compliance reports, for in-depth analysis
Not challenges with the product itself. The product is very reliable. It does have a steep learning curve. But, again, one thing that Fortify or OpenText does very well is training. There are a lot of free resources and training in the community forums, free training as well as commercial training where users can train on how to use the back-end systems and the scanning engines and how to use command-line arguments because some of the procedures or some of the tools do require a bit of a learning curve. That's the only challenge I've really seen for customers because you have to learn how to use the tool effectively. But Fortify has, in fact, improved its user interface and the way users engage the dashboards and the interfaces. It is intuitive. It's easy to understand. But in some regards, the cybersecurity specialist or AppSec would need a bit of training to engage the user interface and to understand how it functions. But from the point of the reliability index and how powerful the tool is, there's no challenge there. But it's just from a learning perspective; users might need a bit more skill to use the tool. The user interface isn't that tedious. It's not that difficult to understand. When I initially learned how to use the interfaces, I was able to master it within a week and was able to use it quite effectively. So training is required. All skills are needed to learn how to use the tool. I would like to see more enhancements in the dashboards. Dashboards are available. They do need some configuration and settings. But I would like to see more business intelligence capabilities within the tool. It's not particularly a cybersecurity function, but, for instance, business impact analysis or other features where you can actually use business intelligence capabilities within your security tool. That would be remarkable because not only do you have a cybersecurity tool, but you also have a tool that can give you business impact analysis and some other measurements. A bit more intelligence in terms of that from a cybersecurity perspective would be remarkable.
Wang Dayong - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to integrate and has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages
The product provides false reports sometimes. It also fails to understand the context of the code. It reports that a line of code has issues without considering its relation with the previous line. The product should improve the report quality. While it asks us to improve the code quality, it would be good if it also suggests how to improve the quality.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The product has deeper scanning capabilities."
"The solution has improved our code quality and security very well."
"It has the lowest false positives."
"Coverity is scalable."
"We were very comfortable with the initial setup."
"Considering the analysis part and the benchmarking process involving the product that my company carried out, the solution is good for finding bugs and violations"
"The features I find most valuable is that our entire company can publish the analysis results into our central space."
"The most valuable feature is that there were not a whole lot of false positives, at least on the codebases that I looked at."
"Almost all the features are good. This solution has simplified designing and architecting for our solutions. We were early adopters of microservices. Their documentation is good. You don't need to put in much effort in setting it up and learning stuff from scratch and start using it. The learning curve is not too much."
"The UL is easy to use compared to that of other tools, and it is highly reliable. The findings provide a lower number of false positives."
"Micro Focus WebInspect and Fortify code analysis tools are fully integrated with SSC portals and can instantly register to error tracking systems, like TFS and JIRA."
"The most valuable features of Micro Focus Fortify on Demand have been SAT analysis and application security."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to submit your code and have it run in the background. Then, if something comes up that is more specific, you have the security analyst who can jump in and help, if needed."
"It helps deploy and track changes easily as per time-to-time market upgrades."
"It improves future security scans."
"There is not only one specific feature that we find valuable. The idea is to integrate the solution in DevSecOps which we were able to do."
"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."
"It assists during the development with SonarLint and helps the developer to change his approach or rather improve his coding pattern or style. That's one advantage I've seen. Another advantage is that we can customize the rules."
"It is a good deal compared to all other tools on the market."
"The solution can verify vulnerabilities, code smells, and hotspots. It makes the software more secure and it helps make a junior or novice developer sharper."
"It's a great product. If you are in a hurry and just want to focus on the functional requirements of any kind of project, SonarQube is highly helpful. It enables the developers to code securely. SonarQube has a Community edition, which is open source and free. There are also three proprietary or paid versions: Enterprise edition, Data Center edition, and Developer edition."
"The static code analysis of the solution is the most important aspect for us. When it comes to security breaches within the code, we can leverage some rules to allow us to identify the repetition in our code and the possible targets that we may have. It makes it very easy to review our code for security purposes."
"I follow Quality Gate's graduation model within organization, and it is extremely helpful for me to benchmark products."
"If you want to have your code scanned and timed then this is a good tool."
 

Cons

"The product could be enhanced by providing video troubleshooting guides, making issue resolution more accessible. Troubleshooting without visual guides can be time-consuming."
"Zero-day vulnerability identification can be an add-on feature that Coverity can provide."
"The solution's user interface and quality gate could be improved."
"Sometimes it's a bit hard to figure out how to use the product’s UI."
"Ideally, it would have a user-based license that does not have a restriction in the number of lines of code."
"The product could be enhanced by providing video troubleshooting guides, making issue resolution more accessible. Troubleshooting without visual guides can be time-consuming."
"When I put my code into Coverity for scanning, the code information of the product is in the system. The solution could be improved by providing a SBOM, a software bill of material."
"Some features are not performing well, like duplicate detection and switch case situations."
"Primarily for a complex, advanced website, they don't really understand some of the functionalities. So for instance, they could tell us that there is a vulnerability because somebody could possibly do something, but they don't really understand the code to realize that we actually negate that vulnerability through some other mechanism in the program. In addition, the technical support is just not there. We have open tickets. They don't respond. Even if they respond, we're not seeing eye to eye. As the company got sold and bought, the support got worse."
"In terms of what could be improved, we need more strategic analysis reports, not just for one specific application, but for the whole enterprise. In the next release, we need more reports and more analytic views for all the applications. There is no enterprise view in Fortify. I would like enterprise views and reports."
"Fortify on Demand needs to improve its pricing."
"It lacks of some important features that the competitors have, such as Software Composition Analysis, full dead code detection, and Agile Alliance's Best Practices and Technical Debt."
"We typically do our bulk uploads of our scans with some automation at the end of the development cycle but the scanning can take a lot of time. If you were doing all of it at regular intervals it would still consume a lot of time. This could procedure could improve."
"It does scanning for all virtual machines and other things, but it doesn't do the scanning for containers. It currently lacks the ability to do the scanning on containers. We're asking their product management team to expand this capability to containers."
"This solution would be improved if the code-quality perspective were added to it, on top of the security aspect."
"It would be highly beneficial if Fortify on Demand incorporated runtime analysis, similar to how Contrast Security utilizes agents for proactive application security."
"It would be a great add-on if SonarQube could update its database for vulnerabilities or plugging parts."
"We have tens of millions of code to be analyzed and processed. There can be some performance degradation if we are applying Sonar Link to large code or code that is complex. When the code had to be analyzed is when we ran into the main issues. There were several routines involved to solve those performance issues but this process should be improved."
"Expression of common vulnerabilities and exposures is not always current."
"In terms of analysis and findings, other tools provide more in-depth insights and detailed steps to mitigate or handle issues."
"I would also like SonarQube to be able to write custom scanning rules. More documentation would be helpful as well because some of our guys were struggling with the customization script."
"Any suggestions for potential improvements may include bill of materials functionality."
"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."
"SonarQube could improve by adding automatic creation of tasks after scanning and more support for the Czech language."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive."
"This is a pretty expensive solution. The overall value of the solution could be improved if the price was reduced. Licensing is done on an annual basis."
"Coverity is very expensive."
"The pricing is very reasonable compared to other platforms. It is based on a three year license."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a one out of ten."
"Depending on the usage types, one has to opt for different types of licenses from Coverity, especially to be able to use areas like report viewing or report generation."
"The pricing is on the expensive side, and we are paying for a couple of items."
"Offers varying prices for different companies"
"The pricing can be improved because it is complex when compared to the competition."
"The licensing was good because the licenses have the heavy centralized server."
"Fortify on Demand is affordable, and its licensing comes with a year of support."
"The solution is a little expensive."
"Buying a license would be feasible for regular use. For intermittent use, the cloud-based option can be used (Fortify on Demand)."
"It's a yearly contract, but I don't remember the dollar amount."
"Micro Focus Fortify on Demand licenses are managed by our IT team and the license model is user-based."
"We make an annual purchase of the licenses we need."
"A low cost long-term solution for non-critical situations."
"I think comparing the product to competitors it should be less expensive."
"I am satisfied with the pricing."
"We are using the free, unlicensed version."
"The costs for this application, for the kind of job it does, are pretty decent."
"SonarQube is a fairly affordable solution for a larger scale if you have a specific role or specific department for secure code."
"It's an open-source product."
"The free version of SonarQube does everything that we need it to."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
33%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How would you decide between Coverity and Sonarqube?
We researched Coverity, but in the end, we chose SonarQube. SonarQube is a tool for reviewing code quality and securi...
What do you like most about Coverity?
The solution has improved our code quality and security very well.
What do you like most about Micro Focus Fortify on Demand?
It helps deploy and track changes easily as per time-to-time market upgrades.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Micro Focus Fortify on Demand?
In comparison with other tools, they're competitive. It is not more expensive than other solutions, but their pricing...
What needs improvement with Micro Focus Fortify on Demand?
There are frequent complaints about false positives from Fortify. One day it may pass a scan with no issues, and the ...
Is SonarQube the best tool for static analysis?
I am not very familiar with SonarQube and their solutions, so I can not answer. But if you are asking me about which ...
Which gives you more for your money - SonarQube or Veracode?
SonarQube is easy to deploy and configure, and also integrates well with other tools to do quality code analysis. Son...
How does Snyk compare with SonarQube?
Snyk does a great job identifying and reducing vulnerabilities. This solution is fully automated and monitors 24/7 to...
 

Also Known As

Synopsys Static Analysis
Micro Focus Fortify on Demand
Sonar
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SAP, Mega International, Thales Alenia Space
SAP, Aaron's, British Gas, FICO, Cox Automative, Callcredit Information Group, Vital and more.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Sonar, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Updated: April 2025.
851,174 professionals have used our research since 2012.