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Klocwork pros and cons

Vendor: Perforce

4.0 out of 5

24 reviews
92% willing to recommend

431 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Klocwork offers static analysis and code refactoring to enhance safety and reliability but struggles with true positives, identifying only 30% in tests. Though its language support now includes JavaScript and Python, it lacks modern language coverage, necessitating other tools. Developers appreciate features like incremental analysis, while custom checkers are a bonus. However, its complex rule definitions and excessive warnings can be cumbersome. Reporting and dashboard flexibility are limited, impacting management insights.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Klocwork helps teams consider corner cases and potential bugs in advance.

Static analysis and code refactoring features support safety and reliability requirements.

Custom checker creation is a significant advantage.

Incremental and on-the-fly analysis facilitate early defect detection during coding.

Klocwork's reporting enhances understanding of development trends and improvement over time.

CONS

Defining rules is complex and could benefit from automation based on various SILs to reduce confusion.

Klocwork lacks integration with Agile DevOps and Agile methodologies which limits flexibility.

Support for modern languages like Angular, .NET, Ada, and Golang is missing, making it less competitive against free alternatives.

The dashboard and reporting mechanisms need improvement for better flexibility and detailed analysis as they are not as efficient as those in competing tools.

Klocwork produces too many warnings, requiring significant expertise to categorize and manage.

Klocwork Pros review quotes

reviewer2180745

Principle engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

May 10, 2023

The reporting helps us understand the trend of our results and whether we improve over time. We can see the history within Klocwork's server architecture and know that we're making things better. It creates a great story for our management. We can demonstrate value and how our software is developing over time.

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BD

Principle Engineer at MTSI

Aug 2, 2018

I like not having to dig through false positives. Chasing down a false positive can take anywhere from five minutes for a small easy one, then something that is complicated and goes through a whole bunch of different class cases, and it can take up to 45 minutes to an hour to find out if it is a false positive or not.

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Head - Solution Management Group at Meteonic Innovation Pvt. Ltd.

Oct 18, 2022

The most valuable feature of Klocwork is finding defects while you're doing the coding. For example, if you have an IDE plug-in of Klocwork on Visual Studio or Eclipse, you can find the faults; similar to using spell check on Word, you can find out defects during the development phase, which means that you don't have to wait till the development is over to find the flaws and address the deficiencies. I also find language support in Klocwork good because it used to support only C, C++, C#, and Java, but now, it also supports Java scripts and Python.

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Free Report: Klocwork Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Klocwork. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

RE

Principal Software Engineer at Valeo

Aug 23, 2023

It's integrated into our CI, continuous integration.

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MG

Real Klocwork User

TMS Product Architect with 10,001+ employees

Nov 19, 2019

There is a central Klocwork server at our headquarter in France so we connect the client directly to the server on-premises remotely.

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KG

Krishna M Gopalakrishnan

Manager, Quality, Functional Safety, Cybersecurity Embedded Processing at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 9, 2025

Klocwork is user-friendly, with a client-server architecture that provides all needed compliance.

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reviewer1553658

Senior Product Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Oct 29, 2022

On-the-fly analysis and incremental analysis are the best parts of Klocwork. Currently, we are using both of these features very effectively.

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Head of Customer Succes at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2024

There's a feature in Klocwork called 'on-the-fly analysis', which helps developers to find and fix the defects at the time of development itself.

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reviewer1184322

Software Chief Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 21, 2019

One can increase the number of vendors, so the solution is scalable.

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Sr. Test Engineering Manager - Embedded Linux SW / RF at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Apr 30, 2022

Klocwork's most valuable feature is the static code analysis feature. It detects the potential problem earlier to allow the developer to receive feedback quickly and then address it before it becomes a problem.

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Show 7 more reviews (out of 17)

Klocwork Cons review quotes

reviewer2180745

Principle engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

May 10, 2023

Under NIST cybersecurity standards, we must address vulnerabilities within a specified time after discovering them. When we try to propagate those updates and fixes through the system, it would be nice if the clients could reconnect to the existing server or have the server dynamically updated in some way. I know that isn't easy, but maybe processes could be enhanced to make that more streamlined from a DevOps perspective.

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BD

Principle Engineer at MTSI

Aug 2, 2018

Klocwork does have a problem with true positives. It only found 30% of true positives in the Juliet test case.

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Head - Solution Management Group at Meteonic Innovation Pvt. Ltd.

Oct 18, 2022

What needs improvement in Klocwork, compared to other products in the market, is the dashboard or reporting mechanisms that need to be a bit more flexible. The Klocwork dashboard could be improved. Though it's good, it's not as good as some of the other products in the market, which is a problem. The reporting could be more detailed and easier to sort out because sorting in Klocwork could be a bit more time-consuming, mainly when sorting defects based on filters, compared to how it's done on other tools such as Coverity.

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Free Report: Klocwork Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Klocwork. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

RE

Principal Software Engineer at Valeo

Aug 23, 2023

The main problem is that since it only parses the code, the warnings or the problems that are given as a result of the report can sometimes require a lot of effort to analyze.

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MG

Real Klocwork User

TMS Product Architect with 10,001+ employees

Nov 19, 2019

We'd like to see integration with Agile DevOps and Agile methodologies.

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KG

Krishna M Gopalakrishnan

Manager, Quality, Functional Safety, Cybersecurity Embedded Processing at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 9, 2025

Customers using different static analysis tools report more issues than with Klocwork, indicating that Klocwork's engine is not as superior.

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reviewer1553658

Senior Product Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Oct 29, 2022

Modern languages, such as Angular and .NET, should be included as a part of Klocwork. They have recently added Kotlin as a part of their project, but we would like to see more languages in Klocwork. That's the reason we are using Coverity as a backup for some of the other languages.

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Head of Customer Succes at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2024

This solution could be improved if they offered support of more languages including Ada and Golang. They currently only support seven languages.

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reviewer1184322

Software Chief Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 21, 2019

I would like to see better codes between projects and a more user-friendly desktop in the next release.

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Sr. Test Engineering Manager - Embedded Linux SW / RF at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Apr 30, 2022

Klocwork has to improve its features to stay ahead of other free solutions.

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Show 8 more reviews (out of 18)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Application Security Tools

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Static Code Analysis

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Application Security Tools

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Static Code Analysis

Popular Comparisons

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SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Klocwork

GitLab vs Klocwork

Snyk vs Klocwork

Checkmarx One vs Klocwork

Veracode vs Klocwork

Coverity vs Klocwork

Mend.io vs Klocwork

Fortify on Demand vs Klocwork

SonarQube Cloud (formerly SonarCloud) vs Klocwork

Fortify Static Code Analyzer vs Klocwork

HCL AppScan vs Klocwork

PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional vs Klocwork

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