SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) Reviews

Our use case of SonarQube is to analyze code quality and to implement quality dates in our build pipelines.

The ability to tweak the rules and feed them into our build pipelines so that they can become an integral part of those pipelines is a valuable feature. This product works really well, the integrations and pipelines are good.

SonarQube currently requires multiple tools. I'd like to have the ability to use one tool overall. 

We've been using this solution for a few years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We pay a very reasonable, annual licensing fee. 

My recommendation is to just go with this out-of-the-box rule set first. Don't try to tweak them and learn what they mean. First learn what the alerts mean and then slowly tweak it to your specific use cases.

We do a lot of development. We were previously doing it internally, and then we hired a couple of development partners. So, day in and day out, a lot of changes were happening. We wanted to ensure that whatever changes happened, they undergo some level of quality assessments. That was one of the reasons why we wanted to use it. 

We have started looking into it from the information security side, but it is being used by the core development team.

We are using the Community edition. So, we don't have to incur any licensing costs. This is the best part.

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.

It's a stable solution.

It is not scalable if you have a bigger workload. Because it is a Community edition, it has its own restrictions and limitations in terms of the number of lines of codes.

We have 15 to 20 people who are using it.

We don't have any experience with them. We don't have any AMCs, and we don't have any technical support.

It was easy, but because we were using it for the first time, it took some time. I would rate it 3.5 out of five in terms of ease of setup.

We deployed it in-house. In terms of maintenance, there is only one person who is taking care of SonarQube as a platform or the services that are provided by SonarQube.

We are using the Community edition of SonarQube.

For a small setup with less number of applications, it is okay because it is easy to deploy and manage with a simple console. When the number of lines of code is high, it takes time, and you have to spend a lot of time in terms of getting the right results.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

I have it integrated with our continuous integration server. On a scheduled basis, typically in the middle of the night, it'll do performance scans so that the results are available and viewable by the developers on the website. The scans are done automatically by using a continuous integration server, which is TeamCity.

We are using version 5.6.6. It is a very old version, but that's what we've been using. We haven't gotten around to updating it.

I like that it's easy to navigate not just in terms of code findings but you can actually see them in the context of your source code because it gives you a copy of your code with the items that it found and highlights them. You can see it directly in your code, so you can easily go back and make the corrections in the code. It basically finds the problems for you and tells you where they are.

The learning curve can be fairly steep at first, but then, it's not an entry-level type of application. It's not like an introduction to C programming. You should know not just C programming and how to make projects but also how to apply its findings to the bigger picture. I've had users who said that they wish it was easier to understand how to configure, but I don't know if that's doable because what it's doing is a very complicated thing. I don't know if it is possible to make a complicated thing trivially simple.

They could improve their documentation. There were some books written about it, but even when we first started using it, the books were out of date. It's more of a plea to some of the authors who have become experts in using it to revise their books. I'd buy a copy of it. SonarQube does a good job of supporting the open-source community, but some of the documentation tends to lag behind. That's not unique to SonarQube. It gives an opportunity to those who have taken the time to learn about it to author books and become resident experts or community experts. It'd be nice if some of those guys made another edition to support the open-source efforts that are there.

In terms of features, at this point, I don't have any requirements. We've been growing into it slowly, and we haven't really exhausted what it already has. When and if we get to a point where we are aggressively applying what it's telling us, we may reach a point where it's like, "If it could tell us this as well, that'd be nice." We haven't reached that point yet. We haven't listened to all of the advice that it's giving us now.

It has been a couple of years.

Any lack of stability is because it's being expanded and updated pretty much constantly. We haven't experienced any crashes or bugs. We do have an opportunity here coming up within the next few weeks of revisiting some of the ways we do things there.

It is definitely scalable. We plan to increase its usage.

Since we're using the open-source components, we use web searches and online resources. Once you get a little used to their website, they have a lot of information. The support, even for an older version, is pretty good. I've been able to find workable solutions. You just have to do a little searching.

We don't have stability issues. It hasn't crashed since we got it up and running, but there are some configurations or different options you can apply when you're scanning. So, you have to learn its language, and the information is available if you search the web.

Way back in the past, we used other static analysis tools like PC-lint or Gimpel Lint. I still have plans to resurrect some of that, but I'm of the mindset that the more opinions you get about your code, the better off you are. You get to look from different angles with different tools. In terms of the automated tool, SonarQube was the first one we had for getting into the DevOps generation of stuff.

We did have some issues, but they were because we didn't understand the relationship between different flavors. You've got the server, and the SonarQube service itself provides an HTTP type input. There are also versions of the scanners for different tools we're using, which are typically C++. We started with a mismatch of that. It may have been the server and the scanner, which runs on your client workstations. We had a mismatch of versions. After we dug into it a little bit and realized that was the problem, it was pretty straightforward. The setup from there was pretty trivial. 

You do need to know how to use a database. I most certainly use MySQL just because it's easily available on a minimal Linux install, CentOS. It's a Red Hat 7. It's BaseOS, a minimal install. It probably needed Java and a few tools that are fairly common. If you know how to set up a MySQL database, you can do it. If you know how to set up Java on Red Hat, which is pretty straightforward other than the fact that some path issues come into play, but that's just part of the game. Once you do that, it installs pretty easily.

We did have a consultant. He was looking at our overall engineering infrastructure, things beyond SonarQube. He was helpful in finding out, or pointing out, that it was the issue with the revisions. The versions of the different pieces weren't matching up. He did help with that, but in terms of putting it in, I did the validation work for validating the installation process and reproducibility for future users in case I leave the company and they need to recreate it. They've got the documentation to do so. So, I did all that. For an application of its complexity, it was fairly straightforward once we resolved the version issue.

Its deployment and maintenance can be done by one engineer.

We're using an older version because it is the open-source flavor of it and we can continue using it at no cost. We're not paying any licensing at all, which was another factor in choosing this route so that we can learn and grow with it and not be committed to licenses and other similar things. If we choose to get something else, we have to relearn, but we don't have to relicense. Basically, we're paying no license costs.

We did look at a lot of other ones. Some of the names I actually can't recall. There were code quality analyzers out there besides that. We did review them and settled on this one because it's very widely used, and the open-source capabilities are pretty well-supported to where you can use it without obligation. None of them are trivial to set up and use because they are doing a very complicated process. They all have their different ways of going about things, but you've got to understand any one of them. We picked this route.

You have to be willing to invest. For any tool of this magnitude, if you're going to say, "Well, we want to do the least we can possibly do and see what's the least we can get by with," you'll get the least possible benefit. My recommendation is that you do the opposite. You should consider everything it's telling you. You may not want to fix everything, but you should be aware of everything that's showing in your code. After that, you have the opportunity to look at your whole development process and just the way you do things and go back to your roots and look for ways to change things at the beginning that can have an impact. You have a big impact on the output of things towards the end, but maybe change the way you start things. Instead of trying to get the least that you can get with the least amount of effort, partner yourself with it as much as possible.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case of SonarQube is getting feedback on code. We are using Spring Boot and Java 8. We are also using SonarLint, which is an Eclipse IDE plugin, to detect vulnerabilities during development. Once the developer finishes the code and commits the code into the Bitbucket code repository, the continuous integration pipeline will automatically run using Jenkins. As part of this pipeline, there is a build unit test and a SonarQube scan. All the parameters are configured as per project requirements, and the SonarQube scan will run immediately once the developer commits the code to the repository. The advantage of this is that we can see immediate feedback: how many vulnerabilities there are, what the code quality is, the code quality metrics, and if there are any issues with the changes that we made. Since the feedback is immediate, the developer can rectify it immediately and can further communicate changes. This helps us with product quality and having less vulnerabilities in the early stages of development. 

This solution is deployed on-premise. 

One of the most valuable features of SonarQube is its ability to detect code quality during development. There are rules that define various technologies—Java, C#, Python, everything—and these rules declare the coding standards and code quality. With SonarQube, everything is detectable during the time of development and continuous integration, which is an advantage. SonarQube also has a Quality Gate, where the code should reach 85%. Below that, the code cannot be promoted to a further environment, it should be in a development environment only. So the checks are there, and SonarQube will provide that increase. It also provides suggestions on how the code can be fixed and methods of going about this, without allowing hackers to exploit the code. 

Another valuable feature is that it is tightly integrated with third-party tools. For example, we can see the SonarQube metrics in Bitbucket, the code repository. Once I raise the full request, the developer, team lead, or even the delivery lead can see the code quality metrics of the deliverable so that they can make a decision. SonarQube will also cover all of the top OWASP vulnerabilities, however it doesn't have penetration testing or hacker testing. We use other tools, like Checkmarx, to do penetration testing from the outside. 

SonarQube could be improved with more dynamic testing—basically, now, it's a static code analysis scan. For example, when the developer writes the code and does the corresponding unit test, he can cover functional and non-functional. So the SonarQube could be improved by helping to execute unit tests and test dynamically, using various parameters, and to help detect any vulnerabilities. Currently, it'll just give the test case and say whether it passes or fails—it won't give you any other input or dynamic testing. They could use artificial intelligence to build a feature that would help developers identify and fix issues in the early stages, which would help us deliver the product and reduce costs. 

Another area with room for improvement is in regard to automating things, since the process currently needs to be done manually.

Aside from other helpful features, the most important thing that SonarQube needs to do—the key feature—is to detect security vulnerabilities. The rest of the other features are helpful to the developer and the team to deliver the product faster, but security is a mandatory feature. 

As for additional features, SonarQube covers most of the languages, but there is still room for improvement covering the latest version of the tech stack—for example, Java 13. They're still improving, and they're focusing on SonarCloud nowadays. Currently, we aren't using all the top quality features of SonarCloud. I also think it would be helpful if SonarQube could integrate with Jira, a work management tool, or other communication tools, like Skype or Microsoft Teams, so that a bot could report directly to the developer. 

I have been using SonarQube for the past three years. 

The stability and performance of SonarQube are good. We use it on a daily basis, as part of our code development. 

As far as maintenance, it mainly happens when the product is being developed. There may be some features which can be enhanced, based on customer feedback and the tech stack, such as how we can improve performance of have a deployment with zero downtime. There are so many technologies coming, so many things happening, and there is always room for code improvements and the product we develop. Our top considerations are quality and security, which are being improved in a continuous process. There are many new features and enhancements coming in—for example, if you want to upgrade from the Java 6 version, then you can upgrade the tech stack, which will reduce the number of lines of code and improve performance. 

This solution is easy to scale. The instances in which we are deploying it are easy to scale because we are using it in production. We aren't supposed to deploy as part of the development, but the scalability feature is there because we are using Ansible, Kubernetes, and Docker. 

In our organization, there are currently around 25,000 people working with SonarQube. 

We also use Checkmarx and Snyk. One of the main differences between them and SonarQube is that they have dynamic testing and analysis, rather than static analysis. 

The initial setup wasn't a complex process. It was straightforward, and I had no issues. The deployment happened automatically and the pipeline was complete in three minutes. It depends on the scale of the project, the number of code repositories, the number of modules you are deploying, and all that. I would say deployment should take five minutes, maximum. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. Everything happens internally and we have our own internal tools, so there are no third-parties involved in development. 

I'm not too aware of the pricing because a different team covers that, but SonarQube has been on the market for a very long time, so I would guess the pricing would be decent. 

I rate SonarQube an eight out of ten. 

To those looking to implement SonarQube, I would advise you not to run it manually—integrate it with tools like Bitbucket and Jenkins, and make it automatic. If you change one line of code, the SonarQube should run automatically and give you the report. Don't go and run it manually and check the reports and all—it should run automatically to the entire code base, not to your particular module. So you need to configure that, as well as your project requirements and what code quality metrics will be achievable—like 85% or 95%—because you want code quality for a better product, without loopholes. You need to configure these things before starting to work with SonarQube. 

SonarQube is used for in-production scanning of applications. We are only doing unit testing to improve the overall quality of the code.

The developers have responsibility for unit testing, but it is very important that we check what they have been doing. SonarQube allows us to see the result directly in the pipeline.

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.

What we are seeing is for some of the Javascript projects SonarQube is not reading all the files. We had to manually configure it to accomplish what we wanted. However, we probably needed some documentation that we did not have that explained this process.

In an upcoming release, it would be beneficial to have the ability to use multiple applications under one project, and if we want to scan one of the applications we can just switch to that application, this would be really helpful.

I have been using SonarQube for approximately two years.

The solution is scalable. 

We have plans to increase the number of users using this solution because we have approximately 3,000 applications but only 200 are being used.

There are a lot of people using this solution in my organization because they are able to scan directly from their IDs.

We have worked with the support from SonarQube and we have had good experiences.

The initial setup was simple. When we did the upgrade and it took our team approximately two hours.

Our internal team did the implementation of the solution.

We are using the community version of the solution and we plan on purchasing licenses for the upgraded version soon. There is a limitation on how many lines of code can be scanned and this is why we are going to purchase a license for an increased amount.

SonarQube is a very nice tool and people can learn to code better from the analysis it provides. We needed to make sure our code is maintained properly and has high quality and this tool helped.

The solution has made the developers have more confidence in their code because from the scanning they can fix bugs and problems easily.

I rate SonarQube a seven out of ten.

We use SonarQube to scan SAS code for quality control in mostly mobile applications, such as iOS and Android applications.

SonarQube is designed well making it easy to use, simple to identify issues and find solutions to problems.

The solution could improve the management reports by making them easier to understand for the technical team that needs to review them.

I have been using the free version of SonarQube for approximately one year and then I purchased a subscription that I have been using for the last three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution has scaled well for our needs. We have two million lines of code and we have not had a problem.

We work for a large enterprise that has approximately 1,000 IT employees.

There is a lot of information for SonarQube online in the community forums. I only used technical support when I needed to renew my license.

The installation is not difficult.

The solution has a free version and a license version. The license is priced reasonably, the cost of hiring one programmer is more expensive than the solution.

The licensing process could be improved. We need to contact purchasing to receive the key for the license but the process should be automatic, similar to a SAS purchase.

I have evaluated Fortify Application Defender.

I rate SonarQube a nine out of ten.

We are using SonarQube for many different reasons, but I was interested more in the security metrics based on the new updates for more particular rules.

The depth features I have found most valuable. You receive a quick comprehensive comparison overview regarding the current release and the last release and what type of depths dependency or duplication should be used. This is going to help you to make a more readable code and have more flexibility for the engineers to understand how things should work when they do not know.

I was more focused on the security aspects and not on quality. SonarQube focuses a lot on security and is going to provide some visibility around that area, but if there could be more focus on team management. For example, what type of remediation is going to be provided when the types of scans are being applied based on different rule sets at the SonarQube level, from the security point of view, this would be helpful.

If there was an official Docker image of SonarQube that could easily integrate into the pipeline would help the user to plug in and plug out and use it directly without any custom configuration. I am not sure if this is being offered already in an update but it would be very helpful.

In an upcoming release of the solution, I would like to see more types of programming languages added and improvement in their SaaS offering to compete better with other enterprise solutions, such as Fortify.

I have been using this SonarQube for approximately four years.

We are not relying on this solution as a go-to application security scanning tool. We use it for some minor enhancement regarding security, but we are using it actively in other departments for the code quality scanning. I have not had any problems using the solution, it has been stable.

We have approximately 15,000 engineers in my company and many of them are using this solution.

I have evaluated Fortify.

I rate SonarQube a six out of ten.

We use SonarQube mostly for code quality testing.

The integrations SonarQube provides with our software delivery pipeline are very seamless. The main benefit of using SonarQube in our organization was having a clean code with fewer static vulnerabilities within the application.

SonarQube could improve its static application security testing as per the industry standard. It would be really great if I could extract the overall report that I see in the dashboard.

I have been using SonarQube for a few years.

SonarQube is a stable solution.

Around 20 to 25 people use the solution in my team.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution can be deployed within a couple of days. We don’t need many people to deploy SonarQube. It is not difficult to maintain the solution.

We use the API call for SonarQube to integrate it into our development workflow. It's a continuous process for us to review the reports and remediate any findings we get from SonarQube. The quality gates and quality profiles are helpful in establishing the required gates and governance that we may need. SonarQube has impacted our team's productivity and code quality over time.

I would recommend SonarQube to other users evaluating it because it helps streamline some of the coding practices. The solution helps teams within the organization get into a good habit of writing clean code. The solution is helpful from a long-term sustainability standpoint.

I would recommend users to try out the open source version of SonarQube. If that doesn't suffice their needs, then they can go for an enterprise version.

Overall, I rate SonarQube an eight out of ten.