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Coverity Static vs SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 15, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Coverity Static
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SonarQube Server (formerly ...
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (1st), Software Development Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Coverity Static is 6.0%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) is 19.7%, down from 27.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube)19.7%
Coverity Static6.0%
Other74.3%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Jaile Sebes - PeerSpot reviewer
Resolving critical software issues demands faster implementation and better integration
We use Coverity primarily to find issues such as software bugs and memory leaks, especially in C++ and C# projects. It helps us identify deadlocks, synchronization issues, and product crashes Coverity has been instrumental in resolving product crashes by detecting various issues like deadlocks.…
Sthembiso Zondi - PeerSpot reviewer
Consistent improvements in code quality and security with effective integration and reliable technical support
The features of SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) that I find most useful are the suggestions received from reviewing the code. When they review the code, they provide suggestions on how to fix it, and we find those very useful from a development perspective. We use SonarQube Server's (formerly SonarQube) centralized management and visualization of code quality metrics on the dashboard because that's the executive dashboard that we send to the executives to show where we are in terms of quality, security, and where the company can improve. We use that for organizational improvement purposes. The ability to tailor metrics tracking in SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) has been beneficial to my team. There are team-specific dashboards which are related to specific repositories they utilize, and we have that aggregative dashboard that shows the whole organization's performance. We can drill down per specific repository, which makes it easier for the team to improve specific things.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In my opinion, the most effective Coverity feature for identifying critical vulnerabilities is the extra checks, which offers deep analysis."
"Coverity is easy to set up and has a less lengthy process to find vulnerabilities."
"It's very stable."
"The solution has helped to increase staff productivity and improved our work significantly by approximately 20 percent."
"The ability to scan code gives us details of existing and potential vulnerabilities. What really matters for us is to ensure that we are able to catch vulnerabilities ahead of time."
"Coverity is easy to use and easy to integrate with CI."
"Coverity gives advisory and deviation features, which are some of the parts I liked."
"Coverity is scalable."
"It's enabled us to improve software quality and help us to disseminate best practices."
"The software quality gate streamlines the product's quality."
"We consider it a handy tool that helps to resolve our issues immediately."
"It is a very good tool for analysis despite its limitations."
"We advise all of our developers to have this solution in place."
"The integrations SonarQube provides with our software delivery pipeline are very seamless."
"The product itself has a friendly UI."
"The freemium version of SonarQube Server offers excellent value, especially compared to the high costs of Snyk."
 

Cons

"The level of vulnerability that this solution covers could be improved compared to other open source tools."
"Coverity is far from perfection, and I'm not 100 percent sure it's helping me find what I need to find in my role. We need exactly what we are looking for, i.e. security errors and vulnerabilities. It doesn't seem to be reporting while we are changing our code."
"Some features are not performing well, like duplicate detection and switch case situations."
"Coverity is not stable."
"SCM integration is very poor in Coverity."
"Its price can be improved. Price is always an issue with Synopsys."
"There should be additional IDE support."
"Zero-day vulnerability identification can be an add-on feature that Coverity can provide."
"Any suggestions for potential improvements may include bill of materials functionality."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to have notifications because now, it is a bit difficult. I think that's a feature which we could add there and it would benefit the users as well. For every full request, they should be able to see their bugs or vulnerability directly on the surface."
"We've been using the Community Edition, which means that we get to use it at our leisure, and they're kind enough to literally give it to us. However, it takes a fair amount of effort to figure out how to get everything up and running. Since we didn't go with the professional paid version, we're not entitled to support. Of course that could be self-correcting if we were to make the step to buy into this and really use it. Then their technical support would be available to us to make strides for using it better."
"A robust credential scanner would be a huge bonus as it would remove the need for yet another niche product."
"We did have some trouble with the LDAP integration for the console."
"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."
"The exporting capabilities could be improved. Currently, exporting is fully dependent on the SonarQube environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I would rate Coverity's pricing as a nine out of ten. It's already very expensive, and it's a problem for us to get more licenses due to the price. The pricing model has some good aspects - for example, a personal license gives access to all languages without code limitations, which is better than some competitors. However, it's still a lot of money for us to spend."
"It is expensive."
"The tool's price is somewhere in the middle. It's neither cheap nor expensive. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"The price is competitive with other solutions."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a one out of ten."
"The pricing is very reasonable compared to other platforms. It is based on a three year license."
"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."
"The beauty of this solution is the free open-source version is capable enough in doing pretty much what an enterprise-level version can do."
"The development license cost is reasonable, and we've had no concerns about SonarQube when it comes to cost."
"As a user and a consumer of this solution, it can be pricey for my company to support and use, even though there are many benefits. For this reason, we use the free version. In the future, as our product cycles develop and evolve at a more steady pace, we hope to invest in the licensing for this tool."
"We pay €10 per month for this solution, which is good. It provides a good value for money."
"Get the paid version which allows the customized dashboard and provides technical support."
"The licence is standard open source licensing"
"The developer edition is based on cost per lines of code."
"I use the full trial version of SonarQube."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
32%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Healthcare Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise75
 

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 security. It helps to guide our development teams during code reviews by providing rem...
What do you like most about Coverity?
The solution has improved our code quality and security very well.
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 tools that are the best for for Static Code Analysis, I suggest you have a look...
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. SonarQube has a great community edition, which is open-source and free. Easy to use...
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 find any issues reported on the internet. It will store dependencies that you a...
 

Also Known As

Synopsys Static Analysis
Sonar
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SAP, Mega International, Thales Alenia Space
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Coverity Static vs. SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.