SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) Reviews

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 it to check the code quality, and the code review to find out the vulnerabilities about the central codes like simplifications and codes. We also use it for security management.

The most valuable feature is the security hotspot feature that identifies where your code is prone to have security issues.

It also gives you a very good highlight of what's changed, and what has to be changed in the future.

Apart from that, there are many other good features as it's a code analytics platform. It also has a dashboard reporting feature, which is very good. I also like the ease of its integration with Jenkins.

Another valuable feature is the time snapshot that it provides for the code. It provides the code quality, the lagging, and the training features like what already has gone wrong and what is likely to go wrong. It's a very good feature for a project to have a dashboard where the users can find everything about their project at a single glance.

There are various standards that are followed. Awareness is a must.

Product awareness is something that I would recommend. If the users are not aware of how to use the product, they won't understand the features.

I have been using SonarQube for three years. 

It is quite stable. There are no kind of issues that we face on SonarQube. It's just about the awareness where the users are not aware of a feature and that's where we need to jump in and explain some of the features about how it works.

It's definitely easy to scale. 

We do contact them based on the project team requirement. We contact them if they have to set up any specific kind of portfolio application and such application et cetera, internal.

Their support is good. They respond quickly. The response time is very good. They answer the queries within 24 to 48 hours. That's a plus for them. It's a very costly product, so we use the enterprise-level product. It does consume a lot of license cost for that.

We used Fortify, it is also another tool for static code analysis. The security team used to use that, but not in our team because ours was a newly assembled team for the work. 

The initial setup is simple. It's basically an orchestration platform on which I manage around 400 SonarQube incentives.

It's a mass production environment. I'm currently managing around 400 plus teams who are using the product. We are trying to migrate it onto Kubernetes.

The setup takes around five to ten minutes as I have created automation. 

It requires maintenance on the platform side, but not on the SonarQube side. Because there is a DB cleanup automatically inbuilt in Sonar, it does not require much to maintain within SonarQube itself.

It eats up a lot of memory. For a stack it's around 2.5GB. We use it on a daily basis. 

Everything is included in the standard licensing. 

Awareness about how to use the product is important. It's a very good product for developers because it gives you timely notifications about where the tool has gone wrong or what could go wrong in the future. That's popular for developers. It's very good for the stats about the product for architects

The metrics are how the budgeting should be done et cetera. These are the things that they can find out from the dashboard based on the lines of codes. 

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.

I would rate it an eight 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.

We are using the solution for code quality and security.

The solution has a wide variety of features and an open-source community that you are able to learn Java, JavaScript, or any other programing language. The quality profile rules that it provides based on the architect are set across the board, this provides continuity. Being able to fix all the application vulnerabilities before it reaches production is a huge benefit.

There are times that we have the database crash. However, this might be an issue with how we have configured it and not a software issue. Apart from this, I do not see any issues with the solution.

I have been using the solution for approximately eight years.

The scalability depends on the use case. You cannot install it with minimal resources and expect it to run thousands of jobs. It is scalable based on your environment. How big is your project? How many APIs do you want to scan? How many APIs per minute, etc. Based on that information you need to first decide upfront how much memory or how much storage you want to give to it. You need to have clear data with you and then use the resources to design accordingly. I think it is highly scalable and can operate seamlessly if you give it the environment that is sufficient. You cannot expect magic from it.

We have some projects that have 150 users with ten teams using the solution.

We had to contact technical support back several years ago because we had an issue with one of the new SQL plugins which ended up being resolved. The support is not required anymore because they have very good documentation that meets our needs.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I do not know the price of the solution since I have not been involved in purchasing licenses. However, this solution requires a license and we have enterprise-level licenses for our organization and for our client.

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 enterprise-level has only a few more options, such as better reporting and generating PDFs. If you have a small-scale project or if you do not have a high budget, I think open-source will do wonders.

For those wanting to implement this solution, I would suggest it is the best tool. It has a big open-source community where you learn any language. There are many extra plugins you can apply to scan in your code. It has support for Android, iOS, COBOL, Java, JavaScript databases, and more. It has everything you need.

I rate SonarQube a nine 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.

I work on vulnerability management. I use the security features in SonarQube. I also use Veracode. I use both solutions to verify each other’s results.

We see the security issues in our solutions with the help of the product. It helps us improve the solutions.

There are many options and examples available in the tool that help us fix the issues it shows us.

The product must improve security analysis. It must introduce software composition analysis in future releases.

I have been using the solution for three years or more. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

We have seen an ROI because we are avoiding rework. The product helps us to fix security and quality.

The product’s price is lower than Veracode’s price.

Veracode is more efficient in security analysis. It also has software composition analysis features. So, it would be difficult for SonarQube to compete with Veracode.

There are a lot of functions and features in SonarQube. I would recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the tool an eight 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.

My main use case for SonarQube is to analyze code quality in various programming projects, particularly focusing on identifying bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells. I also use it to detect patterns in data clusters and ensure there are no leaks in the codebase.

The features of SonarQube that I find most valuable for identifying code smells are its comprehensive code analysis capabilities, which cover various aspects of code sustainability. Specifically, its ability to detect issues across different functions and methods, including security vulnerabilities, is particularly useful.

SonarQube could be improved by implementing inter-procedural code analysis capabilities, allowing for a more comprehensive detection of defects and vulnerabilities across the entire codebase.  Additional functionality that could improve SonarQube includes features like automatic code correction and AI-generated suggestions to streamline code maintenance.

I have been using SonarQube for almost three years.

I would rate the stability of the solution as an eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of the solution as an eight out of ten.

In comparing Coverity and SonarQube, Coverity stands out for its superior vendor support and enterprise-level analysis capabilities, particularly in security and leak detection across procedures. SonarQube excels in dashboard usability and cost-effectiveness but lacks certain advanced features like inter-procedural analysis and some leak detections available in Coverity.

Setting up SonarQube was relatively straightforward.

In terms of pricing, SonarQube is more comfortable for global licensing and cloud-based usage, while Coverity's licenses, particularly in India, may come with more restrictions and be less flexible.

I integrate SonarQube into my CI/CD pipeline by running it during the build process for static code analysis. Once the analysis is complete, the results are sent to the dashboard for easy monitoring and tracking of code quality.

Using SonarQube for security vulnerability detection offers several benefits such as comprehensive security rule coverage and integration with the dashboard for easy monitoring. Additionally, SonarQube provides features like password handling, eliminating the need for separate tools and enhancing overall code security.

SonarQube handles false positives during code analysis by allowing teams to review and exclude them, especially in long-term projects where patterns are familiar. While false positives may occur, experienced teams can easily identify and manage them, ensuring accurate analysis results.

For software development, especially in Java-based environments, I highly recommend using SonarQube due to its effectiveness in ensuring code quality and minimizing potential issues. While there are free tools available, SonarQube's comprehensive support for various languages and its benefits make it a valuable choice for developers.

Overall, I would rate SonarQube as an eight out of ten.