Code Review Tools

Code review tools help automate parts of code reviews, helping identify bugs and issues earlier and with less effort

Code reviews are a critical part of quality assurance (QA). Code review tools help review software code for early bug and issue detection. Traditionally, code reviews were completed manually by one or more developers. The latest development in code reviews is the integration of rules based and machine learning based approaches to build automated code review tools.

To be categorized as a code review tool, a product must be able to enable automation of parts of the code review process

If you’d like to learn about the ecosystem consisting of Code Review Tool and others, feel free to check AIMultiple IT / Tech.

Compare Best Code Review Tool

Results: 16

AIMultiple is data driven. Evaluate 16 services based on comprehensive, transparent and objective AIMultiple scores.
For any of our scores, click the information icon to learn how it is calculated based on objective data.

*Products with visit website buttons are sponsored

What are our data sources?

We use the data sources on the side for ranking solutions and awarding badges in code review tool category. Our data sources in code review tool category include;

4

review websites

2

social media websites

1

search engine data for branded queries

Code Review Tool Leaders

According to the weighted combination of 7 data sources

Veracode

Codacy

SonarQube

PyCharm

Coverity

What are Code Review Tool market leaders?

Taking into account the latest metrics outlined below, these are the current code review tool market leaders. Market leaders are not the overall leaders since market leadership doesn’t take into account growth rate.

Veracode

SonarQube

PyCharm

Coverity

Codacy

What are the most popular Code Review Tools?

What are the most searched code review tool brands?

Searches with Brand Name

These are the number of queries on search engines which include the brand name of the solution. Compared to other IT / Tech categories, Code Review Tool is more concentrated in terms of top 3 companies’ share of search queries. Top 3 companies receive 89%, 8% more than the average of search queries in this area.

What are the most mature Code Review Tools?

Which code review tool companies have the most employees?

101 employees work for a typical company in this solution category which is 80 more than the number of employees for a typical company in the average solution category.

In most cases, companies need at least 10 employees to serve other businesses with a proven tech product or service. 12 companies with >10 employees are offering code review tool. Top 3 products are developed by companies with a total of 100k employees. The largest company building code review tool is AWS with more than 100,000 employees.

AWS
JetBrains
Veracode
Checkmarx
SonarSource

What are the Code Review Tools growing their number of reviews fastest?


We have analyzed reviews published in the last months. These were published in 4 review platforms as well as vendor websites where the vendor had provided a testimonial from a client whom we could connect to a real person.

These solutions have the best combination of high ratings from reviews and number of reviews when we take into account all their recent reviews.

What is the average customer size?

According to customer reviews, most common company size for code review tool customers is 1,001+ employees. Customers with 1,001+ employees make up 51% of code review tool customers. For an average IT / Tech solution, customers with 1,001+ employees make up 44% of total customers.

Overall
Customer Service
Ease of Use
Likelihood to Recommend
Value For Money

Customer Evaluation

These scores are the average scores collected from customer reviews for all Code Review Tools. Code Review Tools is most positively evaluated in terms of "Overall" but falls behind in "Customer Service".

What is the level of interest in Code Review Tools?

Interest in Code Review Tools

This category was searched on average for 3k times per month on search engines in 2022. This number has decreased to 2.9k in 2023. If we compare with other it / tech solutions, a typical solution was searched 710 times in 2022 and this decreased to 480 in 2023.

The main purpose of the code review is to increase quality assurance and eliminate possible errors. A systematic review is needed to ensure the technical content and quality of the code. Technical details such as common security vulnerabilities, memory leaks, and race conditions are examined and cleared of errors in this process. For more information feel free to read our article on code review.

The main sub-branches of the code review are as follows:

  • Pair programming: Two programmers work together in one workstation
  • Formal inspections: A traditional method that needs two programmers to meet and review the code line by line
  • Informal walkthroughs: A review process in which a programmer leads and the other team members ask questions about possible deviations from development standards.
  • Email pass-around: the author of the code emails the code to reviewers.

The code review process can be seen as a code feedback process. Other developers give positive and negative feedback to the developer who writes the code. A guide or checklist can be used to ensure that the code meets the coding standards and that common errors are identified. In a manual code review, the team gathers and passes over the lines of the individual code. The typical output of a manual code review can be:

  • General Overview
  • Code Metrics
  • Architecture review
  • UI review
  • Tests review
  • Code Quality review
  • Recommendations

Code review is a time-consuming but essential process. Automated code review tools can be used to reduce the effort involved in code reviews.

Although the main purpose of a code review is to increase software quality and security, it also facilitates collaboration and knowledge transfer within the team.

  • Code reviews help identify areas where coding standards are not met. Compliance to the code standards is ensured by experienced team members. Early detection of code incompliance issues helps resolve them easier and increases the quality of the software.
  • Software security is of paramount importance and reviews help identify security vulnerabilities.
  • Transfer of experience is an important factor for a team to develop and grow. Code reviews facilitate experience sharing within the team as the team discuss important aspects of the code.

Automated code review is a review process using software tools. The code development team aims to save time by using automated code review tools.

Automated code reviews save time and improve code quality efficiently without personal biases. Many of the code review processes go through making similar errors or similar corrections, resulting in an inefficient and tedious process. Thanks to advances in AI, machine learning models can detect similar errors automatically.

An automated code review tool results in even earlier error detection since these tools work in the background while developers are coding.

However, relying only on automated code reviews would not be a best practice approach. Some vulnerabilities, such as authentication issues, access control issues, and insecure encryption usage, are difficult to detect automatically. Considering contributions of manual code review to teamwork, it will be best to use both manual and automatic code reviews.

You can visit our research article on automated code review to get more information.

There are three main features of code review tools: assisting, enforcing and automating. Some tools incorporate all these features.

  • Assisting: When the code review is done and sent, it takes time to get feedback and correct it. In order not to experience this process again and again, some tools indicate which parts of the code may create a problem. This functionality can be integrated to IDEs to facilitate the code review process.
  • Enforcing: This feature reminds developers to review newly added code. It ensures that the code review processes are followed and does not allow code integration without review.
  • Automating: This feature supports correcting simple mistakes automatically. However, this is still an emerging functionality and ideally auto-corrected code should also be reviewed.

Automated code review tools are an important part of the code review process. The points to be considered in the selection of these tools are:

  • Coding language and IDE support: The most basic criterion is that the language in which the code is written is supported by the review tool. It is crucial to find out whether the tool supports the programming languages currently used.
  • Cloud-hosted: Cloud support is another key factor for different teams planning to collaborate. However, a cloud-hosted system can bring security and connectivity problems. The pros and cons of a cloud solution need to be evaluated by the team.
  • Well documented and supported: Well documentation helps team members to learn and being on expert on the tool faster. Technical support would help developers as they master the automatic code review tools.
  • Static code analysis with an extensive set of rules: Predefined rules guide automated code reviews. It is helpful to have a wide range of rules in the auto code review tool.
  • Machine learning (ML) capabilities: Auto code review tools are moving beyond simple rules-based approaches to using machine learning. A tool with ML capabilities is a more future proof solution.