Sentrint vs SonarQube: quality gates or a security report (2026)

Pick by what you want checked. SonarQube's quality gates decide whether new code meets a standard you set, and Sonar's hosted Team plan is $34 a month for up to 100k lines of code. Sentrint looks only for security problems and explains each one, and its Founder plan is $22 a month.

Sonar's plans and documentation, and Sentrint's pricing, were read on 11 November 2026. Sonar prices its products by lines of code rather than by seat or scan, so the cost for your project depends on its size.

How they compare

SonarQube reviews code in CI and holds it to a standard you set, covering maintainability as well as security. Sentrint is a security scan you start when you want one, with nothing to host and no standard to configure:

Choose SonarQube if

• You care about maintainability as much as security and want one tool to judge both.
• You want a gate in CI. Code passes or fails a quality gate, and a failing gate can fail the pipeline job.
• You are happy to run a server. Community Build is free, open source and self-managed, and covers 21 languages.
• Your private project fits the free hosted tier, which goes up to 50k lines of code with no card and no expiry.
• You want your coding agent to query Sonar's analysis. The SonarQube MCP server is open source and free.

Choose Sentrint if

• You want security findings without quality findings mixed in.
• You do not want to host a server or wire a scanner into CI.
• You want each finding explained in plain English with a prompt your coding agent can act on. The sample report shows one.
• Your code grows faster than your budget. Sentrint's price follows how often you scan, not how many lines you have.
• You want dependencies checked for known vulnerabilities on the entry plan. Sonar's dependency scanning comes with Advanced Security, which is sold to Enterprise plan users.

Pricing, as each vendor lists it

Sonar's hosted Team plan is free for private projects up to 50k lines of code, with no card and no expiry, and public open-source repositories get SonarQube for OSS at no cost. The paid Team plan is $34 a month for analysis of up to 100k lines of code, aimed at teams under 50 developers. Enterprise is sold through a conversation with Sonar, and Advanced Security (dependency scanning, malicious packages, SBOM and licence policy) and the Remediation Agent are separate subscriptions on top.

If you would rather host it yourself, Community Build is free. The paid self-managed editions, Developer, Enterprise and Data Center, are priced per instance, per year, based on lines of code, and we did not read those prices.

Sentrint's pricing page lists Free at 1 scan a month for a GitHub account at least 30 days old, Top-up at $10 for 6 scans, and Founder at $22 a month for 36 scans across 15 repositories. The MCP server and REST API come with every plan, Free included, with the scan allowance as the only limit.

Where Sentrint is worse

Sentrint has no gate at all. It cannot fail a CI run, so it will never stop a bad change the way a failing SonarQube quality gate can.

Self-hosting is also a real advantage on Sonar's side. Community Build runs on your own infrastructure as often as you like for nothing. Sentrint's free tier is one scan a month, and the scan reads your code on Sentrint's servers.

Sentrint says nothing about code quality. Duplication, complexity and maintainability are outside its scope, and SonarQube covers them. Sentrint is also a code scan, not a pentest: nothing is executed, no login is tested, and no running site or cloud account is touched. It has no custom rules, no editor plugin, no enterprise compliance reporting, and it reads GitHub repositories only.

Using them together

A team can keep SonarQube as its CI gate and run a Sentrint scan before a launch or a customer's security review. The first Sentrint scan is free, so trying both on your own repository costs nothing.

Is SonarQube free?

Partly, in two ways. Community Build is free to self-host, and the hosted Team plan is free for private projects up to 50k lines of code.

Does SonarQube find security vulnerabilities?

Sonar describes Community Build as automated code review for quality and security. We did not check which security rules each edition includes, so compare them on your own repository, and note that dependency scanning comes with Advanced Security on Enterprise.

Does SonarQube have an MCP server?

Yes. Sonar lists a SonarQube MCP server as open source and free, for bringing its analysis into any agent that speaks MCP.

Can I run SonarQube and Sentrint on the same repository?

Yes. SonarQube runs in your CI pipeline and Sentrint reads a pushed commit when you start a scan, so neither touches the other's setup.

Sources

Read on 11 November 2026:

• SonarQube Community Build: https://www.sonarsource.com/open-source-editions/sonarqube-community-edition/
• Sonar plans and pricing, including the FAQ: https://www.sonarsource.com/plans-and-pricing/
• Sonar docs, quality gates in Community Build: https://docs.sonarsource.com/sonarqube-community-build/quality-standards-administration/managing-quality-gates/introduction-to-quality-gates
• Sonar docs, CI integration in Community Build: https://docs.sonarsource.com/sonarqube-community-build/analyzing-source-code/ci-integration/overview
• Sentrint pricing: https://sentrint.com/pricing
• Sentrint sample report: https://sentrint.com/sample