10 Best Code Review Tools Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 20 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
Writing code is a craft, but ensuring it’s clean, efficient, and bug-free often feels like an uphill battle. You’ve likely experienced the frustration of spending hours reviewing pull requests, juggling feedback from teammates, or discovering critical issues too late in the process. Code reviews are essential for maintaining software quality, but they can also be time-consuming and inefficient without the right tools in place.
That’s where code review tools come in. These tools streamline collaboration, catch errors early, and help teams deliver better software faster. Over the years, I’ve worked on countless projects, evaluating a variety of tools to simplify and enhance the code review process. In this guide, I’ll share my top recommendations for code review tools, drawing from real-world experience to help you find the solution that fits your team’s workflow and makes your reviews more effective.
What Is Code Review?
Code review is an integral part of the quality assurance (QA) process of software development, often occurring after the initial coding phase but before the final testing and deployment. The source code undergoes scrutiny from someone other than the original author. It’s used to identify potential areas for improvement in efficiency and security. The primary goals of code review are to ensure the quality of the software and to improve the skills of all developers involved.
Code review tools facilitate this process in several ways, including automating the review, laying out a structure, and making the code easy for other team members to access.
Best Code Review Tools Summary
Tool | Best For | Trial Info | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Best for code health insights | Free trial available | From $20/author/month | Website | |
2 | Best repository | Free plan available | From $4/user/month (billed annually) | Website | |
3 | Best for teams working on Jira | Free plan available (up to 5 users) | From $3.30/user/month (billed annually) | Website | |
4 | Best for centralization | 30-day free trial | From $8/user/month | Website | |
5 | Best security review features | Free plan available | Pricing upon request | Website | |
6 | Best for companies with self-hosted development platforms | Free plan available | From $380/month (billed annually) | Website | |
7 | Best dependency management | Free plan available | From $25/product/month | Website | |
8 | Best open-source option | Free plan available | From $20/user/month | Website | |
9 | Best for teams developing on AWS | Free plan available | Pricing upon request | Website | |
10 | Best for DevOps | Free plan available | From $52/user/month | Website |
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Deel
This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.8 -
New Relic
This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.3 -
Checkmk
This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.7
Best Code Review Tools Reviews
These are my favorite code review tools, along with where I’ve found they excel according to my tests. I’ve also included their strengths and weaknesses, as well as a separate section on how I evaluated them.
CodeScene is a code analysis and visualization tool designed to help development teams improve code quality, understand team dynamics, and enhance software delivery.
Why I Picked CodeScene: It offers a unique code health metric that aggregates various factors—such as code complexity and code smells—to assign a maintainability score to your codebase. This helps you pinpoint areas that may require attention, allowing you to prioritize refactoring efforts effectively. I also like CodeScene's ability to analyze team dynamics. The tool visualizes how individual developers and teams interact with the codebase, highlighting knowledge distribution and potential coordination bottlenecks.
CodeScene Standout Features and Integrations:
Features include hotspot analysis, which identifies frequently modified areas of your code that may need attention. Additionally, behavioral code analysis considers the human aspects of coding, offering a more holistic view of your codebase. CodeScene also provides automated code reviews by integrating with pull requests, ensuring that code quality is maintained without manual intervention.
Integrations include Jira, Trello, Azure DevOps, GitHub Issues, GitLab, YouTrack, Slack, and REST API.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Offers visualizations that make complex data easy to understand
- Provides actionable insights into code quality and team dynamics
- Helps identify and prioritize technical debt effectively
Cons:
- Most integrations are only available on higher-tier plans
- Configuration can be complex for certain setups
GitHub is the most popular Git repository host, offering cloud-based services for development teams of all sizes.
Why I Picked GitHub: When I find an issue in a codebase that I can correct, I use pull requests on GitHub to add suggested code and go over it with my fellow team members. When I initiate one, it lets me compare the branch to the base so everyone can see what’s different and, if there’s a consensus, proceed to merge.
GitHub Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I like using for code review in GitHub include the option to initiate review requests. I can specify someone I want to do it or let GitHub suggest one from analyzing historical blame data.
GitHub also has protected branches where only authorized team members can merge code after review, which is useful when working with new developers or ones with little Git experience.
Integrations are pre-built for Codefactor, Codacy, Codecov, Coveralls, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Terraform, Jira, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Most experienced developers are already familiar with it
- Several integrations
- Robust versioning system
Cons:
- Restrictive free plan
- Relies heavily on the CLI
Bitbucket is a cloud-native Git solution from Atlassian, the company behind products like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, that powers CI/CD workflows.
Why I Picked Bitbucket: Bitbucket won me over with its native Jira integration that simplified code review by creating a bridge between the repository and the platform where the team coordinated operations. It contextualized diffs and comments against the code, and it gave me the option to create issues and assign tasks in Jira from a pull request.
Bitbucket Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I liked while using Bitbucket with Jira include the single-page view that puts my repo in the same window as my workspaces, so I didn’t have to keep going back and forth between the code and team messages. I also liked that I could add checklists to my pull requests, as I would in a regular Jira ticket, and have reviewers check them off before requests get merged.
Integrations, beyond the native Jira, are pre-built for Slack, Buddybuild, CircleCI, Cider Security, CloudCannon, Codeship, Planio, Snyk, Testim.io, and Visual Studio.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Git functionality
- Decent CI/CD and DevOps workflow support
- Enhances collaboration with native Jira integration
Cons:
- Periodic stability issues
- Few integrations and limited functionality with non-Atlassian products
Rhodecode is an open-source code management platform that hosts everything behind a firewall for extra security.
Why I Picked Rhodecode: I chose Rhodecode because it provides multiple options for code repositories and erosion control, with support for Git, Mercurial, and Subversion (SVN). You can bring all of them into one workspace and create common workflows that translate across each one, making collaboration easy without needing to switch existing systems.
Rhodecode Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I liked in Rhodecode for centralization include the ability to migrate from SVN to Git, for example, if you want offline functionality or higher speeds, and have the system rescan and remap the full repository for you. It also provides permission management functions for your servers from behind a firewall to ensure security across different environments.
Integrations are pre-built for Jira, Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis CI, Trello, GitHub, Bitbucket, Slack, Confluence, and Redmine.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Provides full-text searches for code
- Robust centralization features
- Supports multiple repo and version control systems
Cons:
- UI isn’t too user-friendly
- Sluggish performance
Veracode is a digital security company that provides a variety of products and services for software developers, platforms, and workflows.
Why I Picked Veracode: I chose Veracode because of its penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) offering that lets you get pentest experts to check how resilient your system is against attacks. These teams are useful for catching vulnerabilities that might go unnoticed with an automated code review.
Veracode Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I liked for doing security-centric code reviews in Veracode include the static end-to-end scans that check pipelines, policies, and IDEs for vulnerabilities. For the number of security scans that Veracode runs, I appreciated that I always got a report that presented vulnerabilities by how critical they were so I could prioritize fixes by severity.
I also liked Veracode Security Labs, a tool that I used to strengthen my grasp of cybersecurity as I coded with live exercises, sandboxed demonstrations of exploitations, and gamified systems, all with progress reports.
Integrations are pre-built for Jira, CircleCI, Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, Bamboo, and Docker.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Security Labs helps you learn security best practices on the fly
- Provides detailed reports and logs
- Robust security features
Cons:
- Scans take long to complete
- Sometimes flags false positives
Gitea is an open-source self-hosted software development solution that provides Git hosting, code review CI/CD pipelines, and package management.
Why I Picked Gitea: I chose Gitea because it’s written in Go, which makes it fast and lightweight enough to be relatively manageable on self-hosted development platforms. The documentation says it needs 1GB of memory and a dual-core processor for small projects, and this tracks with my tests which I carried out on a Raspberry Pi. As far as self-hosted Git solutions go, I’d say it’s more than workable.
Gitea Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I liked in Gitea include Actions, an integrated CI/CD pipeline that allowed me to create custom workflows with YAML. This made it easy to incorporate a dedicated step for code review in the software development lifecycle. Gitea also supports more than 20 public and private package managers, including Chef, PyPl, Maven, and npm, that I could use to set things up in my self-hosted environment.
Integrations are pre-built for Jenkins, Bitbucket, GitLab, GitHub, Visual Studio Code, Docker, YouTrack, and Agola.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Built-in CI/CD pipeline
- Highly configurable
- Lightweight
Cons:
- Managed option is expensive
- Self-hosted option requires dedicated maintenance teams
Snyk is a developer security platform that provides software composition analysis (SCA), infrastructure-as-code (IAC), static applications security testing (SAST), and containerization functionality.
Why I Picked Snyk: Snyk made it easy for me to keep track of both direct and transitive dependencies, so whenever I was doing code review, I knew how far out any changes were going to ripple. It also analyzed my projects, then located and notified me of vulnerable dependencies so I could get out ahead of potential disasters.
Snyk Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I liked in Snyk include the fact that it reviews code and provides a report that ranks the risks it finds in order of severity, so it’s easier to prioritize fixes if you’re not sure where to start.
Whenever it finds a vulnerability, it also provides clear remediation advice, whether you’re working within a CLI or IDE. For the latter, it works on some of the most popular IDEs, including Visual Studio, VS Code, and every option from JetBrains, making it easy for most developers to include it in their workstations.
Integrations are pre-built for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Jenkins, CircleCI, RubyMine, WebStorm, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Eclipse, and Bitbucket.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Integrates with popular IDEs
- Robust security features
- Strong dependency management
Cons:
- Security is sometimes aggressive and might flag false positives
- Expensive
Codebeat is an open-source automated code analysis and review tool with dedicated support for some of the most popular web and mobile programming languages.
Why I Picked Codebeat: As I’ve stated above, Codebeat provides dedicated, built-in support for specific programming languages that are commonly used for mobile and web development. Currently, it supports automated code review for Javascript, Python, Go, Typescript, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, Swift, and Objective-C, with six more languages in beta.
Codebeat Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that stood out to me while I was testing Codebeat include the GPA feature that scans the code in a namespace for various violations, applies penalties if necessary, and gives you a score out of 4. It also provides light project management features with functions like access levels that let you work better with both internal team members as well as open-source contributors.
Integrations are pre-built for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, and HipChat.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Detailed code review reports with GPA scoring system
- Easy to set up
- Provides automated code reviews
Cons:
- Limited integrations
- Few languages fully supported
AWS CodeCommit is a fully managed platform that hosts Git repositories for source control and security.
Why I Picked AWS CodeCommit: CodeCommit leverages several features native to AWS that you can use for code reviews. For example, I could control access to the code itself by user, time, and location using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Key Management Service (KMS).
AWS CodeCommit Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that made me recommend CodeCommit for companies working within AWS include the ability to create repos using whatever method you prefer from AWS SDKs, CLI, or the Management Console. You can also monitor the repositories closely when they’re live with CloudTrail and CloudWatch, both of which track several metrics and give you detailed status logs.
Integrations are native for other AWS products and services, including S3, KMS, IAM, DynamoDB, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, SDK, Management Console, CLI, and SNS.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Robust user access control
- Native integrations for AWS products and services
- Easy to setup on AWS
Cons:
- Git functionality not as refined as alternatives like GitHub
- Limited non-AWS integrations
Azure DevOps, formerly called Visual Studio Teams Services, is a collection of tools for CI/CD, agile, and DevOps development workflows from Microsoft.
Why I Picked Azure DevOps: Azure DevOps provides a suite of tools that streamline cross-department collaboration, tools I believe are good for involving all major stakeholders in code review. Most of these tools can also be integrated into CI/CD pipelines; at the center of everything is Azure Repos, the Git-based tool that I used to host the code and share it with team members.
Azure DevOps Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I liked for DevOps with Azure DevOps include Artifacts, a package management tool that supports Python, npm, Maven, and NuGet from public and private sources. With Boards, a project management tool that connects directly to Repos, I could track code review feedback and requests from my team members.
Integrations are pre-built for Docker, Jenkins, Slack, GitHub, Jira, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, GitLab, Xcode, and ServiceNow.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Free for small teams
- Robust DevOps and collaboration features
- Provides CI/CD pipelines
Cons:
- Individual tools aren’t as robust as standalone alternatives
- Opinionated design means limited customizability
Other Code Review Software Options
I evaluated several tools for this article and found a couple that were good enough to include if you still feel like you need something different from what’s in the main list:
- Collaborator
Collaboration features
- GitLab
Reporting features
- JetBrains Space
Organizational features
- Codegrip
Rule management
- Codestriker
Notification system
- Codefactor
Issue tracking features
- Peer Review for Trac
Trac code review plugin
- JArchitect
For Java review
- Review Board
Document review
- Gogs
Golang review tool
Selection Criteria For Code Review Tools
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best code review tools for this article:
Core Functionality
A few of the main functions I wanted the tools to cover include:
- Repository access so it’s easy for reviewers to get to the codebase
- Automation of repetitive tasks to facilitate scaling and speed
- Collaborative features like notifications, boards, and messaging to make peer reviews more manageable across teams
Key Features
Some features I wanted the tools to have for a better chance at making the list include:
- Logging for bugs and other issues that reviewers find in the code
- Remediation so that developers can act on issues they uncover
- Workflow management so the process moves along smoothly between programmers and reviewers
Usability
I consider code review a necessary bottleneck in software development, so I needed tools that were easy to use, like straightforward integration into the system and navigable interfaces, in order to reduce the time spent on the process while retaining effectiveness.
Integrations
As one part of the software development process, I needed the subjects to be able to integrate with other tools developers use, including IDEs, messaging apps, and CI/CD pipelines.
Costs & Pricing for Code Review Tools
Each code review tool plan has its own features and pricing designed to match the specific needs and budgets of different organizations. Below is a breakdown of common plan options in the code review market.
Plan Type | Average Price | Common Features Included | Best For |
---|---|---|---|
Free | $0 - $20/user/month | - Limited features | - Individual Developers: Ideal for freelance developers or small personal projects. |
Basic | $21 - $50/user/month | - Access for a small team | - Small QA Teams: Perfect for startups or teams with limited testing needs and budget constraints. |
Standard | $51 - $100/user/month | - Enhanced test case management | - Growing QA Teams: A good fit for mid-sized teams with growing testing requirements. |
Premium | $101+ /user/month | - Advanced automation and reporting | - Large Enterprises: Caters to established QA departments with complex testing needs, large teams, and a focus on advanced automation and reporting. |
Enterprise | Custom pricing | - Customizable for large organizations | - Global Organizations: Designed for highly regulated industries or large-scale deployments requiring extensive customization, security, and dedicated support. |
People Also Ask
If you’re new to code review and feel you need more beyond the tools, here are the answers to some questions you might have:
What is the purpose of a code review?
Is code review part of DevOps?
How long should a code review take?
Conclusion
Code review means your team has to stop active development and go back to the code base, meaning it’s inherently a bottleneck in the software development process. Finding the right code review tools for your workflow can keep disruption to a minimum and ensure you can still ship products on time rather than be even more of a stumbling block.
I hope the information in this article was enough to get you started. Subscribe to The CTO Club newsletter for more great insights.