Qodana is a SAST platform from JetBrains that brings 3,000+ IDE inspections into CI/CD pipelines. It runs the same analysis engines that power IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and other JetBrains IDEs, supporting 60+ languages.
The platform covers code quality, security vulnerabilities, and technical debt tracking. A free Community tier is available, with paid plans starting at $6 per active contributor per month.
What is Qodana?
Qodana extends JetBrains IDE inspections beyond individual developer workstations into automated CI/CD workflows. When developers use IntelliJ IDEA or WebStorm, they see warnings as they type. Qodana applies those same analyses to entire codebases, catching issues that might be missed or ignored during local development.
Each language gets a specialized linter based on the corresponding JetBrains IDE: Qodana for JVM uses IntelliJ’s engine, Qodana for Python uses PyCharm’s, and so on. This means the same rules and the same accuracy in both places.
The current version is 2025.3. There are 15 linters available, including 4 free Community linters (JVM Community, Python Community, .NET Community, Clang).
Pricing
Qodana uses a contributor-based pricing model. An “active contributor” is anyone who committed to a Qodana Cloud project in the past 90 days.
| Tier | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Community | Free | Java, Kotlin, Python, C#, C++, VB.NET. Limited linters and historical data. |
| Ultimate | $6/contributor/month | All languages. Quality gates, baselines, code coverage, FlexInspect, Quick-Fix. 180 days historical data. |
| Ultimate Plus | $15/contributor/month | Everything in Ultimate plus taint analysis, vulnerability checker, license audit, SSO, public API. Unlimited historical data. |
Minimum 3 contributors for paid plans. 60-day free trial available for both paid tiers.
Key features
Taint analysis (Ultimate Plus)
Qodana traces potentially harmful data through your application to identify paths where untrusted input reaches sensitive operations without validation. The engine covers 700+ built-in taint configuration entries for common frameworks and libraries.
Performance benchmark: Qodana can analyze 7 million lines of code in under 30 minutes for taint analysis (as of the 2025.2 release).
Currently supported in the PHP and JVM linters.
Vulnerability checker (Ultimate Plus)
Uses the OSV tool to check Gradle, Maven, npm, and PyPI dependencies for known vulnerabilities. Available in the JVM, .NET, Python, Go, PHP, and JS linters.
Technical debt tracking
The baseline feature marks a project’s current state as a starting point, then tracks only new problems from that point forward. When combined with quality gates, only new issues count toward the threshold — pre-existing technical debt doesn’t block builds.
Getting started
curl -fsSL https://jb.gg/qodana-cli/install | bash or brew install jetbrains/utils/qodana on macOS. Windows users can use winget install JetBrains.QodanaCLI.qodana scan in your project directory. Qodana auto-detects the language and selects the appropriate linter. Results open in a local HTML report.JetBrains/[email protected]) with a QODANA_TOKEN. Native integrations also exist for GitLab CI, Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, and TeamCity.qodana.yaml to your project root with failThreshold and baseline settings. New problems exceeding the threshold will fail the build.When to use Qodana
Qodana is a natural fit for teams already using JetBrains IDEs. The consistency between editor warnings and CI/CD findings eliminates the “works on my machine” gap for code quality.
For teams not using JetBrains IDEs, SonarQube offers a broader plugin ecosystem. For focused security scanning, Semgrep or Snyk Code may provide deeper vulnerability coverage. Qodana’s strength is combining code quality, security, and technical debt tracking with the same engine developers already use.
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