SonarQube and StackAttest measure different things about the same repository
If you are looking for a SonarQube alternative, it is worth being clear about what you would be replacing. Sonar's centre of gravity is the long-term health of a codebase, and it has spent a long time getting good at that. StackAttest asks whether an application is ready to run in production, and whether somebody outside the team can read the answer. The two overlap on source analysis, and this page says where.
Which one fits your situation
SonarQube may be the better fit when the question is the long-term health of a codebase: maintainability, reliability, duplication, test coverage imported from your own test runner, and a quality gate that fails a build when new code does not meet the conditions you set. Sonar's documentation describes analysis across a long list of languages, frameworks and infrastructure-as-code platforms, an editor extension, pull request decoration, and a Clean as You Code model that holds new code to a standard instead of demanding a rewrite of everything before it.
StackAttest may be the better fit when the question is whether this application is ready for production and whether somebody outside the team can read the answer: thirteen controls across security, dependencies, runtime behaviour and operational readiness, each graded by how strongly it was established, ending in a Passport you can send rather than a dashboard somebody needs an account to see.
The same questions, asked of both
Each row is one question put to both products. The SonarQube column is drawn from Sonar's own documentation, and where their documentation does not say something, neither does this page.
What it is for
Measuring and holding the quality of a codebase over time. Sonar frames this as Clean Code, with issues grouped by maintainability, reliability and security, and technical debt reported as estimated remediation effort.
Establishing whether an application is ready to run in production, and recording how strongly each control result was established.
Who it is built for
Developers, and the engineering leads who want one standard applied consistently across every repository the team owns.
Founders, and the investors, accelerators and customers asking them for a technical answer they can check.
Scope
The source in the repository, across the languages, frameworks and infrastructure-as-code platforms listed in their documentation. Some of the security analysis, including deeper taint analysis, is edition dependent, which their documentation sets out.
Thirteen controls across application security, dependencies, runtime behaviour and operational readiness, mapped to OWASP ASVS 5, NIST SSDF, CWE, OWASP API Security Top 10, WSTG, SLSA. A defined floor, not a complete security review.
Source analysis
Its centre of gravity. Rules cover bugs, code smells and vulnerabilities, security hotspots are raised for a person to review rather than reported as settled findings, and every issue carries the location in the file that produced it.
A read-only repository validation feeding named controls: where credential material lives, whether authorisation is enforced server side, whether data access is injection safe, and what the dependency graph carries. Findings cite the file they came from.
Runtime testing
No. The analysis is static. Test coverage shown in Sonar comes from reports your own test runner produced, and the product does not deploy or exercise the application.
Runtime validation builds and runs the application in an isolated environment and probes it, including whether the deployed system refuses a read of another account's data.
Where it sits
A quality gate. Conditions are applied to the analysis, most often to new code, and they pass or fail the build and decorate the pull request. Teams build their merge rules around it.
A validation you trigger, ending in a report. There is no gate that fails your build, and nothing here is designed to sit between a developer and a merge.
What a result looks like
An issue with a type, a severity and a location, plus project measures for reliability, maintainability, security, duplication and coverage.
A control outcome with an evidence grade from E0 unknown to E5 independently reproduced, and the controls a run could not reach listed as uncovered rather than passed.
Repeatability
Every analysis, with history retained, so a measure can be tracked across releases and a regression is visible as a movement rather than as a single number.
The same control pack on every run, so two validations are comparable and a change in the product is visible as a change in the result.
What you have at the end
A project dashboard, an issue list, and a gate status that many teams treat as part of their definition of done.
A founder-controlled Passport: control results, evidence grades, what stayed uncovered, and a signed technical attestation.
Where it stops
It reports on the source it analysed. Whether the deployed system enforces what the code implies, whether a rollback path exists, or whether a backup has ever been restored are not questions a static code quality platform sets out to answer.
It is not a code quality platform. There is no maintainability rating, no technical debt measure, no coverage history, and no quality gate to build a CI policy around.
Statements about SonarQube on this page are drawn from Sonar's own public product documentation at docs.sonarsource.com, read on 1 September 2026. Their products change and some capabilities differ by edition. Where this page and their documentation disagree, theirs is right.
Source analysis is the overlap, and Sonar has been at it far longer
Both read your source and both report security issues found in it, so on that ground the work is the same and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. Sonar goes wider: many more languages, many more rules, issue history across releases, and security analysis whose depth depends on the edition you run, all of which their documentation describes. The StackAttest source pass exists to settle named controls and to record each one at a stated evidence grade inside a report addressed to somebody outside the team. If you already run Sonar, expect agreement on the ground you share. What StackAttest adds there is not a larger rule set. It is the runtime half, the operational controls, and the report around them.
What SonarQube is good at
Sonar has been doing static analysis for a long time and its own documentation is the best statement of what it covers: analysis across a long list of languages, frameworks and infrastructure-as-code platforms, rules for bugs, code smells and vulnerabilities, security hotspots raised for review, duplication, and test coverage imported from your own test runner. Its Clean as You Code model holds new code to a standard rather than demanding a rewrite of everything that came before, which is the part teams tend to say made it stick. If your problem is a codebase that is getting harder to work in, that is the problem it was built for.
Maintainability and readiness are different questions
Security is one dimension in Sonar alongside reliability and maintainability, and that is a reasonable way to build a code quality platform. It does mean a project can rate well and still ship with a service key in a browser bundle, an authorisation rule that only exists in the interface, no rollback path and a backup nobody has restored. It can also carry real technical debt and still be safe to run this month. The two questions are not opposed. They are just not the same question, and a green gate is not an answer to whether the thing is ready.
The quality gate is a model we do not have
A quality gate is a genuinely good idea: conditions you set, applied to the analysis, failing the build when new code does not meet them. Teams build their merge rules around it, and it is a capability StackAttest does not offer. Nothing here fails your pipeline. A validation is a report produced when you ask for one, addressed to a reader rather than to a branch. If what you want is a mechanism that keeps code below your standard out of the main branch, Sonar has one and this does not.
Readiness is wider than source
Several of the thirteen controls cannot be settled by reading code at all: whether the deployed system refuses a request for another account's data, whether a rollback path exists, whether backups have ever been restored. Those come from a runtime probe or from an operator attestation, and the report records which. No static analyser claims to answer them, and reading a clean analysis as though it had is the mistake this page exists to prevent.
Using both
Plenty of teams should run both, and nothing here argues otherwise. Sonar keeps the codebase workable and holds new code to a standard on every pull request, which is continuous work inside the team. A validation answers the outside question at the moment somebody asks it, and cites the state of the source as one part of a wider picture that includes the running system. If you can only do one thing this month, do the one that matches whoever is currently asking you for something.
What this page is not claiming
- This is not a claim that StackAttest finds more than SonarQube. It is a narrower source pass inside a wider question, and on the ground they share, Sonar's language and rule coverage reaches well past what thirteen controls need.
- There is no quality gate here, no maintainability rating and no technical debt measure. If a CI policy depends on those, this does not provide them.
- No price for SonarQube appears here. Their editions are published on their own site, and a number copied onto this page would go stale without either of us noticing.
- It is not a penetration test, and running it more often does not make it one. Deterministic checks and bounded runtime probes are not a person hunting for the failure nobody anticipated.
- Thirteen controls is a defined floor, not a complete security review. A clean result means the controls that were tested held at the evidence strength recorded, mapped to OWASP ASVS 5, NIST SSDF, CWE, OWASP API Security Top 10, WSTG, SLSA, and nothing wider than that.
- It is not SOC 2 and does not replace it. SOC 2 attests to organisational controls over a period; this validates technical controls in the software. They answer different questions for different buyers.
- It does not replace human due diligence. It gives a reviewer repeatable evidence to start from, which is a different job from being the reviewer.
- Controls a run could not reach are reported as uncovered rather than passed. A result you did not earn is worse than no result.
Questions
Is StackAttest a SonarQube alternative?
For part of what Sonar does, and not for the rest. If you want something to hold code quality across your repositories, with a gate your pipeline can depend on, Sonar does that job and StackAttest does not do it at all. If what you need is a readable answer to whether the application is ready for production, that is a different instrument, and this is one.
What does SonarQube do that StackAttest does not?
Sonar's documentation describes analysis across a long list of languages and frameworks, maintainability and reliability ratings, technical debt as estimated remediation effort, duplication, imported test coverage, security hotspots for review, an editor extension, pull request decoration, and a quality gate that fails a build. StackAttest does none of those.
Does StackAttest have a quality gate?
No. There is nothing here that fails your build or blocks a merge. A validation runs when you ask for one and produces a report, which is a different mechanism aimed at a different reader.
Does a clean SonarQube analysis mean the application is production ready?
It means the rules that ran found nothing they were written to find in the source they read. It says nothing about whether the deployed system refuses a request for another account's data, whether a rollback path exists, or whether a backup has ever been restored. Those are the controls a validation covers that no static analysis of source reaches.
Do the source results overlap?
Yes, and the page says so above rather than pretending otherwise. Both read the repository and both report security issues in it. Sonar reports far more of them across far more languages; StackAttest uses what it reads to settle named controls at a stated evidence grade inside a report addressed to somebody outside the team.
Can I use both?
Yes, and many teams should. They sit at different points: Sonar inside the development loop on every pull request, a validation at the moment somebody outside the team asks whether the product is ready. Neither one blocks the other.
Related
Find out where your application actually stands
Start with the layer you can run today. The result says which layers ran and what they could not reach, so it is honest about its own limits.