SonarQube tells you everything.
Rotwise fixes what matters first.

The short version

SonarQube is the reference static analysis platform. It reads over 40 languages and frameworks, ships more than 7,000 rule types, fails a pipeline through quality gates, runs in the IDE, and can be deployed in Sonar's cloud or inside your own perimeter. If you run a platform team, need OWASP or MISRA reporting, or ship in a language Rotwise does not read, SonarQube is the safer choice and this page will not try to talk you out of it.

Rotwise is narrow on purpose. It reads Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, and PHP repositories on GitHub, scores the technical debt AI assistants leave behind, ranks it, and turns the findings into small pull requests that a human approves one batch at a time. If your product was written largely with Cursor or Claude Code, you have one to ten engineers, and the question on the table is "what do we fix first, and who is going to do it", Rotwise was built for that question.

Side by side

Where SonarQube is the better choice

• You need a gate, not a backlog. Quality gates that fail a pipeline, an IDE extension that flags issues as you type, and pull request decoration keep new problems out. Rotwise has none of those. It works on the debt that is already in the repository.
• Your stack is outside seven languages. Java, C#, Kotlin, Swift, C++ or infrastructure code: SonarQube reads them and Rotwise does not.
• You host on GitLab, Bitbucket or Azure DevOps, or analysis has to run inside your own network. Rotwise is GitHub-only and cloud-only.
• Compliance is the deliverable. OWASP and MISRA reporting, SSO and SCIM, portfolios across hundreds of projects: that is enterprise territory, where Sonar says 75% of the Fortune 100 already use it.

Where Rotwise is the better choice

Point a general-purpose analyzer at an app that was written in a few weekends with an assistant and you get a long list. The list is accurate, and it is not a plan. Nobody on a three-person team has a week to triage it, so it gets closed and the debt stays. Rotwise starts where that list ends.

• Order, not volume. Every finding is scored by severity and category, then sequenced: security, correctness, tests, performance, configuration, maintainability. The first batch is the one that would embarrass you on a diligence call, not the longest one.
• Fixes arrive as pull requests. An approved batch becomes one branch, one pull request and one commit per finding, so a single revert undoes it. You see the dry-run diff before approving anything, and you decide when to merge. One batch, one pull request, one revert explains why the batches stay small.
• AI-generated debt is the specialty. The rules and the AI review look for what assistants produce: the empty rescue, the route without an auth check, the query inside a loop, the key pasted from a dashboard. The three findings we see in almost every vibe-coded app shows the usual suspects.
• Priced for a small team. One flat monthly price per plan, a line cap you can predict, and no per-seat pricing. The free scan needs no card and shows you the score before you pay for anything.

What a batch looks like

An illustrative example from a Rails app. A scan flags a controller that writes the raw request parameters into a model:

def create
  @invoice = current_user.invoices.create!(params[:invoice])
  redirect_to @invoice
end

Rotwise reports it as a P0 security finding, "Request parameters assigned to a model without filtering", because a caller can set any attribute the model has, including prices and foreign keys. The finding goes into the first batch with the other P0 and P1 findings from the scan, and the proposed fix is the idiomatic one:

def create
  @invoice = current_user.invoices.create!(invoice_params)
  redirect_to @invoice
end

private

def invoice_params
  params.require(:invoice).permit(:number, :issued_on, :amount_cents)
end

The diff is checked with git apply --check before you see it, lands on a branch named after the batch, and nothing merges until a human merges it. Finding the line is the easy part. The difference is what happens next.

Using both

Many teams should. SonarQube, or its free Community Build, as the gate that keeps new issues out of every pull request. Rotwise for the backlog that piled up before the gate existed, delivered as pull requests you merge between features. Once the Debt Score is where you want it, the gate does the maintenance and the rescans confirm it.

How Rotwise handles your code along the way, including the permissions the GitHub App asks for, is on the security page.

Questions founders ask