Best Code Review tools for developers in 2023

Code reviewing is the process of systematically examining and testing code in the early stages of development to catch elusive bugs, logic problems, and uncovered edge cases. Besides ensuring that you continuously ship quality code to production, code reviews also provide a second opinion on how to implement a solution and a way for developers to understand the company codebase better.

Establishing a strong code review strategy in your software development workflow can also strengthen collaboration, enhance security and help your team develop a standard coding style. Simply put, code reviewing is a great practice with immense benefits, irrespective of your development methodology. 

Depending on the size and structure of your team, there are different approaches you can adopt in your code review process. Traditionally, code reviews were done over the shoulder, where a more experienced developer would read through the code and verbally provide suggestions. For distributed teams, the reviewer would initiate a conversation, provide suggestions or point out bugs through a public mail list to the rest of the team. Code reviews can also be performed through pair programming.

While the above methods have worked over the years, the modern workplace recognizes digital collaboration, technology, and tools as the way to create a more agile work environment. Modern code review tools have automated most aspects of the code reviewing process, increasing efficiency and collaboration.

In this article, we will explore what code review tools are; and how they can help you or your team of developers improve the quality of your code without much hassle. 

What are code review tools, and why are they important?

We have already pointed out that code reviewing is an integral part of the software development life cycle, whose primary goal is to minimize bugs and improve code quality. 

Code review tools make the code reviewing process efficient by providing a clear structure, automating tasks, and an easier way of integrating code review into your software development process. Code review tools also facilitate code review collaboration and make the entire process transparent and consistent.

Tool-assisted code reviews also streamline communication between developers involved and support documentation of the process. These features could save time, allowing you to focus on creating more features.

Best Code Review tools

A wide range of code review tools are listed on the internet with different features that can meet the needs of just about any team. However, some have overlapping functionalities; thus, choosing the ideal one can be overwhelming. To help you get started with your search for the perfect code review tool below is a highlight of the most popular code review tools and their functionalities. 

Crucible

Crucible by the Atlassian team is a lightweight, collaborative web-based code review platform that enables developers to review code, discuss changes, share knowledge and identify defects across different version control systems such as Helix Core, Git, SVN, and Mercurial.

Its key features include the following:

• Allows developers to collaborate within their code with inline comments, threaded discussions, and mentions.
•  Activity streams show recent updates and comments, allowing you to follow what is happening throughout the project.
• Real-time personalized notifications and review reminders.
• Pre-commit reviews.
• Seamless integration with other Atlassian products such as Confluence, Bitbucket, and Jira.

Crucible has two payment plans tailored for small teams of up to 5 and enterprises with large teams. Both plans have a 30-day trial period. For small teams of up to 5 users, you’ll need to make a one-time payment of $10, while large teams need to make a one-time payment of $1100.

Gerrit

Gerrit is an open-source web-based code review platform by Google with Git-enabled SSH and HTTPS servers compatible with all Git clients. With syntax highlighting and colored differences, you can easily identify old and new files and easily change specific sections.

Other key features include

• Simplified management by hosting many Git repositories together.
• Discuss specific sections of your code before making changes.
• Managing workflows with deeply integrated and delegatable access controls.
• Gerrit can be extended and customized by installing server plugins.

Gerrit is an open-source tool and is therefore available for free.

GitHub

Github is the world’s most popular code-hosting platform that lets developers collaborate on projects. With over 83 million reportedly using the platform as of June 2022, Github is perhaps the most popular code-reviewing platform. Beginning with a simple pull request, you can comment on the changes, approve the changes or request further changes before a pull request is merged. 

Other notable features.

• The ability to create team owners responsible for code in a certain repository. Code owners receive automatic review requests and can approve changes made to the code they own.
• Assign code reviews and clarify which team member should submit their review for a pull request.
• You can also request reviews from multiple contributors. The contributors will be notified of your requests.
• You can also insert multiple comments to clarify a code review in a pull request.
• GitHub also allows you to enforce restrictions on a piece of code. For instance, you can require reviews before certain branches are merged.
• GitHub copilot suggests entire functions or lines in your code editor.

Sprkl for CI

Sprkl is a Personal Observability platform that provides individual developers with telemetry data and insights about every code change right in the IDE. Powered by OpenTelemetry, we instrument every code change and analyze it upon execution. 

We recently launched Sprkl for CI to shorten code review and debugging time by providing a focused, personalized report for every Pull Request. See more profound into the effects of your code diff, including hidden errors, app ripple effect, performance and security insights, diff coverage, and more. 

With Sprkl for CI, team leads can benefit from

• Faster, more efficient code review – identify issues and understand the context of the pull request before reading a line of code
• Improved team productivity – encourage collaboration among team members, 
• Easier onboarding of new team members – see clear views of system architecture and flow traces  

With Sprkl for CI, dev teams can benefit from

• Instant debugging – trace back issues to specific lines of code 
• Quicker iterations – pull backtraces from CI to your IDE, debug, fix and commit again 
• Easier collaboration – teammates quickly understand the context of your diff

Sprkl Personal Observability platform can also help:

• Understand the context of the diff before reading a single line of code with focused insights and graphic visualization.
• Debug comfortably – pull your observability data to your local IDE and see your relevant traces instead of endless logs.
• Iterate quicker – pull backtraces from CI to your IDE, debug, fix and commit again 
• Collaborate easily- communicate with your teammates to understand the context of your diff.

The new personal observability platform currently works with GitHub Actions. You can join the free Beta release of Sprkl for CI here.

GitLab

Gitlab is an open-source collaborative software development platform providing a range of features such as continuous integration, issue tracking, and team support.

GitLab also enables distributed teams to review code, comment, discuss changes asynchronously, and identify bugs. Using GitLab, you can streamline your development team’s code review and approvals through the approval workflow and inline comments. 

Other key features:

• Powerful planning tools to ensure that your team is working on the right things at the right time. The team planning feature meets the needs of small to large enterprise teams and includes features such as time tracking, issues board milestone lists, Jira issues integration, and many more.
• Portfolio management to help you and your team gain product vision and track and measure the velocity of various projects. 
• The GitLab service desk allows people to create issues in your GitLab instance without using their user account.
• Built-in GitLab CI/CD capabilities enable you to build, test, deploy and monitor your code from a single application.

GitLab offers a free plan for individual users and a premium package starting at $19/month. 

SmartBear Collaborator

Collaborator by SmartBear is a code and document review software that allows teams to collaborate and produce high-quality documents and code. Using Collaborator, developers can peer-review code, design documents, documentation, test plans, and user stories and easily keep the rest of the team informed on the changes made. 

Since every project may have unique requirements, customizable templates and checklists allow you to build peer-review frameworks that work best for your team. 

Other Key features:

• Variety of review styles depending on your workflow and formality requirements.
• Ability to have simultaneous reviewers.
• Seamless integration with primary SCM tools, IDEs, and version control tools.
• Reports and metrics to help you improve your team’s code-review process.
• Bug tracking through comments, tracking bugs in real-time.

Embold

Embold is a static code analysis platform that allows developers to monitor and manage the quality of their software projects. Embolden analyzes code issues, design issues, metrics, and duplication.

Through integrated and automated workflows for pull requests and commits, you can save time on every code review by quickly viewing the effect of every code change on the quality of your code.

Other Notable Features:

• Key performance indicators that bring transparency to your software development process.
• A partitioning assistant to help break down large classes and improve maintainability. 
• Anti-pattern visualizations to help developers understand issues.

Embold has a free and premium version starting at $4.99/month.

Bitbucket

Bitbuckets code review is a code first that allows you to collaborate, find bugs, and merge with confidence. Bitbucket’s code review process allows you can take control and significantly reduce the time to approve using the features below:

• A side-by-side view that will enable you to compare large files and make comments, among other task management features.
• Find and fix bugs faster before shipping to production through scans integrated into your pull request views.
• A Checklist to guide your code reviewing process and thus Merge with confidence.

• The ability to create a workspace and invite your team members to collaborate.
• Forum to discuss changes before they are merged into the main project. 
• Choosing the right workflow that enhances productivity and is perfect for your team.

Bitbucket offers you a free and standard plan starting at $3 per user per month.

JetBrains Space

JetBrains space is an all-in-one software development platform integrated with JetBrain’s IDEs. Space has incredible features, such as code review, git hosting, CI/CD pipelines, orchestrating cloud dev environments, chats, and file storage. 

Space’s code review feature allows you to establish a customizable and robust code review process that works for you with or without formal rules. With this feature, you can review code before it is merged or after merging a couple of commits to the main branch.

Other features include

• The ability to collaborate in one space and directly in your codebase through discussions.
• The ability to track conversations between the review and the author of the code.
• Ability to make comments on multiple lines, suggest direct changes to the code and accept them in a single click.
• Permission scheme to restrict direct commits to the main branch or any other branch.

Space offers a free and paid plan starting from $8 per user per month

Review Board

Review Board is a web-based, open-source collaborative tool for reviewing code, PDFs, documents, and graphics all in one place. Review Board has a straightforward interface but can scale to thousands of repositories of all kinds. 

Other notable features include

• You can review, discuss and track issues that need to be fixed in one place.
• One can also view every code review request on the same page.
• Automate code reviews using the review bot.
• Crucial command line tool to execute various actions.
• Ability to integrate with other services, such as Circle CI, and connect to your repositories.

Review Board is an open-source tool and is therefore available for free.

CodeScene

CodeScene is a behavioral code analysis AI tool that helps software development teams identify hidden code risks and provide feedback on code quality and potential issues. Unlike the traditional static code analysis tools that focus on low-level coding verification, CodeScene  focuses on helping teams manage technical debt, improve efficiency and make sound architectural decisions. 

Key Features.

• All major Git Hosting platforms.
• Automated code reviews that can detect code quality issues.
• Support for building pipelines such as Jenkins.
• Hotspots to help you prioritize technical debt and improvements.
• Ability to identify refactoring targets that have the highest ROI.

CodeScene offers standard and pro plans with Cloud and on-premise hosting options for €18 and €27, respectively.

Helix Swarm

A web-based free code review tool that unites teams to perform effective code reviews, share files, tasks, and comments, and submit final work with this tool. Helix swarm streamlines your entire code review process by helping you ensure that the right people review code on time. 

Helix swarm integrates with Helix core for automated code reviews while supporting a collaborative environment that allows users to build, test, and release products faster.

Other features:

• Comment threading allows you to bring up issues by adding comments in line with the code. 
• A review dashboard to monitor code in progress or complete code reviews gives you visibility across the project.
• Custom workflows that give you and your team control and flexibility over the code review process.
• Helix Swarm integrates well with Jenkins.

Helix Swarm is free.

CodeStriker

An open-source web application that supports online code reviewing. Codestriker will minimize your paperwork by recording all issues, comments, and decisions in a database. Codestriker also supports traditional document reviews, diffs generated by Source Code Management (SCM) systems,s, and plain diffs.

Other notable features:

• Integration point with CVS, Clearcase, Perforce, Visual SourceSafe, and Subversion.
• A configurable metric system that allows you to record code inspection metrics.

CodeStriker is an open-source tool under the GPL license and is freely accessible.

Rhodecode

Rhodecode is a web-based platform that provides a unified interface for team collaborations on code reviews, discussions, and source code changes to improve code quality. Rhodecode integrated well with SVN, Git, and Mercurial, allowing you and your team to conduct code reviews across all your repositories. You can also use intelligent commits to trigger comments and changesets, share gists and provide feedback with inline code reviews.

Other features:

• Rhodecode enables you to code faster, debug, iterate and apply the best coding practices across your codebase.
• Improved team collaboration that fosters innovation and delivers quality products faster and better resource allocation.
• Unified permission management and enterprise-grade source code protection.
• Workflow automation for faster interaction and implementation.

The Rhodecode community edition is free and open source. However, the cloud-based version costs $8 per user per month, while the on-premise version costs $75/per year per user.

Visual Expert 

A code review solution that specializes in server-side code. Visual expert integrates well with the following three major DBMS: SQL Server, PowerBuilder, and Oracle PL/SQL. Visual expert allows teams to collaborate on projects, for instance, during migration or when maintaining a large application. 

To further enhance collaboration, once code is reviewed and analyzed on the server side,  other team members can access it from a shared repository. Alternatively, any team member can create a project and share it with the rest of the team. 

Visual Expert also has a task scheduler that lets you define when to perform code analysis. The Visual Expert server also generates your code documentation. Using the task scheduler, you can define when, how, and where to generate it.

Visual Expert has a free trial. However, a year subscription for the standalone license starts at $495.

Veracode

Veracode is the leading SaaS applications security company providing multiple security analysis tools on a single platform. Alongside cloud-based enterprise-class application security, seamless integration, and agile security solutions, Veracode also provides cutting-edge automated code-review tools that speed development.

Veracode code review tools help improve your application security from inception to production using a combination of deep expertise, best practices, and cutting-edge technology. 

Other code review tools by Veracode include

• Static code analysis tools that let developers quickly identify security flaws and fix them.
• Software composition tools that help detect vulnerabilities in open-source and commercial code.
• Static IDE code analysis tool that sans and identifies flaws as code is being written.

Codacy

Codacy is a DevOps intelligence program that automates code reviews and monitors the quality of every pull request and commit. Codacy supports over 40 programming languages, meaning you can integrate Codacy into your workflow.  

If you have an existing code review process, Codacy is flexible and can easily adapt to your process. Once you’ve added your git repository, Codacy will automatically detect issues and notify you to take action. 

Using Codacy, you can also get visibility into the health of your projects,  track their quality over time, know the amount of technical debt and make informed decisions. 

You can set up Codacy to run on the cloud by setting up your repository with just a few clicks. Alternatively, you can also opt for the self-hosted plan packed with first-class security on your servers. 

Codacy has a Teams package for individual developers and small teams starting from $15/month per user and an enterprise plan whose pricing can be discussed with their sales team.

Reviewable

Reviewable is a lightweight code review and analysis tool to help you and your team get through code reviews quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly. Reviewable seamlessly integrates with Github and Github Enterprise, helping you start your code review immediately.

Other notable features.

• Tracks where participants can participate in discussions and keep them alive until an issue is resolved.
• Ability to keep track of revisions to make sure that no changes are missed.
• Line comments that map across file revisions and stays in place until they have been resolved.
• Customizable fonts, margins, and keyboard shortcuts.
• A modern and intuitive interface and full contextual help.

Reviewable has a free and open-source plan that is free and an organization plan going for $39 per month for 10 contributors.

CodeFactor.io

CodeFactor is a code analysis and review tool that gives you a glance at the quality of code in your whole project, recent commits, and bug-prone files. CodeFactor also allows you to track fixed and new issues for every pull request or commit you make. 

Other features include:

• Automated code reviews Git; you just need to paste the link to the repository.
• Help manage technical debt by showing you the most critical issue based on code size, file size, and change frequency.
• CodeFactor also allows you to create comments directly from code.
• Automatic status update for GitHub or Bitbucket pull requests.
• You can also toggle inspection for any repository branch on the fly.

CodeFactor offers a free community plan; the pro plans start at $19 monthly.

Conclusion

Code reviews play a very important role in any software development lifecycle, regardless of the technologies you’re using. Choosing the right code review tool will help you or your team catch elusive bugs, improve code quality and potentially save money and time. In this article, we have highlighted some of the most popular code review tools giving you a good starting point for your search for the right tool for you and your team. However, even a less popular code review tool not listed here can also be the right tool that meets your needs.

Faq

What is a code review tool?

A code review tool is a software application that enables a team of developers to automate the process of reviewing code for bugs and vulnerabilities, improving the quality and consistency of the code in the process.

What is the code review process?

The code review process begins by identifying individuals responsible for reviewing the code. In most setups, experienced developers review code and provide suggestions. However, this can also change depending on the workload of the individuals, project timelines, the size of your team, and the project’s requirements. Finally, you also need to create guidelines on how your team should objectively critique each other’s code and provide constructive feedback. 

Why are code reviews important?

Every organization can benefit from a streamlined code review process regardless of the existing workflows. Some of the benefits that can be realized through code reviews are:

• Code reviews improve the quality and consistency of your codebase.
• Catch some obvious bugs and thus reduce any messes in production.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing of the codebase across the team.
• You can mentor junior developers in the process.
• Code reviews allow your team to ensure that their code adheres to set guidelines.

What are the common ways to conduct code reviews?

The most efficient way to conduct code reviews is by leveraging the code review tools we discussed above. However, this can also be coupled with other code-reviewing methods, such as pair programming, walkthroughs by an experienced developer, or using an email to share feedback on a certain piece of code.

Try Sprkl for CI for free.