Burned out by code reviews? You're not alone! GitLab's survey has them ranked #3 in causing developer burnout, right behind tight deadlines and long work hours. The reasons? Tedious manual tasks, limited reviewer bandwidth, and inconsistent feedback plagued by incomplete documentation, missing context, and unclear code standards. This transforms a crucial quality control process into a productivity deadweight, hindering developer progress and morale.
However, AI's entry in software development has helped developers to use AI tools for effective code reviews. AI algorithms can analyze code, and uncover hidden vulnerabilities and bugs that human eyes might miss. Moreover, it takes care of your repetitive tasks like syntax checks and basic analysis, freeing you to focus on higher-level thinking and problem solving. What's more is these AI-powered code review tools help maintain consistent code standards and identify stylistic quirks, leading to cleaner, more maintainable code.
In this article, let’s explore the top AI tools for code reviews, outlining their features, price structures, getting-started guides, and use cases for you to get the tool that suits the development needs.
1. CodeGuru Reviewer
CodeGuru Reviewer is an AI-powered tool from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses machine learning and static application security testing (SAST) tools for code review and profiling, automatically providing recommendations for improvements.
It is designed to help developers detect security vulnerabilities in their code at any stage of the development lifecycle. It identifies code quality issues, security vulnerabilities, and hard-to-find bugs. Integrates seamlessly with popular code repositories like GitHub, Bitbucket, and AWS CodeCommit.
CodeGuru Reviewer also scans for hardcoded credentials and identifies issues ranging from Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) Top Ten issues, Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25 issues, log injection, secrets, and secure usage of AWS APIs and SDKs. The tool provides integrations with various integrated development environments (IDEs) and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools, making it adaptable to various development workflows.
CodeGuru Reviewer is suitable for codebase maintenance, finding performance bottlenecks, and ensuring best practices are followed in your code.
Features
- Precise Vulnerability Detection: CodeGuru Security uses machine learning, drawing from years of AWS and Amazon.com security practices. It identifies security vulnerabilities in your code, like injection flaws, data leaks, weak cryptography, and missing encryption.
- Inline Code Fixes: For certain vulnerabilities, CodeGuru Security uses machine learning to generate ready-made code blocks that can replace your vulnerable code lines. You can remove the problematic code and insert the suggested code updates directly into your file.
- Vulnerability Tracking: It keeps tabs on a vulnerability even if it moves to a different part of a file or another file. Once a vulnerability is found, the tracking feature can detect if it's still there in subsequent scans or if it has been fixed. When it confirms that a vulnerability is fixed, it automatically marks the finding as 'Closed,' and this update can be sent to your notification system.
- Integrations: Besides running code scans in the console, you can integrate CodeGuru Security with various other tools and services. This integration allows you to automate vulnerability detection without disrupting your development process. You can find a list of supported IDEs and services for CodeGuru Security on the console's Integrations page.
- Metrics Dashboard: CodeGuru Security analyzes your findings and creates metrics presented in a dashboard. The dashboard offers insights into your findings, like the average time it takes to resolve them, types of vulnerabilities, and their severity. With vulnerability tracking, the dashboard maintains an updated view of your code's security status. These metrics help track application security progress, identify vulnerabilities during development, and collaborate with teams to address security issues.
Price Structure
CodeGuru Reviewer offers a 90-day free trial. During this trial period, users can analyze up to 100,000 lines of code for free with the AWS Free Tier. After the trial, pricing is based on the number of lines of code analyzed per month, with a pay-as-you-go model.
How to Get Started With CodeGuru Reviewer?
- Sign in to your AWS account.
- Create a CodeGuru Reviewer repository and configure it to point to your codebase.
- The tool will automatically scan your code and generate recommendations.
Advantages
- The tool is trained on AWS security best practices and benefits from the insights gained from millions of code vulnerability assessments conducted within Amazon.
- It is designed to maintain a very low false-positive rate, ensuring that the vulnerabilities it identifies are genuine.
- Provides a console, with a simple interface to initiate code review. Users can also associate their existing code repositories on platforms such as GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, or AWS CodeCommit directly within the CodeGuru console.
- Can find code problems at any stage of development, no matter how your team works, and it smoothly works with your software tools CodeGuru Reviewer seamlessly plugs into your CI/CD tooling.
- Reduce false positives by performing deep semantic analysis, CodeGuru Reviewer significantly reduces the number of false positives. This ensures that engineering resources are not wasted on non-vulnerable issues, allowing teams to focus on productive tasks.
- Automatic bug closure tracking includes a bug-tracking feature that automatically detects when a vulnerability is closed. This simplifies bug tracking and eliminates the need for manual tracking efforts.
- No Virtual machine provisioning is required for setup. It easily integrates with your existing tooling and scales based on your workload, ensuring minimal operational overhead.
Disadvantages
- The pay-as-you-go pricing model can be expensive for large codebases.
- Goes out of context in most cases as it would provide more suggestions that do not align with the query, but it is expected to mature fully over time.
Snyk
Snyk is an AI-based security platform that specializes in identifying vulnerabilities in open-source code libraries. It integrates with various development tools and platforms. Snyk can be used to scan code during the development process and in continuous integration pipelines.
Snyk is primarily used for identifying and fixing security vulnerabilities in third-party libraries and dependencies.
Features
- AI-Powered Code Generation within your IDE
- Real-Time Code Scanning by Snyk:
- Effortless Vulnerability Fixes Recommended by Snyk
- Snyk open source to find and fix vulnerabilities in your open-source software.
Price Structure
Snyk offers a free tier with limited features. Paid plans are available, with pricing based on the number of users and organizations.
How to Get Started With Synk?
- Sign up for a Snyk account.
- Connect your code repositories or CI/CD pipelines.
- Snyk will automatically scan your code for vulnerabilities and provide remediation advice.
Advantages
- Specializes in open-source code vulnerability detection.
- Integrates with various development tools.
- Offers a free tier for small projects.
Disadvantages
- Limited focus on general code quality and best practices.
- The learning curve can be very complex for beginners and does provide too many false positives.
Integrations
Snyk understands that developers and teams have their own preferred tools and processes for building and managing code. That's why it offers a wide array of integrations, ensuring that you can incorporate security seamlessly into your established workflows.
Some of the popular integrations include Bitbucket, Jira, GitHub, and IntelliJ. These integrations enable you to easily incorporate Snyk's robust security capabilities into your familiar development environment, making it convenient to identify and address vulnerabilities right from where you work, find out more about integrations.
3. PullRequest
PullRequest is an AI-powered code review as a service platform. It provides expert code reviewers to review your pull requests. Uses AI to identify code quality and security issues.
PullRequest is suitable for organizations looking to augment their code review process with expert reviewers.
Features
- Reducing Engineering Cycle Times: PullRequest is geared towards streamlining the development process. By leveraging a combination of AI and human expertise, it helps identify potential issues within your code swiftly. This means shorter feedback loops, faster issue resolution, and ultimately, reduced engineering cycle times.
- Enhancing Overall Code Quality: PullRequest doesn't just spot problems; it actively contributes to code quality improvement. With a team of industry experts and a careful review process, it offers recommendations and guidance to elevate the overall quality of your codebase. This results in cleaner, more maintainable, and higher-quality code.
- Learning from Industry Experts: PullRequest provides access to experienced industry experts who specialize in various domains. Developers can learn from these experts' feedback, gaining insights, best practices, and knowledge that can benefit their professional growth.
- Identifying Development Trends: PullRequest's continuous code review process allows it to spot trends and patterns in your development workflow. This helps in recognizing areas of improvement, and potential bottlenecks, and allows you to adapt to emerging industry practices.
Price Structure
PullRequest offers custom pricing based on the specific needs of your organization. But the standard offerings are:
- Pay-as-You-Go Code Review: At $199 per one hour of review. With integrations such as GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket Cloud. Access to a network of top-notch engineer reviewers, and support via email, community, and chat.
- On-Demand Code Review: At $699 per developer per month (with a minimum of 5 developers). You get code quality and review metrics for your team. Annual code-level security reporting. Enhanced support from the Premium Customer Success team.
- Enterprise or Custom Solutions: This pricing category is tailored to your specific organization's needs.
How to Get Started With PullRequest?
- Sign up for a PullRequest account.
- Integrate your code repositories with PullRequest.
- Submit pull requests, and PullRequest's experts will review your code.
Advantages
- Provides access to experienced code reviewers.
- Uses AI to assist in identifying code issues.
- Custom pricing to fit organizational needs.
Disadvantages
- It may be cost-prohibitive for small teams or projects.
4. CodeClimate
CodeClimate is a static code analysis platform that uses AI to analyze your code for issues, such as code complexity, duplication, and style violations. Integrates with various code repositories and CI/CD tools. Provides a maintainability score to assess code quality over time.
CodeClimate is suitable for teams looking to improve code quality and maintainability.
Features
- Automated Code Review Comments: Code Climate delivers automated code review comments on your pull requests. This means you receive valuable feedback to enhance your code quality and security right within your development workflow.
- Comprehensive Test Coverage: Ensure your code has proper test coverage every time. Code Climate allows you to examine test coverage line by line within code differences. Say goodbye to merging code without adequate tests; Code Climate has got you covered.
- Maintainability Alerts: Tackle technical debt head-on with Code Climate. Quickly spot frequently changed files that lack proper coverage and have maintainability issues. Keep track of your progress with measurable goals, monitoring your code's health day by day.
- Code Prioritization: Identify the critical areas to focus on. Code Climate lets you connect code quality insights with high-churn areas. This way, you can concentrate your efforts on files that need better coverage and maintenance, ensuring you address what truly matters in your codebase.
Pricing
CodeClimate offers a free trial with limited features. Paid plans are available, with pricing based on the number of users and private repositories.
How to Get Started With CodeClimate?
- Sign up for a CodeClimate account.
- Connect your code repositories or CI/CD pipelines.
- CodeClimate will automatically analyze your code and provide feedback.
Advantages
- Offers insights into code maintainability.
- Integrates with popular development tools.
- Provides a free trial for evaluation.
Disadvantages
- Pricing can be prohibitive for large organizations.
5. CodeScene
CodeScene offers valuable experience in your software development journey with simple integration to your GitHub account to identify and analyze malicious actions with your code structure, and other hidden vulnerabilities. Recognizes and addresses all tech debts that will deliver significant improvements, efficiency, and maximize return on investment.
Features
Utilizes behavioral code analysis to provide actionable insights into your codebase.
Aids in streamlining bug detection and resolution. Focuses on code quality enhancement. Its most notable features are:Â
- Automated Code Insights: CodeScene conducts automated code reviews and provides immediate feedback. It sets quality gates and prioritizes code issues, ensuring your codebase stays on track.
- Pull Request Integrations: CodeScene seamlessly integrates with pull requests to create an immediate feedback loop. Receive valuable feedback on code quality and potential issues right when you need it.
- Insights for Everyone: CodeScene delivers insights for all stakeholders, from developers to leadership and QA/testers. Expect automated code reviews, improvement suggestions, refactoring targets, and even a score for your code's health.
- Deep Analytical Facts: Dive into deep analyses, whether they're technical, architectural, or social. Uncover code health trends, dependencies, hotspots, complexity insights, and prioritize managing technical debt.
- Team Efficiency Boost: Elevate your team's efficiency and align with modern development practices. By reducing key personnel bottlenecks and distributing knowledge, you'll minimize risks and dependencies while fostering collaboration.
- Taming Technical Debt: CodeScene helps you take control of technical debt. Decide whether to pay down the debt or establish a quality benchmark for existing code, ensuring your projects remain on a solid foundation.
Advantages
- Unique approach to code analysis.
- Provide insights on code and team structure.
- Get up to speed with project development from actionable insights.
Disadvantages
- Specific limitations when using their on-premise solutions and delays in deliverables.
- The learning curve might be difficult for beginners to be able to get the best value for your money.
Conclusion
AI tools for code reviews can be invaluable for improving code quality, enhancing security, and streamlining the development process. Each tool mentioned here has its unique strengths and limitations.
When choosing the right tool for your team, consider factors such as the size of your codebase, budget, and specific code review needs. The key to successful code reviews lies in adopting best practices like setting clear objectives and guidelines, adopting automation tools, or using an engineering management platform.
Looking forward, the future of AI code review is bright. As AI models become more sophisticated, they will be able to handle even more complex tasks, further reducing the burden on developers and ensuring the highest quality code.
However, it's important to remember that AI is not a magic bullet. Human expertise is still essential for code reviews, and AI should be seen as a tool to augment, not replace, human judgment.
