CodeRabbit vs Qodo: a comment, a status check, and a merge gate are not the same control
CodeRabbit posts the review, can publish a Security check that does not block until GitHub requires it, and submits a request-changes review only after that workflow is turned on. Qodo posts comments and labels. Its compliance doc tells you to add the Action that would block the merge.
After the 14-day trial, CodeRabbit’s Free plan summarizes a pull request and does not run the code review in Git. A summary is a comment. It is not a status check, and it is not a merge gate.
On a paid CodeRabbit plan the review posts a walkthrough and inline comments. Request-changes stays off until someone enables it. Pre-merge checks default to warning, and a warning does not block. The CodeRabbit Security check is a separate GitHub check, off by default, and publishing it does not change merge rules. Qodo’s review also starts as comments and labels. The compliance doc tells you to add a GitHub Action if those labels should stop the merge. The doc does not say Qodo itself is the required status check.
Those are different controls on the same green pull request. A comment GitHub will still merge, a check nobody required, and a gate you turned on are not one switch.
| Primary use case | Review pull requests from people and coding agents, as comments, with optional request-changes and an optional Security check | Review pull requests against team rules, as comments and labels, and hand those rules to the coding agent before the pull request exists |
|---|---|---|
| Review comment | Walkthrough and inline comments on a paid plan. Free, after the trial, summarizes and does not run the Git code review | A review summary and inline comments while the workspace has credits or is inside the trial |
| Status check | CodeRabbit Security is a GitHub check. It is off until you publish it. Publishing it does not require it | The compliance doc does not describe a Qodo status check. It describes labels, including Failed compliance check and Possible security concern |
| Merge gate | Request-changes, off by default, submits a request-changes review when the review posts actionable comments. Error-mode pre-merge checks block only together with that workflow. The Security check blocks only after a GitHub admin requires the check named CodeRabbit Security | The compliance doc says to add your own GitHub Action on those labels if the merge should stop. The label alone is not that gate |
| License/pricing | Per developer, per month, with an annual rate and a higher month-to-month rate. See Editions | Monthly credit packs for the workspace, no annual self-serve term. See Editions |
| Who operates it | Whoever enables request-changes, whoever publishes the Security check, and whoever requires that check in GitHub | Whoever funds the credit pool, writes the rules, and, if merge has to stop, adds the Action on Qodo’s labels |
We reviewed CodeRabbit’s pricing page, plans doc, pre-merge checks doc, request-changes doc, Security check doc, and docs FAQ, plus the marketing FAQ, on 3 Oct 2026. We reviewed Qodo’s pricing page, pricing-and-usage doc, custom compliance doc, context-engine page, PR-history page, and the v1 data-sharing page, plus the 1 October 2026 Qodo 3.0 post. We also read three Hacker News comments. We did not install either product, so this is not a hands-on bake-off.
CodeRabbit
Qodo
CodeRabbit and Qodo are both still sold under those names. No completed acquisition of either company was on the first-party pages or the funding reports opened 3 Oct 2026. Qodo is the name the company announced on 30 September 2024, when it said Codium, also called CodiumAI on its own funding post, was now Qodo.
Editions and pricing
The dollars below are the public plan pages opened 3 Oct 2026. They are not the same meter. CodeRabbit bills developers who open pull requests, by the month, with a lower rate if you pay annually. Qodo bills a shared credit pool by the month, and the self-serve plan has no annual term. Do not divide one into the other.
| How you buy it now | Free after the trial summarizes pull requests. Open-source public repositories get Team features with no paid subscription. Essentials, Team, and Advanced are the paid review plans. Enterprise is a quote, including a self-hosting option | A 14-day trial with unlimited reviews, then Pro Team credit packs. There is no permanent free tier. Qualified open-source projects can apply to a separate program. Enterprise adds SSO, bring-your-own model keys, and single-tenant or on-prem |
|---|---|---|
| Public price (3 Oct 2026) | Essentials: $24 per developer per month billed annually, or $30 per developer per month month-to-month. Team: $48 or $60 on those same terms. Advanced: $72 or $90. Past the included hourly allowance, eligible continued reviews are $0.25 per reviewed file, with a spending cap you set. Enterprise is arranged with the account team | Pro Team packs on the pricing page: $30 a month for 2,500 credits (the page estimates about 18 reviews), $60 a month for 5,000 credits (about 36), $240 a month for 20,000 credits (about 144). That matches the published $0.012 per credit. Credits expire at the end of the monthly cycle. Overage is the same $0.012 per credit until the cap you set. Enterprise is a quote |
| What the count includes | A pull-request review run inside the hourly allowance counts as one review, including an automatic pass after a new push. Essentials allows 5 per developer per hour, Team 8, Advanced 10, Enterprise 12. Essentials reviews up to 150 files after path filters. Team and above review up to 300. A review with more than 300 files is not offered as a usage-priced extra | Every review draws credits. Smaller pull requests draw fewer, larger ones draw more. The review counts above are the pricing page’s estimates. They are not a measured count for an agent-sized diff. The pricing page says Pro Team supports up to 30 users. The pricing-and-usage doc, read the same day, says Pro Teams has unlimited users per workspace and no per-engineer provisioning. Those two pages disagree |
| Main buying consideration | How many developers open pull requests, and will the agent push faster than the hourly allowance on the plan you can sign? | How many reviews a month the pool has to absorb, and which user cap the order form actually enforces? |
Comment, check, and gate
A review comment is text on the pull request. A status check is a result GitHub can list. A merge gate is the host rule that refuses the merge. Turning on one does not turn on the others.
| Review comment | Walkthrough, inline comments, and pre-merge results in that walkthrough. Built-in checks cover docstring coverage (80% unless you change it), title, description, and whether the linked issue matches the diff. Inconclusive does not block | Summary and inline comments. A severity threshold of 3 limits inline comments to high findings. Findings under the threshold stay in the summary. The default is no threshold. An effort label on a 1 to 5 scale is on by default |
|---|---|---|
| Status check | CodeRabbit Security fails while blocking Security comments remain. It is off for every repository until you publish it, and only after the repo has PR Security review access. The default block threshold is Critical. The check doc says publishing it does not change merge rules. It is separate from pre-merge checks and from the general review | Not on the compliance doc. That doc adds labels. Failed compliance check is on by default for custom compliance. Possible security concern is on by default for the security check inside compliance. A label is not a status check |
| Enforced merge gate | Request-changes is disabled by default. When it is on, actionable inline comments become a request-changes review, and the request-changes page presents that review as what blocks the pull request. Error-mode pre-merge checks block only with that workflow. Warning does not. The Security check blocks only after a GitHub admin requires the check named CodeRabbit Security. Success and Neutral both satisfy that required check. The check does not run on merge-queue commits, and the doc says not to require it for a merge queue | The compliance doc’s blocking section says to configure a CI action so Possible security concern or Failed compliance check prevents the merge, and to implement a GitHub Action. It does not say the label is already a required check. This page does not treat Qodo as blocking the merge |
| Who can clear it | With request-changes on, @coderabbitai approve can approve without a finished review of the latest commit. Authors can do that unless allow_author_approval is false. A rate-limited run leaves approval pending. For the Security check, resolving the GitHub conversation does not clear a blocker. A later review has to verify the code change. For pre-merge checks, ignore is a separate override, and the author cannot use it when override is limited to requested reviewers | Whoever controls the Action or the required check in CI. Raising the credit cap resumes reviews. It does not merge the pull request |
The $15 a month is that person’s recollection in January 2026. It is not a figure on the plan page checked 3 Oct 2026. The second sentence is a comment the team resolves without a code change. That is a review comment, not a required status check.
The typos are the commenter’s. The effort label matches a Qodo compliance option that is on by default and scores review effort from 1 to 5. The comment treats that label, and the walkthrough, as help for the human reviewer. It does not describe a merge that Qodo refused.
Quality, languages, privacy, and context
The pages below were read for both products. Where one vendor’s page names a number and the other’s does not, the missing number stays missing.
| What the vendor says about quality | The docs FAQ says 100% accuracy is not guaranteed. The marketing FAQ says CodeRabbit catches 95% or more of bugs and is meant to complement human review. Those are the pages’ claims, not a count from this comparison. The two pages do not use the same sentence | The context-engine page says the engine reduces hallucinated or non-actionable issues and prioritizes findings by severity and relevance. PR history, marked beta, classifies a finding from how similar past findings were handled, and can say a finding may not need attention when similar ones were dismissed. No percentage is on those pages |
|---|---|---|
| Languages | The docs FAQ and the marketing FAQ say CodeRabbit works with all programming languages, with proficiency varying by popularity and training data. The marketing FAQ names Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, and Ruby as examples, not as a closed list | A supported-language list was not on the context-engine, PR-history, or compliance pages opened 3 Oct 2026. The compliance examples include folders named for Python and C++ repositories. That is a folder example, not a coverage list. This page does not turn the missing list into a limit |
| False positives, in the vendor’s words | Neither FAQ prints a false-positive rate. Inconclusive pre-merge checks do not block. The January 2026 comment above is a user describing CodeRabbit comments they resolve without a code change | The context-engine page says it reduces non-actionable output. It does not print a false-positive rate. PR history is the mechanism that page gives for down-ranking a finding the team has dismissed before |
| How much of the repo it sees | The docs FAQ says code reviews have full code access, including code in issues and pull requests, and can run analysis tools. Reports, a different feature, have summary-only access and no code access. Custom pre-merge checks run in a read-only sandbox and can use the pull-request diff, linked issues, and MCP tools. The marketing FAQ says reviews use the codebase, file dependencies, and coding style. No file-count limit is on those pages beyond the plan’s review file caps in Editions | The context engine says it reasons over repositories, pull requests, organizational rules, cross-file relationships, historical patterns, and dependencies, not only the changed lines. PR history indexes connected repositories. That page says GitHub and GitLab, with other Git providers coming later. No token or file limit is on those pages |
| Privacy | The docs FAQ says code is shared with OpenAI and/or Anthropic for review, and that CodeRabbit, OpenAI, and Anthropic do not use it to train models. It also describes caching of encrypted code, a vector index, and learnings you can opt out of. The marketing FAQ says source code is not retained after a review except when review caching is enabled, and it also says data is used to fine-tune your reviews. Those two CodeRabbit pages do not match. This page does not pick one | The data-sharing page opened is titled for Qodo 1.x and says that experience is being sunset. It says code is never stored or used for training. A privacy page for the product sold as Qodo now was not the page opened, so the v1 sentence is not applied to the current product |
What runs before the pull request
On 1 October 2026 Qodo posted version 3.0. The post says coding agents can retrieve the team’s rules through an Agentic Toolbox while they are still writing, and can request a local review before the pull request opens. It also says Qodo can write a brief for a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex. PR Triage is marked Research Preview in that post. The same post names GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, and Gerrit. The post does not say that preview is a required status check.
On 12 August 2026 CodeRabbit announced what it calls Agentic Change Management. The pricing page lists loops with coding agents on Essentials and above. The request-changes and Security-check docs are still the merge behavior above. Sample numbers on the marketing page are not the hourly allowances in Editions.
Where they overlap
Both products comment on a pull request a person or a coding agent opened. Neither comment is a merge gate by itself. Both offer an enterprise path that includes self-hosting or on-prem. A scanner that fails the build on source patterns is a SAST purchase. Dependency advisories are SCA. CodeRabbit can take linter and SAST output into a review on Essentials, and it reviews each pull request for security on Advanced and Enterprise. Qodo can add a Possible security concern label. Neither of those is the scanner purchase, and neither label or comment is a required status check until someone makes it one.
The comment names CodeRabbit as what that team runs. The limit it states is the one both products still leave you: bugs in the diff are not the same finding as a bad boundary or a wrong domain rule.
When to use both
Two reviewers on one pull request produce two threads and two meters. Split by repository. Use CodeRabbit where you will decide, separately, whether request-changes is on and whether GitHub requires the CodeRabbit Security check. Use Qodo where the coding agent has to pull the rules before it opens the pull request, or where Gerrit is a host the 3.0 post names, and where a failed rule should become a label your own Action requires. If both would comment on the same diff, keep the one whose failure you will actually wire as a gate.
Choose CodeRabbit when you will pay per developer who opens pull requests, and you will choose among a comment, a request-changes review, and a Security check that blocks only after GitHub requires it. Choose Qodo when the review is drawn from a shared monthly credit pool, the output you will enforce is a label, and the Action that blocks the merge is one you add.
FAQs
Is a review comment the same as a status check?
No. CodeRabbit’s walkthrough and inline comments are the review. CodeRabbit Security is the GitHub check, and it is off until you publish it. Qodo’s compliance doc describes comments and labels, not a Qodo status check.
Does either product block the merge by itself?
CodeRabbit’s request-changes workflow is off by default. When it is on, the request-changes page presents that review as blocking the pull request. Error-mode pre-merge checks block only with that workflow. The Security check blocks only after GitHub requires the check named CodeRabbit Security. Qodo’s compliance doc tells you to add a GitHub Action on its labels. This page does not treat the Qodo label as a merge block.
What do they say about false positives and languages?
Neither page opened here prints a false-positive rate. CodeRabbit’s docs FAQ says accuracy is not guaranteed, and the marketing FAQ claims 95% or more of bugs. Qodo’s context-engine page says it reduces non-actionable findings and does not give a percentage. CodeRabbit’s FAQ says all programming languages, with proficiency that varies. A Qodo language list was not on the pages opened, which is not a claim that a language is missing.
What public prices were checkable?
Only the figures in Editions and pricing, from the plan pages opened 3 Oct 2026. The dollar amount inside the January 2026 comment is that person’s memory. The Qodo review counts are the pricing page’s estimates. Editions has the user-cap wording that the two Qodo pages do not share.
Did either company get acquired?
No completed acquisition was on the sources opened 3 Oct 2026.
Is this a hands-on bake-off?
No. The comparison uses the plan pages, the review docs, the privacy pages named above, two launch posts, and three comments. Nobody installed either product for this page.
