type: service
status: active
timestamp: 2026-06-20
tags: [services, code-quality, maintainability, technical-debt]

Code Climate Quality

Maintainability scoring with A-F grades per file; free for public repos

Code Climate Quality

Role

Assigns each file in the repo a maintainability grade (A — F) based on cyclomatic complexity, cognitive complexity, method length, file length, argument count, and duplication. Posts the per-PR delta as a status check; the dashboard surfaces the worst-graded files across the whole family at a glance.

Free tier

Free forever for OSS / public repos:

Unlimited analysis
All languages (JS / TS / Ruby / Python / Go / Java / etc.)
PR comments + status checks
Maintainability + duplication reports
Coverage import (we point Codecov at coverage; CC reads its own upload via cc-test-reporter if we want the duplicate)
Public dashboard (linkable from repo READMEs)

Card / subscription required?

NO for public repos. GitHub OAuth signup, no payment method requested.

Alternatives

Sonarcloud — broader rule set and SAST, but its maintainability rendering is buried inside the quality-gate UI; Code Climate’s “A — F per file” is the most legible single artefact for technical-debt review.
DeepSource — sibling tool in this stack, different rule emphasis (issues / autofix vs. graded maintainability).
Better Code Hub — discontinued.

Swap cost

Low. GitHub App install + a one-line .codeclimate.yml at repo root. No code changes; uninstalling the GitHub App removes it cleanly.

Why this is our pick

The five-tool code-quality stack (decision) deliberately picks different rendering surfaces for overlapping signals: Sonarcloud’s quality-gate, CodeRabbit’s LLM PR review, Codecov’s coverage delta, DeepSource’s issue list, and Code Climate’s A — F grade. The grade is the cheapest signal to glance at during a “is this file getting worse?” check; it complements the rest without duplicating the dashboard.

Cross-refs

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