Best AI code review tools in 2026: an honest comparison

• Code review
• Tools compared

There's no single best AI code review tool in 2026. There's a best fit for your Git host, your budget and how much you need a review to stop a bad merge. Below, 13 tools are compared on those questions, with every fact linked to the vendor's own page and checked on 24 October 2026.

Disclosure: I build AI CodeOps, one of the tools on this list. I've tried to be fair: every fact about other products comes from their own pricing pages and docs (linked inline and at the end), and each tool gets a "choose it if" section, including the ones that beat us on something.

AI code review changed a lot in 2026:

• Several vendors moved from per-seat pricing to usage-based billing: GitHub Copilot, Cursor Bugbot, Qodo and Greptile.
• Cursor bought Graphite (December 2025).
• Google shut down the free Gemini Code Assist GitHub app and stopped selling new Code Assist subscriptions.
• Qodo handed its open-source PR-Agent to the community.

If you compared tools a year ago, your notes are probably out of date. (If you're new to the topic, start with what AI code review is, and what it misses.)

This guide compares the tools on the five questions teams actually ask:

1. Does it work with our Git host?
2. What does it cost, and is there a free or open-source plan?
3. Can we run it on our own servers?
4. Can it block a merge, or does it only comment?
5. What is it best at?

Quick comparison

Prices as published by each vendor, checked on 24 October 2026. "Can block a merge" means a documented way to fail a required check or request changes, not just leave comments.

How to choose in 30 seconds

• On GitHub and want zero setup: GitHub Copilot code review.
• Need the widest host coverage from a mature reviewer: CodeRabbit or Cursor Bugbot.
• All-in on GitLab, including self-managed: GitLab Duo.
• On Gitea or Forgejo: your options are few. They are PR-Agent (Gitea, run it yourself), Greptile (Gitea, Enterprise only) and AI CodeOps (Gitea and Forgejo, for the changes its own sessions make).
• Want AI review to actually stop bad merges: look for tools with a documented merge gate (CodeRabbit, Sourcery, Bugbot, AI CodeOps), or pair any reviewer with SonarQube or Snyk.
• Need on-prem or air-gapped: Qodo Enterprise, GitLab Duo on GitLab Self-Managed, SonarQube Server, or PR-Agent run on your own infrastructure.

Whatever you pick, the merge gate is what makes it count. Quality gates explains the idea; the rest of this post is about who has one.

The tools

CodeRabbit

CodeRabbit posts PR summaries and line-by-line review comments, and also reviews in the IDE and CLI.

• Git hosts: the widest of the SaaS reviewers here: GitHub, GitHub Enterprise Server, GitLab (including self-managed), Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Cloud and Data Center (platforms).
• Merge blocking: pre-merge checks can run in "error" mode. Paired with Automatic Approvals, an error blocks the merge until it's fixed or someone overrides it. Custom checks need the Team plan or above.
• Pricing (pricing, plans):
• Essentials $24 per dev/month on annual billing ($30 monthly), Team $48 ($60 monthly), Advanced $72, then Enterprise.
• The free tier gives PR summaries only; full reviews on the free tier are in the IDE and CLI.
• Public open-source repos get Team features, with hourly review limits.

Choose it if you want a mature, widely used reviewer across several Git hosts. Watch out for the per-hour review limits on each plan (5 PR reviews per developer per hour on Essentials), and usage-based charges past them.

GitHub Copilot code review

Copilot reviews pull requests on request, or automatically through a repository ruleset, with no extra app (code review).

• Billing: since 1 June 2026 Copilot bills by usage ("AI Credits"), and code review also uses GitHub Actions minutes (GitHub blog). GitHub estimates $0.05 to $1 of AI credits per review on "Lite" effort and $0.25 to $5 on "Balanced", before Actions minutes.
• Merge blocking: by default its reviews don't count toward required approvals. An opt-in "Copilot approvals" setting, in public preview, lets it submit an approving review.

Choose it if you're on GitHub.com and already pay for Copilot. Watch out for cost that grows with usage, no model choice, and GitHub's own note that it won't catch every problem.

Qodo and PR-Agent

Qodo describes itself as an AI code review and code governance platform (docs).

• Git hosts: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and Gerrit (deployment models).
• Deployment: multi-tenant, single-tenant, on-prem and air-gapped options, with different host lists for each.
• Pricing (pricing): Pro Team is $30 a month for 2,500 credits at $0.012 each, pooled across the team and designed for up to 30 users. Qodo puts 2,500 credits at about 18 reviews. There is a 14-day trial and an open-source program; Enterprise is custom, for 30 or more users.

PR-Agent, Qodo's original open-source reviewer, was handed to the community on 23 April 2026. It now lives at The-PR-Agent/pr-agent on GitHub. Qodo's announcement said the licence would return from AGPL v3 to Apache 2.0; the repository has since moved on to the MIT licence. Its supported hosts include Gitea. I wrote up what the move means.

Choose Qodo if you need Gerrit or an air-gapped deployment. Choose PR-Agent if you want a free reviewer and are happy to operate it yourself.

Greptile

Greptile reviews PRs with context from your whole codebase, and can auto-approve low-risk PRs.

• Git hosts: GitHub, GitLab.com and Bitbucket Cloud on all plans. GitHub Enterprise Server, GitLab Self-Managed, Bitbucket Data Center and Gitea are on Enterprise (code providers).
• Pricing (pricing): $1 per credit, no seat fee; a review costs 1, 3 or 10 credits depending on depth. The free Starter tier covers one developer with 50 credits a month. Free for non-commercial projects under an OSI-approved licence.
• Merge blocking: none documented. Auto-approve is in beta, and your host's own rules still decide the merge.

Choose it if codebase-wide context is your priority. Watch out for Gitea and running it on your own servers being Enterprise-only.

Graphite

Graphite combines stacked pull requests, a merge queue and AI reviews (Graphite Agent). Cursor acquired it in December 2025.

• Git hosts: GitHub only, with GitHub Enterprise Server on Enterprise.
• Pricing (pricing): Hobby is free, Starter $20 and Team $40 per user/month on annual billing. AI reviews are limited on Hobby and Starter and unlimited on Team.

Choose it if your team already works with stacked PRs. Watch out for GitHub-only support and no documented merge gate for AI reviews.

Sourcery

Sourcery offers AI code review plus security scanning.

• Git hosts: GitHub and GitLab, including self-managed GitLab; GitHub Enterprise Server on Enterprise.
• Pricing (pricing): free for public repos; Pro is $12 per dev/month on annual billing ($15 monthly), tied with Bito's Team plan for the lowest published per-seat price here.
• Merge blocking: a blocking security comment fails the "Sourcery review" check, which you can make a required check (status checks).

Choose it if you want an affordable reviewer with a real merge gate on GitHub or GitLab. Watch out for no Bitbucket, Azure DevOps or Gitea support.

Bito

Bito's AI Code Review Agent mixes LLM review with static analysis and dependency checks.

• Git hosts: GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, including self-managed GitHub and GitLab.
• Pricing (pricing): Team is listed at $12 or $15 and Professional at $20 or $25 per seat per month; the page doesn't label which figure is the annual price. Each seat includes 5,000 reviewed lines a month, then $5 per 1,000. Running it on your own servers is a $5 per seat add-on on Professional, and on-prem is on Enterprise.
• Merge blocking: its "request changes" comments block only where your host requires resolved threads.

Choose it if you want to run the reviewer on your own servers below the Enterprise tier. Watch out for line caps, and confirm the billing period with them.

Gemini Code Assist (code review on GitHub)

The free consumer GitHub app was shut down on 17 July 2026 (Google). Google stopped selling new Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise subscriptions on 9 October 2026, and points customers to Antigravity in Gemini Enterprise (sunset). Google says the enterprise version of the GitHub app isn't affected by the consumer shutdown.

Our take: don't start a new rollout on it. If you're replacing it, I wrote a migration guide with five alternatives.

GitLab Duo (Code Review Flow)

GitLab's agentic code review has been generally available since GitLab 18.8 (Code Review Flow).

• Availability: Free (paid through GitLab Credits), Premium and Ultimate, on GitLab.com, Self-Managed and Dedicated. It can use models you host. Premium is $29 per user/month, billed annually (pricing).
• Merge blocking: Duo can "request changes" to block a merge, but that feature is in beta and off by default.

Choose it if you're all-in on GitLab, especially self-managed. Watch out for it being GitLab-only, the CI runner it needs, and context limits on very large merge requests.

Cursor Bugbot

Bugbot reviews PRs for bugs, security and quality issues, and can start an agent to push fixes.

• Git hosts: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps, including GitHub Enterprise Server, self-managed GitLab and Bitbucket Data Center (docs).
• Pricing: usage-based since mid-2026, replacing the old $40 per seat price. Cursor cites an average of about $1.00 to $1.50 per run (Cursor blog). Its pricing page lists Bugbot on Premium, Super, Ultra, Teams and Enterprise.
• Merge blocking: a required status check, once you turn on "fail on unresolved issues".

Choose it if you already use Cursor and want broad host coverage. Watch out for per-run costs on repos with frequent pushes: by default it runs on every PR update.

AI CodeOps (ours)

AI CodeOps is built around the question "should this change merge?", not just "what's wrong with this diff?". It's also a different kind of tool from most on this list: it doesn't review pull requests people open. Specialised AI agents plan, build, review and test a change in a session, and then a release gate decides whether that change can merge:

• your real test suite, run in a sandbox;
• an AI review that completed (a failed review holds the change);
• no open high or critical findings;
• from CI, optional extras: a coverage floor, required workflows and disallowed licenses (checked against an SBOM you record for the project).

A person other than the one who launched the session approves the change, when the team has another approver. Spend caps apply per workspace and per workflow, and each change has a signed evidence pack you can download and verify.

• Git hosts: GitHub, GitLab (including self-managed), Bitbucket Cloud, Gitea and Forgejo. Your models: the platform's, or your own keys, including Ollama Cloud open models.
• Pricing: free during the open beta; free forever for non-commercial open source, by application (open-source program). Running it on your own infrastructure is available for Enterprise customers on request.
• Merge blocking: the gate runs before the pull request opens and again before the console merges it. Your CI can ask the same gate through the release check API. It only knows changes made in AI CodeOps sessions: a pull request a person wrote gets "No workflow runs found".

Choose it if you want AI-written changes to pass hard gates and human approval before merging, you need an audit trail, or you're on Gitea or Forgejo. Watch out for what it isn't: not a reviewer for your team's own pull requests, no PR comments, no IDE plugin, no GitHub Enterprise Server or Azure DevOps, and no SOC 2 report yet. It's newer than most tools here (open beta).

Snyk Code and SonarQube (for context)

These aren't general AI reviewers, but many teams pair them with one because both can fail a pull request on a quality or security threshold.

• Snyk Code: security-focused static analysis (SAST) with a minimum severity for failing the PR check (PR checks). Free covers 100 Snyk Code tests a month; Team starts at $25 a month for up to 10 developers (plans).
• SonarQube: quality gates, with AI Code Assurance for projects with AI-written code. Cloud is free up to 50k lines and Team starts at $34 a month (plans); SonarQube Server runs on your infrastructure. In May 2026 Sonar also acquired the AI reviewer Gitar, which stays available on its own.

Choose them if you need a proven, auditable gate alongside whichever AI reviewer you pick.

Also worth knowing

• Claude Code Review (Anthropic) and OpenAI Codex code review both review GitHub pull requests. Both vendors describe them as reviewers that comment rather than gate. Anthropic's docs say a review never approves or blocks the pull request. OpenAI's docs say Codex's review rules don't replace tests, branch protections or required approvals.
• Gitea and Forgejo users: no tool we checked documents Forgejo support except AI CodeOps. Gitea API compatibility doesn't guarantee Forgejo works, so test before you commit. The Forgejo integration and Gitea integration pages say what ours covers.

If you're weighing up the bill as well as the features, I compare the three pricing models with worked numbers in AI code review pricing in 2026. For side-by-side pages on each tool, see compare.

The bottom line

There's no single best AI code reviewer. There's a best fit for your Git host, budget and risk tolerance.

• If AI is writing more of your code, the tool matters less than the gate: tests, findings and policy that must pass before anything merges, plus a human who signs off.
• Whatever you choose, turn on a required status check and keep a human approval in the loop.

Sources (checked on 24 October 2026)

• CodeRabbit: pricing · plans · pre-merge checks
• GitHub Copilot: code review · plans · usage-based billing
• Qodo: pricing · deployment models · PR-Agent announcement
• PR-Agent: repository
• Greptile: pricing · code providers · auto-approve
• Graphite: pricing · TechCrunch on the acquisition
• Sourcery: pricing · status checks
• Bito: pricing · request changes
• Gemini Code Assist: deprecations · consumer sunset · subscription sunset
• GitLab Duo: Code Review Flow · pricing
• Cursor Bugbot: docs · pricing change · pricing
• Snyk: plans · PR checks
• SonarQube and Gitar: plans · Gitar acquisition
• Claude Code Review: docs
• OpenAI Codex code review: docs

Key takeaways

• Copilot, Bugbot, Qodo and Greptile now bill by usage; CodeRabbit, Sourcery, Graphite and Bito still bill per seat.
• Only a few tools document a real merge block: CodeRabbit, Sourcery, Bugbot and AI CodeOps, plus Snyk and SonarQube as gates.
• Gitea support is rare (PR-Agent, Greptile Enterprise, AI CodeOps), and Forgejo support rarer still.
• Gemini Code Assist's free GitHub app is gone; don't plan a new rollout on it.
• Pick by Git host first, then by whether the review can stop a merge, then by price.