What is reviewdog used for?

reviewdog is an automated code review tool that takes the output of any linter and posts findings as review comments on pull requests, limited to lines in the diff. It is a good fit for automated lint feedback on pull requests, introducing linters without noise on old code and unifying static analysis output in CI.

Is reviewdog open source?

Yes. reviewdog is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at reviewdog/reviewdog and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. reviewdog is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What is reviewdog an alternative to?

reviewdog is an open-source alternative to Codacy, SonarQube Cloud and DeepSource. Other open-source alternatives to Codacy include SonarQube.

Is reviewdog actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to reviewdog was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.21.2, published on 18 September 2026. The project has 9.6k stars on GitHub.

reviewdog: open-source alternative to Codacy

About reviewdog

Reviewdog automates code review feedback by connecting to the linters and analysis tools you already use. It reads their output and posts findings as comments on code hosting services such as GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, but only when the finding falls in the lines changed by the patch under review.

Input can be any tool output described with errorformat patterns, plus the Reviewdog Diagnostic Format, checkstyle and SARIF formats, and it can also suggest code changes. It offers several reporters, including local output, GitHub PR checks, annotations and review comments, GitLab merge request discussions and Bitbucket Code Insights reports. It runs in CI services such as GitHub Actions, Travis CI, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Bitbucket Pipelines and Jenkins, and locally it can filter lint output by diff.

Reviewdog is written in Go and licensed under MIT, and works with any programming language since it only needs the output of the linter. Teams use it to keep a codebase healthy without flooding reviewers with warnings about code that was not touched.

Key features

Posts linter findings as review comments
Filters results to changed lines
Works with any linter via errorformat
SARIF and checkstyle input formats
GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket reporters
Code suggestions in review comments
Local diff filtering mode

Good fit for

→Automated lint feedback on pull requests
→Introducing linters without noise on old code
→Unifying static analysis output in CI

Built with: Go
Tags: code-review; linter; ci; static-analysis; github; gitlab; code-quality; golang

reviewdog: questions and answers

What is reviewdog used for?: reviewdog is an automated code review tool that takes the output of any linter and posts findings as review comments on pull requests, limited to lines in the diff. It is a good fit for automated lint feedback on pull requests, introducing linters without noise on old code and unifying static analysis output in CI.
Is reviewdog open source?: Yes. reviewdog is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at reviewdog/reviewdog and is written mainly in Go.
Is reviewdog free?: Yes. reviewdog is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What is reviewdog an alternative to?: reviewdog is an open-source alternative to Codacy, SonarQube Cloud and DeepSource. Other open-source alternatives to Codacy include SonarQube.
Is reviewdog actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to reviewdog was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.21.2, published on 18 September 2026. The project has 9.6k stars on GitHub.