StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Review
  4. Code Review
  5. Checkstyle vs Pylint

Checkstyle vs Pylint

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Checkstyle
Checkstyle
Stacks132
Followers107
Votes0
GitHub Stars8.7K
Forks3.9K
Pylint
Pylint
Stacks873
Followers97
Votes17

Checkstyle vs Pylint: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Checkstyle and Pylint

Checkstyle and Pylint are both static code analysis tools that aim to identify and report code quality issues. However, there are several key differences between them.

  1. Language Support: Checkstyle is primarily used for Java code analysis, while Pylint is mainly used for analyzing Python code. This difference in language support makes them suitable for different types of projects and programming languages.

  2. Rule Sets: Checkstyle and Pylint have different sets of rules and configurations. Checkstyle allows users to define their own custom rule sets, providing flexibility in rule enforcement. On the other hand, Pylint provides a comprehensive default rule set for Python projects.

  3. Rule Coverage: Checkstyle offers a wider range of code style and formatting rules that cover various aspects of code design and readability. Pylint, on the other hand, focuses more on enforcing coding conventions, identifying potential programming errors, and checking for code smells.

  4. Integration: Checkstyle integrates well with popular Java development tools, such as build systems like Ant and Maven, making it easy to incorporate into the development workflow. Pylint, on the other hand, integrates well with Python development environments and editors like PyCharm, making it convenient for Python developers.

  5. Extensibility: Checkstyle provides a flexible plugin system that allows users to extend its functionality and add custom checks. Pylint also supports some degree of extensibility through plugins, but the range of available plugins is more limited compared to Checkstyle.

  6. Maturity and Community: Checkstyle has been around for a longer time and has a large and active community of users and contributors. This results in a mature and well-documented tool with a wide range of resources available. Pylint, although not as old as Checkstyle, also has a significant community and active development, ensuring continuous improvements and support for Python developers.

In summary, the key differences between Checkstyle and Pylint lie in their language support, rule sets, coverage, integration options, extensibility, and community support.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Checkstyle
Checkstyle
Pylint
Pylint

It is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. It automates the process of checking Java code to spare humans of this boring (but important) task. This makes it ideal for projects that want to enforce a coding standard.

It is a Python static code analysis tool which looks for programming errors, helps enforcing a coding standard, sniffs for code smells and offers simple refactoring suggestions.

-
Syntax Check;Style Check;Warnings
Statistics
GitHub Stars
8.7K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
3.9K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
132
Stacks
873
Followers
107
Followers
97
Votes
0
Votes
17
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 3
    Command Line
  • 2
    Spell Check strings & comments
  • 2
    Code score & directions
  • 2
    Pre-commit checks
  • 2
    IDE Integration
Integrations
IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA
Java
Java
FreeBSD
FreeBSD
Debian
Debian
Vim
Vim
Windows
Windows
Mac OS X
Mac OS X
TextMate
TextMate
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Komodo IDE
Komodo IDE
Eclipse
Eclipse
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

What are some alternatives to Checkstyle , Pylint?

Code Climate

Code Climate

After each Git push, Code Climate analyzes your code for complexity, duplication, and common smells to determine changes in quality and surface technical debt hotspots.

Codacy

Codacy

Codacy automates code reviews and monitors code quality on every commit and pull request on more than 40 programming languages reporting back the impact of every commit or PR, issues concerning code style, best practices and security.

Phabricator

Phabricator

Phabricator is a collection of open source web applications that help software companies build better software.

PullReview

PullReview

PullReview helps Ruby and Rails developers to develop new features cleanly, on-time, and with confidence by automatically reviewing their code.

Gerrit Code Review

Gerrit Code Review

Gerrit is a self-hosted pre-commit code review tool. It serves as a Git hosting server with option to comment incoming changes. It is highly configurable and extensible with default guarding policies, webhooks, project access control and more.

SonarQube

SonarQube

SonarQube provides an overview of the overall health of your source code and even more importantly, it highlights issues found on new code. With a Quality Gate set on your project, you will simply fix the Leak and start mechanically improving.

RuboCop

RuboCop

RuboCop is a Ruby static code analyzer. Out of the box it will enforce many of the guidelines outlined in the community Ruby Style Guide.

CodeFactor.io

CodeFactor.io

CodeFactor.io automatically and continuously tracks code quality with every GitHub or BitBucket commit and pull request, helping software developers save time in code reviews and efficiently tackle technical debt.

ESLint

ESLint

A pluggable and configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript. Maintain your code quality with ease.

Amazon CodeGuru

Amazon CodeGuru

It is a machine learning service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations. It helps you find the most expensive lines of code that hurt application performance and keep you up all night troubleshooting, then gives you specific recommendations to fix or improve your code.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana