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. Pylint vs RuboCop

Pylint vs RuboCop

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

RuboCop
RuboCop
Stacks1.4K
Followers222
Votes41
Pylint
Pylint
Stacks873
Followers97
Votes17

Pylint vs RuboCop: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Pylint and RuboCop are static code analysis tools for Python and Ruby, respectively, used to identify issues in code such as bugs, style violations, and maintainability concerns.

  1. Language Supported: Pylint is specifically designed for Python code, while RuboCop is tailored for analyzing Ruby code. This means that each tool is specialized in detecting language-specific issues and adopting best practices unique to Python or Ruby.

  2. Configuration: Pylint uses a configuration file in the form of a Python file where developers can specify rules and settings for the analysis. In contrast, RuboCop uses a configuration file written in YAML format to define the desired linting rules and behavior.

  3. Linter Philosophy: Pylint aims to enforce a strict coding standard and focus on code quality, while RuboCop is more flexible and encourages the Ruby community's preferred style guide. This difference in philosophy leads to varying degrees of strictness and customization options for developers.

  4. Default Rule Set: Pylint comes with a comprehensive set of default rules enabled out of the box, covering a wide range of potential issues. RuboCop, on the other hand, has a more selective set of default rules, allowing developers to opt into additional rules based on their project requirements.

  5. Integration with Editors: Pylint seamlessly integrates with popular Python IDEs such as PyCharm and VS Code, providing real-time feedback within the editor. In comparison, RuboCop offers similar integrations with Ruby-focused editors like Atom and Sublime Text for a streamlined development workflow.

  6. Community Adoption: Pylint has been widely adopted by the Python community and is considered a standard tool for Python code analysis. RuboCop, although popular within the Ruby ecosystem, has gained traction primarily within Ruby on Rails projects but is not as universally used across the Ruby community.

In Summary, Pylint and RuboCop differ in language support, configuration methods, linter philosophy, default rule sets, editor integrations, and community adoption.

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

Advice on RuboCop, Pylint

Weverton
Weverton

CTO at SourceLevel

Aug 10, 2020

Review

To communicate isn’t just getting rid of syntax errors and making code work. The code should communicate ideas to people through a programming language that computers can also understand.

You should adopt semantic variables, classes, modules, and methods names. For instance, in Ruby, we avoid using particular prefixes such as is_paid, get_name and set_name. In their places, we use directly paid?, name, and name=.

My advice is to use idiomatic and features that the programming language you use offers to you whenever possible, and figure out ways to better pass the message.

Why wouldn’t we be worried about semantics, typos, and styles? We should care for the quality of our code, and the many concepts that define it. You can start by using a #linter to collect some issues from your codebase automatically.

116k views116k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

RuboCop
RuboCop
Pylint
Pylint

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.

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
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
873
Followers
222
Followers
97
Votes
41
Votes
17
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 9
    Open-source
  • 8
    Completely free
  • 7
    Runs Offline
  • 4
    Can automatically fix some problems
  • 4
    Follows the Ruby Style Guide by default
Pros
  • 3
    Command Line
  • 2
    FOSS
  • 2
    Pre-commit checks
  • 2
    Spell Check strings & comments
  • 2
    Code score & directions
Integrations
Ruby
Ruby
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 RuboCop, 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.

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.

Reviewable

Reviewable

A code review tool for GitHub pull requests inspired by Google's internal tool. Powerful diffing and workflow features wrapped in a beautiful UI, with seamless GitHub integration. Free for public repos.

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