NiCad vs QuickDup
NiCad
github.comQuickDup
github.comSide by side
| Figure | NiCad | QuickDup |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Code Clone Detection Tools | 7.7 (#10) | 6.9 (#20) |
| Headquarters | Kingston, Canada | Huddinge, Sweden |
| Languages | Included language plugins cover C, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, WSDL, and ATL. | The README lists comment-prefix support for languages including Go, C/C++, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, Python, Ruby, SQL, Lua, and others. |
| License | The project uses an MIT-style license permitting use, modification, distribution, sublicensing, and sale subject to its stated conditions. | QuickDup is released under the MIT License. |
| Purpose | NiCad is a near-miss source code clone detection system. | QuickDup is a structural code clone detector that finds duplicate code patterns using indent-delta fingerprinting and is designed to generate candidates for AI-assisted code review. |
| Release | The latest listed release is Open NiCad 7.0.1, described as the first open-source release of the clone detector. | The GitHub releases page lists v0.6.0 as the latest release. |
Plans
In their own words
NiCad
NiCad is a near-miss source code clone detection system for finding similar fragments in a repository. It can analyze code at file, function, or block granularity. Included language plugins cover C, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, WSDL, and ATL; plugins for other languages can be added when a TXL grammar is available. Configuration files let users tailor renaming, filtering, abstraction, and normalization before comparison. Results include clone pairs and clone classes in XML-like formats, with optional browsable HTML reports. The default near-miss difference threshold is 0.30; a setting of 0.00 means exact clones. NiCadCross can report fragments from one system that also appear as clones in a second. The software is free under an MIT-style license, with stated conditions for use, modification, distribution, sublicensing, and sale. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows and can be run from its directory for personal use or installed system-wide. NiCad 7.0 requires OpenTxl 11 or later; building comparison tools requires Turing+ 6.2 or later.
QuickDup
QuickDup is a repository code clone detector that finds candidate duplicate patterns using changes in indentation and the first word on each line. It skips comments and blank lines, tokenizes source lines and uses Jaccard similarity to filter patterns below a default 75% threshold. It does not parse abstract syntax trees. Detection options include normalized-indent, word-indent, word-only and inlineable strategies. The README lists comment-prefix detection for languages including Go, C and C++, Java, JavaScript and TypeScript, C#, Python, Ruby, SQL, Lua and MATLAB. QuickDup can emit GitHub Actions annotations for inline pull request comments and restrict them to files changed against a Git reference. Results are written as machine-readable JSON in a .quickdup directory. Incremental caching is available only for the word-indent strategy; other listed strategies re-parse files on each run. The README reports processing about 100,000 lines in about 500 ms on 8 cores. QuickDup is free under the MIT License, with installers for Linux, macOS and Windows, or installation from source with Go.