GitGuardian vs Gitleaks

GitGuardian helps enterprises find leaked secrets and manage non-human identities and AI agent security. Internal Secrets Monitoring looks across code, CI/CD, and collaboration tools, while Public Secrets Monitoring detects secrets exposed on public GitHub. Repository scans can run in real time or historically, and the ggshield command-line tool supports scanning during development, including pre-commit hooks. Listed capabilities also include CI/CD, pull-request, and push-protection scanning, plus custom detection rules. Growth includes remediation playbooks, Slack, Jira, and ServiceNow integrations, AI risk scoring, and false-positive filtering. Enterprise adds non-human identity governance and self-hosted deployment through GitGuardian Bridge, with Helm or KOTS deployment support. Supported version-control systems include GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps. Starter is free for up to 25 developers, with unlimited real-time scanning, up to 500 historical scan detections, and 10,000 API calls per month. Growth and Enterprise pricing requires contacting sales; a 30-day trial is listed.

Gitleaks is free, MIT-licensed software that detects secrets such as passwords, API keys, and tokens in Git repositories, files, and standard input. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted systems. Scans can target repositories, directories, individual files, or streamed data. Custom rules can use Go regular expressions, entropy checks, path matching, keywords, and allowlists. A previous report can serve as a baseline so later scans show only new findings. Output is available in JSON, CSV, JUnit, SARIF, or template formats. The project documents pre-commit hook and GitHub Action use, plus CI/CD, pull-request, and supported VCS workflows for GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Gitea, and Bitbucket. Installation options include Homebrew, Docker, Go, and prebuilt release binaries. A redaction option masks secrets in logs and standard output, with a default redaction value of 100%. The project describes itself as feature complete, with future releases limited to security patches, and its security policy supports only the latest version.