GitGuardian vs Dependabot

Free tier available

Free

Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.

Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.

Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.

Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.

Widely used

GitGuardian · since 2017

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017

• Validity checking distinguishes a live credential from a revoked one, which transforms triage priority.
• Scans full commit history, where most leaked secrets actually live.
• Free for teams up to 25 developers.

• Free and requires a single config file to enable.
• Version-bump pull requests mean remediation is a review, not a task.
• Grouped updates keep the PR volume manageable.

• Secrets scanning only — not a general security platform.
• Historical scans on old repositories produce a large initial backlog.
• Requires repository access, which needs a security review of its own.

• No reachability analysis, so it reports vulnerabilities in code you never call.
• PR noise is a genuine problem on large dependency trees without grouping configured.
• GitHub only.

Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.

Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.