GitGuardian vs OWASP ZAP

Free tier available

Free and open source

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

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

GitGuardian · since 2017

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

• 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, with no licence limits on scanning or users.
• The baseline scan runs in CI in a couple of minutes and catches real misconfiguration.
• Active community and extensive add-on marketplace.

• 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.

• Higher false-positive rate than commercial DAST tools.
• Scanning authenticated, JavaScript-heavy applications requires meaningful configuration effort.
• The interface is dated and the learning curve is real.

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

Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.