head to head · open source
gitleaks vs earthly
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars, 2,236 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. earthly has 12,047 stars, 457 forks, 744 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. gitleaks leads on adoption by 144% (29,364 vs 12,047 stars). gitleaks is written in Go under MIT; earthly is written in Go under MPL-2.0. gitleaks has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, earthly 4%. gitleaks was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ci-cd, cicd, hacktoberfest), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| gitleaks | earthly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-09 | 2025-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 457 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick gitleaks if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick earthly if
- You want the earthly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and earthly fits your workflow better
About gitleaks
Gitleaks is an MIT licensed, Go based command line tool that detects hardcoded secrets such as passwords, API keys, and tokens in git repositories, files, and standard input, and it serves developers and security teams that need to keep credentials out of source control.
read the full gitleaks overview →
About earthly
Earthly is a container based build and CI/CD framework that runs every pipeline inside containers so the same build executes identically on a laptop, a colleague's machine, or any CI system, and it is built for engineers and platform teams who maintain build logic across monorepos or polyrepos and are comfortable with Dockerfile and Makefile style syntax.
read the full earthly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or earthly more popular?
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars and earthly has 12,047. gitleaks has the larger community by that measure.
Are gitleaks and earthly free?
Both are open source. gitleaks is licensed under MIT and earthly under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gitleaks and earthly?
gitleaks is written in Go and earthly in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, gitleaks or earthly?
Choose gitleaks if you want the larger community (29,364 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose earthly if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.