head to head · open source
gitleaks vs ergo
gitleaks has 30,603 GitHub stars, 2,330 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. ergo has 4,693 stars, 193 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. gitleaks leads on adoption by 552% (30,603 vs 4,693 stars). gitleaks is written in Go under MIT; ergo is written in Go under MIT. gitleaks has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, ergo 4%. gitleaks was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (go, golang), 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 | ergo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-28 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 193 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick gitleaks if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ergo if
- You want the ergo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ergo fits your workflow better
About gitleaks
Gitleaks [!WARNING] Gitleaks is feature complete. I'm not merging new features into Gitleaks. Future releases will be security patches only. I'm shifting my focus to Betterleaks [license]: ./LICENSE [badge license]: [go docs badge]: [go docs]: [badge build]: [build]: [go report card badge]: [go report card]: [dockerhub]: [dockerhub badge]: [gitleaks action]: [gitleaks badge]: [![GitHub Action Test][badge build]][build] [![Docker Hub][dockerhub badge]][dockerhub] [![Gitleaks Action][gitleaks badge]][gitleaks action] [![GoDoc][go docs badge]][go docs] [![GoReportCard][go report card badge]][go report card]…
read the full gitleaks overview →
About ergo
Actor model for Go. Build distributed systems without the distributed systems headache. Goroutines and channels work great until your system grows. Then come the mutexes, the race conditions, the service discovery configs, the retry logic, the connection pool management. Ergo replaces all of that with one model: isolated processes that communicate through messages, supervised automatically, addressable across any cluster. Inspired by Erlang/OTP. Zero external dependencies. Pure Go. The core idea in 30 seconds No locks. No race conditions. Sequential message handling is the guarantee. Why not just goroutines +…
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Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or ergo more popular?
gitleaks has 30,603 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,693. gitleaks has the larger community by that measure.
Are gitleaks and ergo free?
Both are open source. gitleaks is licensed under MIT and ergo under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gitleaks and ergo?
gitleaks is written in Go and ergo 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 ergo?
Choose gitleaks if you want the larger community (30,603 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.