head to head · open source
gitleaks vs ergo
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars, 2,236 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. ergo has 4,660 stars, 191 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. gitleaks leads on adoption by 530% (29,364 vs 4,660 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 | ★ 29K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-09 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 191 |
| 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 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 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 ergo
Ergo is an actor based framework for Go that brings network transparency to event driven architecture, drawing direct inspiration from Erlang/OTP. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as a pure Go library with zero external dependencies. The framework models every unit of work as an isolated process that communicates only through messages, so shared state, mutexes, and race conditions are eliminated by design rather than managed by convention.
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Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or ergo more popular?
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,660. 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 (29,364 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.