head to head · open source
gitleaks vs haystack
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars, 2,236 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. haystack has 26,531 stars, 3,144 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gitleaks leads on adoption by 11% (29,364 vs 26,531 stars). gitleaks is written in Go under MIT; haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0. gitleaks has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, haystack 12%. haystack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | haystack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 27K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-09 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 haystack if
- You want the haystack feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and haystack 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 haystack
Haystack is an open source AI orchestration framework written in Python under the Apache 2.0 licence, for building context engineered, production ready large language model applications as modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation, and it is aimed at developers and teams building scalable agents, retrieval augmented generation, multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and conversational systems.
read the full haystack overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or haystack more popular?
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars and haystack has 26,531. gitleaks has the larger community by that measure.
Are gitleaks and haystack free?
Both are open source. gitleaks is licensed under MIT and haystack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gitleaks and haystack?
gitleaks is written in Go and haystack in Python. 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 haystack?
Choose gitleaks if you want the larger community (29,364 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose haystack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.