head to head · open source
gitleaks vs moon
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars, 2,236 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. moon has 4,105 stars, 252 forks, 99 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gitleaks leads on adoption by 615% (29,364 vs 4,105 stars). gitleaks is written in Go under MIT; moon is written in Rust under MIT. gitleaks has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, moon 6%. moon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ci-cd, 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 | moon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 4.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-09 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 252 |
| 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 moon if
- You want the moon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and moon 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 moon
moon is a repository management, organization, orchestration, and notification tool for the web ecosystem, written in Rust under the MIT license. It is a build system and monorepo management tool whose concepts are heavily inspired by Bazel and other build systems. The project is associated with build system, monorepo tooling, ci cd, Node.js, JavaScript, Bun, Deno, Go, Python, and Ruby topics.
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Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or moon more popular?
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars and moon has 4,105. gitleaks has the larger community by that measure.
Are gitleaks and moon free?
Both are open source. gitleaks is licensed under MIT and moon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gitleaks and moon?
gitleaks is written in Go and moon in Rust. 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 moon?
Choose gitleaks if you want the larger community (29,364 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose moon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.