head to head · open source
gitleaks vs moon
gitleaks has 30,582 GitHub stars, 2,330 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. moon has 4,173 stars, 260 forks, 99 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. gitleaks leads on adoption by 633% (30,582 vs 4,173 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| gitleaks | moon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 4.2K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-28 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 260 |
| 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 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 [!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 moon
moon moon is a repository m anagement, o rganization, o rchestration, and n otification tool for the web ecosystem, written in Rust. Many of the concepts within moon are heavily inspired from Bazel and other popular build systems. Documentation Contributing Code of conduct Why use moon? Working in a developer ecosystem can be very involved, especially when it comes to managing a repository effectively. Which package manager to use? Which language version to use? How to import packages? How to build code? So on and so forth. moon aims to streamline this entire process and provide a first class developer…
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Orchestration & Scheduling projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Orchestration & Scheduling field.
Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or moon more popular?
gitleaks has 30,582 GitHub stars and moon has 4,173. 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 (30,582 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose moon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.