head to head · open source
gitleaks vs nextflow
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars, 2,236 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. nextflow has 3,487 stars, 811 forks, 422 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gitleaks leads on adoption by 742% (29,364 vs 3,487 stars). gitleaks is written in Go under MIT; nextflow is written in Groovy under Apache-2.0. gitleaks has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, nextflow 23%. nextflow 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 | nextflow | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Groovy |
| Last push | 2026-09-09 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 811 |
| 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 nextflow if
- You want the nextflow feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Groovy
- You evaluated both and nextflow 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 nextflow
Nextflow is an open source workflow system for scalable, portable, and reproducible computational pipelines. It is written in Groovy, released under Apache 2.0, and built around a domain specific language for data driven workflows. The project lives in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, especially orchestration and scheduling, and its topics include bioinformatics, cloud, Docker, high performance computing, and reproducible research.
read the full nextflow overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or nextflow more popular?
gitleaks has 29,364 GitHub stars and nextflow has 3,487. gitleaks has the larger community by that measure.
Are gitleaks and nextflow free?
Both are open source. gitleaks is licensed under MIT and nextflow under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gitleaks and nextflow?
gitleaks is written in Go and nextflow in Groovy. 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 nextflow?
Choose gitleaks if you want the larger community (29,364 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nextflow if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.