head to head · open source
gitleaks vs pipecd
gitleaks has 30,603 GitHub stars, 2,330 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. pipecd has 1,370 stars, 384 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gitleaks leads on adoption by 2,134% (30,603 vs 1,370 stars). gitleaks is written in Go under MIT; pipecd is written in Go under Apache-2.0. gitleaks has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, pipecd 28%. pipecd 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, cicd), 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 | pipecd | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-28 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 384 |
| 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 pipecd if
- You want the pipecd feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pipecd 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 pipecd
A GitOps style continuous delivery platform that provides consistent deployment and operations experience for any applications Explore PipeCD docs » Try on Playground » Overview PipeCD provides a unified continuous delivery solution for multiple application kinds on multi cloud that empowers engineers to deploy faster with more confidence, a GitOps tool that enables doing deployment operations by pull request on Git. Why PipeCD? Simple, unified and easy to use but powerful pipeline definition to construct your deployment Same deployment interface to deploy applications of any platform, including Kubernetes…
read the full pipecd overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gitleaks or pipecd more popular?
gitleaks has 30,603 GitHub stars and pipecd has 1,370. gitleaks has the larger community by that measure.
Are gitleaks and pipecd free?
Both are open source. gitleaks is licensed under MIT and pipecd under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gitleaks and pipecd?
gitleaks is written in Go and pipecd 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 pipecd?
Choose gitleaks if you want the larger community (30,603 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pipecd if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.