head to head · open source
trivy vs gitleaks
trivy has 37,969 GitHub stars, 692 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gitleaks has 29,368 stars, 2,237 forks, 481 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. trivy leads on adoption by 29% (37,969 vs 29,368 stars). trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0; gitleaks is written in Go under MIT. trivy has attracted 2% as many forks as stars, gitleaks 8%. trivy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (devsecops, go, golang, hacktoberfest), 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
| trivy | gitleaks | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 29K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 692 | ⑂ 2.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick trivy if
- You weight community size — 38K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gitleaks if
- You want the gitleaks feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and gitleaks fits your workflow better
About trivy
Trivy is an open source security scanner written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is an Aqua Security open source project, hosted at trivy.dev, and it lives in the cloud native and DevSecOps ecosystem alongside container runtimes, Kubernetes clusters, and infrastructure as code tooling. The design separates two ideas: scanners, which describe the classes of security issue Trivy looks for, and targets, which describe where it looks. The README presents the project as a comprehensive and versatile scanner, and the topic list — containers, devsecops, docker, iac, infrastructure as code, kubernetes…
read the full trivy overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is trivy or gitleaks more popular?
trivy has 37,969 GitHub stars and gitleaks has 29,368. trivy has the larger community by that measure.
Are trivy and gitleaks free?
Both are open source. trivy is licensed under Apache-2.0 and gitleaks under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between trivy and gitleaks?
trivy is written in Go and gitleaks 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, trivy or gitleaks?
Choose trivy if you want the larger community (37,969 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gitleaks if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.