CodeQL vs TruffleHog

From $30 per active committer/month (GitHub Code Security)

Free tier available

Free on public repos. For private repositories GitHub split Advanced Security into two products in April 2025: Code Security at $30 and Secret Protection at $19 per active committer/month, both now available on Team plans as well as Enterprise. CodeQL sits in Code Security. Billing counts active committers, not seats, which can surprise teams with many occasional contributors.

Free CLI; the enterprise platform adds continuous monitoring and reporting, priced on request.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Open-source CLI is free and fully functional including verification.

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

Widely used

Truffle Security · since 2016

• Interprocedural dataflow analysis finds real vulnerabilities that regex- and pattern-based tools cannot see.
• Free on public repositories, with results in the GitHub security tab.
• Custom queries let you encode organisation-specific security rules.

• Live verification cuts false positives to near zero for supported providers.
• Free and easy to add as a pre-commit hook or CI step.
• Scans far beyond git — buckets, images, logs.

• Writing custom CodeQL queries is a specialist skill with a steep learning curve.
• Analysis is slow — minutes to tens of minutes, so it fits nightly better than per-commit.
• Private-repo licensing through Advanced Security is expensive at scale.

• No dashboard or workflow in the free CLI.
• Verification requires outbound network calls, which some environments block.
• Full-history scans on large repositories are slow.

GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.

Teams that want free, high-signal secret scanning in the pipeline today.