Dependabot vs GitGuardian
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free
FreeFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.
Free tier
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
Widely used
GitGuardian · since 2017
Strengths
- Free and requires a single config file to enable.
- Version-bump pull requests mean remediation is a review, not a task.
- Grouped updates keep the PR volume manageable.
- Validity checking distinguishes a live credential from a revoked one, which transforms triage priority.
- Scans full commit history, where most leaked secrets actually live.
- Free for teams up to 25 developers.
Limitations
- No reachability analysis, so it reports vulnerabilities in code you never call.
- PR noise is a genuine problem on large dependency trees without grouping configured.
- GitHub only.
- Secrets scanning only — not a general security platform.
- Historical scans on old repositories produce a large initial backlog.
- Requires repository access, which needs a security review of its own.
Best for
Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.
Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.
All of these integrate with: GitHub.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.