GitGuardian vs Checkmarx One
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 tier available
Free tierQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.
Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.
Free tier
Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.
Free trial.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
GitGuardian · since 2017
Widely used
Checkmarx · since 2006
Strengths
- 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.
- Very deep SAST analysis with wide language coverage including legacy enterprise languages.
- One platform and one risk view across every scan type.
- Strong compliance and audit reporting.
Limitations
- 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.
- Expensive, with a long procurement and deployment cycle.
- High false-positive volume typical of deep SAST; tuning is a project.
- Scans are slow relative to developer-first tools.
Best for
Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.
Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.
All of these integrate with: GitHub, GitLab, Jira.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.