GitGuardian vs Dependabot
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 tierFree
FreeWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Free tier
Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
GitGuardian · since 2017
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Best for
Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.
Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.
All of these integrate with: GitHub.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.