GitGuardian vs Mend.io
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.
Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.
Free tier
Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.
Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
GitGuardian · since 2017
Widely used
Mend.io · since 2011
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.
- Licence compliance reporting is the strongest in the category and often the reason legal approves a release.
- Reachability analysis reduces the transitive-dependency alert flood.
- Automated remediation pull requests.
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.
- SAST is weaker than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
- Enterprise pricing and sales process.
- Interface is dated in places.
Best for
Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.
Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.
All of these integrate with: GitHub, GitLab, Jira.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.