GitGuardian vs OWASP ZAP
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 and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
GitGuardian · since 2017
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
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, with no licence limits on scanning or users.
- The baseline scan runs in CI in a couple of minutes and catches real misconfiguration.
- Active community and extensive add-on marketplace.
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.
- Higher false-positive rate than commercial DAST tools.
- Scanning authenticated, JavaScript-heavy applications requires meaningful configuration effort.
- The interface is dated and the learning curve is real.
Best for
Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.