GitGuardian vs Trivy
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
Aqua Security · since 2019
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 covers container, IaC, secret and dependency scanning in one binary.
- Fast enough to run on every image build without slowing the pipeline.
- Excellent Kubernetes integration through the Trivy Operator.
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 hosted dashboard or workflow — findings go to your pipeline output.
- No reachability analysis, so alert volume is high on large images.
- Reporting for compliance requires building it yourself.
Best for
Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.
Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.