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testcritic

Semgrep vs GitGuardian

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

From $30 per contributor/month (Teams, per product)

Free tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot. Teams is priced per product per contributor — Code $30, Supply Chain $30, Secrets $15 — so scanning for all three multiplies the per-contributor figure.

Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.

Free tier

Open-source CLI is free and complete; hosted platform free for up to 10 contributors.

Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.

Open source

LGPL-2.1 (CLI)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift
JavaScriptPythonJavaGoRubyPHPC#

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Widely used

GitGuardian · since 2017

Strengths

  • Custom rules are genuinely writable — you can encode your own security or architecture standards in an afternoon.
  • Free CLI with a large community rule registry is immediately useful.
  • Fast enough to run on every pull request without complaint.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • Pattern matching without full dataflow misses some vulnerability classes.
  • Community rule quality is uneven; expect to curate.
  • Advanced dataflow and supply-chain features are paid only.
  • 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.

Best for

Teams that want customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.

Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.

All of these integrate with: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, Jira.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.