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testcritic

TruffleHog vs Semgrep

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 tier

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

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free CLI; the enterprise platform adds continuous monitoring and reporting, priced on request.

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

Open-source CLI is free and fully functional including verification.

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

Open source

AGPL-3.0

LGPL-2.1 (CLI)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

GoCodeless
PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Truffle Security · since 2016

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Strengths

  • Live verification cuts false positives to near zero for supported providers.
  • Free and easy to add as a pre-commit hook or CI step.
  • Scans far beyond git — buckets, images, logs.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • No dashboard or workflow in the free CLI.
  • Verification requires outbound network calls, which some environments block.
  • Full-history scans on large repositories are slow.
  • 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.

Best for

Teams that want free, high-signal secret scanning in the pipeline today.

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

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

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