gitleaks VS semgrep

Compare gitleaks vs semgrep and see what are their differences.

semgrep

Lightweight static analysis for many languages. Find bug variants with patterns that look like source code. (by semgrep)
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gitleaks semgrep
35 74
15,225 9,724
2.8% 2.2%
8.2 9.9
7 days ago about 8 hours ago
Go OCaml
MIT License GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

gitleaks

Posts with mentions or reviews of gitleaks. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-11.
  • How to use Lefthooks in your node project?
    4 projects | dev.to | 11 Apr 2024
    install gitleaks in your machine gitleaks
  • I Analyzed StackOverflow for Secrets
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Nov 2023
    > gitleaks : fatal error: runtime: out of memory

    Should be fixed now: https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks/pull/1292. Thanks for highlighting this simple change I've been putting off :)

  • [Help Needed] Securing Customized Gitleaks and Backend Communication?
    1 project | /r/cybersecurity | 16 Nov 2023
    I work in IT and we're enhancing our 'Shift Left Security' approach to prevent sensitive data leaks in our GitHub repositories. We've customized Gitleaks to send git-related information (like remote repository, author details, commit hash etc.) to our backend after each commit. This setup helps us monitor Gitleaks usage among our developers. (gitleaks)
  • Go Security Scanner
    2 projects | /r/golang | 8 Jun 2023
    Cool. What features/capabilities are different compared to gitleaks?
  • My boss keeps committing his creds into git
    6 projects | /r/devops | 24 May 2023
    To add my anecdote, testing out Trufflehog versus Gitleaks and detect-secrets the other tools seemed superior on detection rate and easier to work with.
  • Tools for very basic security audits
    1 project | /r/msp | 4 May 2023
    Some tools to consider: Gitleaks - open-source secret scanner for git repositories, files, and directories. Retire.js - dependency check tool for client JS code. Censys - It’s a search engine that you can use, for example, to scan any IP address and check open ports, software versions, location of the servers, etc. If you want to check more tools, you can download this free ebook with a list of recommended security tools: https://brightinventions.pl/blog/app-security-free-ebook/ The listed tools are free or offer free trials.
  • About secret scanning
    1 project | /r/opensourcesecurity | 25 Apr 2023
    bonuses: - https://github.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog - https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks
  • Someone has access to my private repos = I lost 140k
    1 project | /r/github | 19 Apr 2023
    I GET IT I need to follow best practice and not upload any sensitive information, even if its a private repo. But through my 10 yeras of coding it happened twice. However these keys only lived in 2 areas: my laptop and GITHUB. My laptop is pretty secured, and the timing of the above events just make me really think someone internally at Github is running https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks on private repos he / she has access to.
  • any open source that checks security vulnerabilities in code?
    3 projects | /r/golang | 8 Mar 2023
    Maybe https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks is what you are looking for
  • Securing the software supply chain in the cloud
    9 projects | dev.to | 10 Dec 2022
    Gitleaks

semgrep

Posts with mentions or reviews of semgrep. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-16.
  • A Deep Dive Into Terraform Static Code Analysis Tools: Features and Comparisons
    6 projects | dev.to | 16 Apr 2024
    Semgrep OSS Owner/Maintainer: Semgrep Age: First release on GitHub on February 6th, 2020 License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
  • Semgrep – Find bugs and enforce code standards
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2024
  • Application Security - Bridging Frontend and Cybersecurity: What is Application Security?
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Apr 2024
    Semgrep - https://semgrep.dev
  • Creating a DevSecOps pipeline with Jenkins — Part 1
    3 projects | dev.to | 17 Mar 2024
    For the SAST stage, I used SonarQube tool. SonarQube is an open-source platform developed by SonarSource for continuous inspection of code quality to perform automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs and code smells on more than 30 programming languages. I preferred SonarQube instead of other SAST tools because it has a detailed documentation and plugins about integration with Jenkins and SonarQube works with Java projects pretty well. Of course you can similar multi-language-supported tools such as Semgrep or language-specific tools such as Bandit.
  • Tree-Sitter
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2024
    > Not sure I understand your point.

    The problem is using Treesitter (for syntax highlighting and "semantic movements") and an LSP at the same time. So if your language has a LSP, using Treesitter additionally is redundant at best and introduces inconcistency at worst.

    I'm not talking about using Treesitter as the parser for the LSP.

    > Most popular languages have language-specific tools

    I'd say even less popular langauges like Coq^H^H^HRocq, Lean 4, Koka, Idris, Unison, ... have their "own" tools, I do not know of a language that uses a Treesitter parser in its LSP, but I do know about tools like https://semgrep.dev/ (written in OCaml) and Github's code search which use Treesitter.

  • AST-grep(sg) is a CLI tool for code structural search, lint, and rewriting
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Dec 2023
    Well, when I seach for "semgrep", I get a very nice corporate landing page with a "Book Demo" button. Which is a level of hassle that just isn't worth it for smaller teams, because "Book Demo" usually means "We're going to try to do a dance to see how much money we can extract from you." Which smaller teams may only want to do for a handful of key tools.

    (4 years ago, I was more willing to put up with enterprise licensing. But in the last two years, I've seen way too many enterprise vendors try to squeeze every penny they can get from existing clients. An enterprise sales process now often means "Expect 30% annual price hikes once you're in too deep to back out.")

    There's also an open source "semgrep" project here: https://github.com/semgrep/semgrep. But this seems to be basically a vulernability scanner, going by the README.

    Whereas AST-grep seems to focus heavily on things like:

    1. One-off searching: "Search my tree for this pattern."

    2. Refactoring: "Replace this pattern with this other pattern."

    AST-grep also includes a vulnerability scanning mode like semgrep.

    It's possible that semgrep also has nice support for (1) and (2), but it isn't clearly visible on their corporate landing page or the first open source README I found.

  • Top 10 Snyk Alternatives for Code Security
    3 projects | dev.to | 31 Aug 2023
    7. Semgrep
  • Semgrep: Semantic Grep for Code
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Aug 2023
  • semgrep VS bearer - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 10 Jul 2023
  • Powerful SAST project for Android Application Security
    3 projects | /r/bugbounty | 21 Jun 2023
    This project is a compilation of Semgrep rules derived from the OWASP Mobile Application Security Testing Guide (MASTG) specifically for Android applications. The aim is to enhance and support Mobile Application Penetration Testing (MAPT) activities conducted by the ethical hacker community. The primary objective of these rules is to address the static tests outlined in the OWASP MASTG.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing gitleaks and semgrep you can also consider the following projects:

trufflehog - Find and verify credentials

SonarQube - Continuous Inspection

trivy - Find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, SBOM in containers, Kubernetes, code repositories, clouds and more

snyk - Snyk CLI scans and monitors your projects for security vulnerabilities. [Moved to: https://github.com/snyk/cli]

git-secrets - Prevents you from committing secrets and credentials into git repositories

codeql - CodeQL: the libraries and queries that power security researchers around the world, as well as code scanning in GitHub Advanced Security

pre-commit - A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks.

Spotbugs - SpotBugs is FindBugs' successor. A tool for static analysis to look for bugs in Java code.

husky - git hooks made easy

sops - Simple and flexible tool for managing secrets

detect-secrets - An enterprise friendly way of detecting and preventing secrets in code.