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Product Security / DevSecOps at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
GitGuardian's automated features enhance productivity by allowing us to delegate tasks and concentrate on governance.
Pros and Cons
  • "GitGuardian has many features that fit our use cases. We have our internal policies on secret exposure, and our code is hosted on GitLab, so we need to prevent secrets from reaching GitLab because our customers worry that GitLab is exposed. One of the great features is the pre-receive hook. It prevents commits from being pushed to the repository by activating the hook on the remotes, which stops the developers from pushing to the remote. The secrets don't reach GitLab, and it isn't exposed."
  • "GitGuardian's hook and dashboard scanners are the two entities. They should work together as one. We've seen several discrepancies where the hook is not being flagged on the dashboard. I still think they need to do some fine-tuning around that. We don't want to waste time."

What is our primary use case?

We utilize GitGuardian to scan for secrets within our codebase. Our implementation includes pre-receive and pre-commit hooks, dashboard scans, and CI/CD integration within GitLab.

How has it helped my organization?

Secret detection is pivotal for development security, ensuring no secrets exist in packages, libraries, dependencies, or code. Even with a locked-down application, explicit permissions could grant easy access to the environment and connected resources. GitGuardian serves as an essential tool for every development team.

GitGuardian aids in prioritizing remediation efforts by promptly notifying us of reported issues. This informs our approach; we prioritize valid reports over invalid ones or those that failed checks. Automation plays a significant role, swiftly addressing invalid reports and saving valuable time.

The solution aligns with our shift-left strategy, empowering developers with security responsibilities through pre-receive hooks that act as security controls. Developers can quickly identify secrets, enhancing security awareness at the development level.

GitGuardian significantly reduces manual work through automation, streamlining incident resolution processes and allowing proactive measures like permissions revocation. While not fully automated, leveraging automated solutions has notably increased productivity, enabling us to focus more on governance and essential tasks.

Our secret detection capabilities have improved dramatically with GitGuardian. Initially facing over 10,000 incidents, we reduced them to 2,700, marking a 60 to 70 percent increase in detection efficiency.

Validation features save considerable time by eliminating the need for manual verification, allowing us to focus on remediation. While accuracy varies based on use cases, we've encountered only a handful of false positives, with the false positive rate correlating strongly with the number of secrets present.

What is most valuable?

GitGuardian offers a range of features that align perfectly with our requirements. With internal policies in place to prevent secret exposure, especially concerning our code hosted on GitLab, GitGuardian's pre-receive hook stands out as a crucial feature. By activating this hook on the remotes, it effectively blocks commits from being pushed to the repository, ensuring that secrets never reach GitLab and remain protected from exposure.

The tool provides comprehensive coverage, including classic technologies such as SMTP credentials, along with Slack tokens and AWS secrets in our specific use case. Its ability to manage various types of secrets, including database connections, APIs, and RSA keys, streamlines our workflow by consolidating detection efforts. This consolidation saves us considerable time, eliminating the need for back-and-forth verification with the team. Once a valid issue is identified, we can promptly escalate it to the team for remediation

What needs improvement?

The GitGuardian hook and dashboard scanners are essential components that should seamlessly integrate to provide comprehensive security coverage. However, we've encountered instances where discrepancies arise, with the dashboard scan detecting issues not reflected on the hook. This inconsistency requires fine-tuning to ensure efficient detection and resolution, as we aim to avoid unnecessary time wastage.

Moreover, the historical scan feature could benefit from improvement. Occasionally, it fails to efficiently track changes in updated histories, leading to delays in data history updates. This can be frustrating, especially when the reported secret remains unchanged or changed in history. Addressing this issue is crucial to alleviate the burden on the team and streamline our workflow. We hope to see enhancements in this aspect from GitGuardian.

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For how long have I used the solution?

I have used GitGaurdian for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Earlier, we had some challenges and problems with the dashboard crashing, but there have been many improvements since then. We haven't seen any crashes lately. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability depends on the deployment model. Our engineers understand how to deploy the solution directly. We have two environments: production and dev. We haven't seen any major hassles, and it doesn't impact the development workflow.

How are customer service and support?

I rate GitGuardian support nine out of ten. GitGuardian support has been great. They respond fast. If something requires investigation, they also resolve the issue quickly. Recently, we had to upgrade because of a bug. They were happy to help us.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used Trufflehog at a previous company. It's hard to compare the two. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I've used a couple of the other solutions, and GitGuardian stands out.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward. We had deployed it on EKS with nodes for dashboard and other aspects of the app.

What about the implementation team?

It was a joint effort. Their support engineers were very skillful and did provide all required help.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Every company has a budget to spend on security tools, so it depends on what you want to spend on security at each stage in their maturity walk. You can have a vulnerability in your code with a firewall in front, but you don't want an application exposing secrets. An attacker knows how to crawl your application and extract information. It depends on how much you want to prioritize the cleanness of your code from a secrets perspective. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at a few other products but primarily chose GitGuardian because of the price. It also has some advantages regarding dashboard maturity and the number of available integrations. We also like the auto-validation and the way the pre-commit hook works. It was also a lot easier to implement GitGuardian. 

I recommend open source for other things but not secrets detection. There's an inherent vulnerability to an open source solution that could leave your secrets exposed. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate GitGuardian Internal Monitoring nine out of ten. Before deployment, it's crucial to thoroughly understand your environment. For users of public cloud services, ensuring compatibility with GitGuardian's features is essential to maximize benefits. While the SaaS solution offers simplicity, our air-gapped internal deployment had minor restrictions on available features. Despite this, we opted to continue with GitGuardian as it satisfied our core needs.

Understanding your environment and version control system is paramount. Determine your implementation approach, considering options like starting with dashboard scans rather than hooks, which I don't recommend initially. Beginning with dashboard scans on your version control system, such as GitHub, and conducting historical scans is advisable. As teams become more acquainted with the tool, gradual implementation of more advanced features like hooks can be considered.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2352429 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
They offer a free tier that provides full functionality for smaller teams
Pros and Cons
  • "It's also worth mentioning that GitGuardian is unique because they have a free tier that we've been using for the first twelve months. It provides full functionality for smaller teams. We're a smaller company and have never changed in size, but we got to the point where we felt the service brought us value, and we want to pay for it. We also wanted an SLA for technical support and whatnot, so we switched to a paid plan. Without that, they had a super-generous, free tier, and I was immensely impressed with it."
  • "The purchasing process is convoluted compared to Snyk, the other tool we use. It's like night and day because you only need to punch in your credit card, and you're set. With GitGuardian, getting a quote took two or three weeks. We paid for it in December but have not settled that payment yet."

What is our primary use case?

We use GitGuardian to detect secrets that have inadvertently been committed to our source code. GitGuardian monitors every Git push and commits we make, and it analyzes the files, looking for things like access tokens, passwords, session ID cookies, etc. If that happens, GitGuardian raises a ticket in our internal ticketing system, and we remedy it. 

How has it helped my organization?

When we first deployed GitGuardian, we went back through all of the commits that we did over the course of the last five or six years that the company existed. It immediately found more than a hundred. We detected all sorts of secrets in those repositories. It had a pretty substantial impact from the first day. That was during our trial run, but now it's incorporated into our deployment pipelines. The impact is still there, and it's still tremendous. It's probably not as instantaneous or the same avalanche of detections that we saw on day one. That was impressive, but we don't get that anymore. It has been a constant trickle of tickets.

GitGuardian helps us prioritize remediation. You need to incorporate it into your existing processes, but GitGuardian provides you with the flexibility and the tools. For example, in our environment, we implement ticket creation through webhooks. We have some logic rules stating that our production repositories are a higher priority than our dev or sandbox repositories. Our developers commit all sorts of weird things to those. GitGuardian gives you the tools to do that, but it may not necessarily do that right out of the box when you first deploy it.

To have collaboration between our security and dev teams, you need to have a detection. Previously, we did not have a functional equivalent to GitGuardian in our environment, and it introduced that process, so we could begin having that conversation. The security team is more focused on remediating to ensure that API token or password is invalidated as soon as possible after it was committed. Developers are more focused on why the secret was committed and environment variables to store that particular secret. The collaboration exists in our company largely thanks to GitGuardian.

A webhook creates a ticket in our internal ticketing system, and the ticket goes to the security guys. They look through it. They make sure the secret is invalidated and start that conversation with the developer to say that they committed this, so please don't do that again. That's the end of the story. We don't use 100 percent of GitGuardian's functionality. We are a fairly small company, so we probably don't need all of that. This simple approach works pretty well for a company of our size.

GitGuardian has improved our security team's productivity if we measure it in security incidents per week, hour, etc. Now, we have a separate stream of secret detection tickets going into our system. It's much better to have those during the deployment phase instead of discovering them after a breach or down the road. 

It's hard to quantify the time saved. Finding a secret that was accidentally committed to a repo is like searching for a needle in a haystack.  And you don't even know if the needle is in that haystack. Now you have something like  X-ray vision that lets you see through that haystack and find right where the needle is. It unlocked a new angle on our application security process that did not exist. When a secret was accidentally committed to a repo, it could have been noticed by a security guy or another developer, or maybe not. 

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of GitGuardian is its core secret detection mechanism. It covers a broad range of technologies. The detection accuracy is extremely good. It correctly detects in about 99 percent of cases. Every false positive we've had wasn't an actual false positive. It was a case where a developer copied a sample code from somewhere, including a dummy password or session ID.  GitGuardian may trigger this, but I think that's a good thing because we know it's there, and it is alert.

What needs improvement?

GitGuardian had a really nice feature that allowed you to compare all the public GitHub repositories against your code base and see if your code leaked. They discontinued it for some reason about eight months ago, it was in preview and kinda exploratory phase, but for whatever reason, they chose not to move forward with it. 

That is unfortunate because it immediately detected a leak of our company code that one of our contractors committed. They leaked our intellectual property into one of their public reports. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used GitGuardian for 14 or 15 months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have never experienced a single instance of downtime, but I don't sit there 24/7. It's just a useful thing that is sitting in the corner humming and doing its thing. I have never noticed any outages.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We are a small company, and it performs beautifully for a company of our size, but I think it will also perform well for a company 20 times our size. If we're talking at the scale of a company the size of Google, then I don't know.

How are customer service and support?

I rate GitGuardian support eight out of ten. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't have a secret detection solution because it's a fairly new area. However, we also use Snyk to supplement GitGuardian. It does things that GitGuardian doesn't do, like dependency detection and static code analysis. GitGuardian is also doing things that Snyk isn't, so the two complement each other nicely.

How was the initial setup?

GitGuardian is a SaaS solution, and the integration process is pretty straightforward. It's similar to other things you integrate with our repository and version control systems. It doesn't require any maintenance. It adds new repositories automatically.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The purchasing process is convoluted compared to Snyk, the other tool we use. It's like night and day because you only need to punch in your credit card, and you're set. With GitGuardian, getting a quote took two or three weeks. We paid for it in December but have not settled that payment yet.

It's also worth mentioning that GitGuardian is unique because they have a free tier that we've been using for the first twelve months. It provides full functionality for smaller teams. We're a smaller company and have never changed in size, but we got to the point where we felt the service brought us value, and we wanted to pay for it. We also wanted an SLA for technical support and whatnot, so we switched to a paid plan. Without that, they had a super-generous, free tier, and I was immensely impressed with it.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

When we acquired GitGuardian, I compared it to GitHub Advanced Security, an additional premium subscription from GitHub that you can purchase on top of your existing one. It claims to do similar things to what GitGuardian does, but GitGuardian is far superior in terms of the types of secrets it can detect. 

I'm not sure if GitHub has caught up since then. I picked GitGuardian over GitHub Security because it had better functionality. Also, not all of our repositories are in GitHub. We also used Azure DevOps. GitHub Advanced Security sort of locks you down within that GitHub sandbox. With GitGuardian, we could scan both GitHub and Azure DevOps repositories and have identical functionality across the two. If we implement a policy in GitGuardian, we would know that it equally applies to secrets committed to both systems.

You also have the option of open-source solutions, but one of our core principles is to lean heavily toward solutions that are not self-hosted, whether it's in the cloud or on-premises. To have an open-source solution, you need to run it somewhere and maintain it. GitGuardian is a software as a service. You sign up and forget about it until your next detection. If a company wants to minimize administrative overhead, GitGuardian is a pretty much no-brainer.

What other advice do I have?

I rate GitGuardian eight out of 10. Secret detection is critical to application security. You might assume that your developers have a security mindset. Many don't. Sometimes, it isn't even a mistake. They might not realize exactly what they are doing and the amount of damage that could occur because of what they commit to a repo. 

When you implement GitGuardian, there will be an influx of detections if you're developing any software that connects to anything with a database, third-party REST API, etc. I recommend looking through the initial list of detections and identifying the most susceptible projects or repositories. Also, look at the developers who produce the most detections. Those are the people who lack a security mindset. Identify the high-risk category of developers.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Buyer's Guide
GitGuardian Platform
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about GitGuardian Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior Security Engineer at a insurance company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Highlights problems and shows engineers how to properly remove them from code, making us materially more secure
Pros and Cons
  • "GitGuardian has pretty broad detection capabilities. It covers all of the types of secrets that we've been interested in... [Yet] The "detector" concept, which identifies particular categories or types of secrets, allows an organization to tweak and tailor the configuration for things that are specific to its environment. This is highly useful if you're particularly worried about a certain type of secret and it can help focus attention, as part of early remediation efforts."

    What is our primary use case?

    We needed a detection tool that would work across all languages and help us identify problem areas. That was especially important where a codebase is made up of several different development languages written over several years (or decades).

    How has it helped my organization?

    GitGuardian efficiently supports a shift-left strategy. As a result, it has made things materially more secure. It's helped us to stop secrets from reaching our codebase.

    The platform has helped to facilitate a better security culture within our organization. In addition to highlighting problems, it shows engineers how to properly remove them from the code, and provides advice on rotation.

    The Dev in the loop feature has helped us to learn about problems and has helped us get our hands on remediating. We've gone from having very long-lived incidents to having much shorter incidents.

    And because we didn't have any solution like this before, of course it has increased our secrets detection rate.

    And in terms of security team productivity, using GigGuardian helped us deliver a key, strategic roadmap item for our organization.

    What is most valuable?

    The solution offers reliable, actionable secrets detection with a low false-positive rate. That low false-positive rate was one of the reasons we picked it. There are always going to be some, but in reality, it's very low compared to a lot of the other, open source tools that are available.

    Accurate secrets detection is notoriously challenging. GitGuardian provides a rich and easy-to-use interface that enables engineers or security teams to jump on issues and manage their remediation. It offers functionality to prevent issues from creeping in.

    GitGuardian has pretty broad detection capabilities. It covers all of the types of secrets that we've been interested in. For example, it covers AWS Keys. There isn't anything specific that it couldn't detect in the stack that we use. That breadth is also evident because we have a lot of different languages that it supports as well.

    The "detector" concept, which identifies particular categories or types of secrets, allows an organization to tweak and tailor the configuration for things that are specific to its environment. This is highly useful if you're particularly worried about a certain type of secret and it can help focus attention, as part of early remediation efforts.

    The ability to check for secrets as part of pre-push hooks is fantastic, as it helps identify issues before they reach the main codebase, and that was the ultimate goal for us.

    Another positive feature is that it quickly prioritizes remediation. That quick feedback loop is very helpful. Based on the detector that finds the problem, you can use that to almost rate the issue. For example, if it's an AWS Key, you would rate it very high so you can jump the prioritization accordingly, once you've got those alerts triggered. And issues can be assigned to individual developers to help gain traction on fixes.

    And the Dev in the loop feature, which our developers use, is pretty important when it comes to remediation because that's what helps make the engineer responsible for having done the thing that needs remediation. This feature is effective in terms of helping collaboration between developers and our security team. It's automated, to a large extent. The "in the loop" feature will notify the engineer of what's happened and will give the security team oversight, but it deliberately puts the onus on the engineer to fix it.  

    In addition, the out-of-the-box reporting mechanisms allow for easy data presentation to both specific engineering teams and senior leadership.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've used the solution for one year.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    I've had no issues with the stability of the service.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    I implemented it on a very large codebase, with no scalability concerns. The SaaS offering made the integration simple.

    How are customer service and support?

    GitGuardian's technical support is very good. They are very proactive and keen about any feedback on the detectors.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    I've previously implemented open source alternatives. These proved cumbersome, unscalable, and with such large false-positive rates as to make the output useless.

    How was the initial setup?

    There wasn't much preparation needed on our side to start using GitGuardian. There was just the standard opt-in to integration and we then used OKTA to manage SSO and set up integrations with GitHub. It is pretty easy.

    There is no maintenance necessary because it's offered as a service.

    It was a pleasure working with their implementation team to integrate it with our source control, and they were available to listen to any feedback we had.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    There are cheaper alternatives and competitors, but you get what you pay for. I've tried to implement a number of alternatives in the past, but those solutions have quickly become unmanageable due to their false-positive rates and poor interfaces.

    Depending on the number of engineers committing to the codebase, pricing will very likely be a factor in any decision made. However, if you're after a great secrets detection platform, you'd be hard-pressed to beat GitGuardian.

    What other advice do I have?

    If a colleague in security at another company were to say to me that secrets detection is not a priority, I'd ask them why that's the case. Arguably, secrets in source code are a very large risk, especially given the distributed nature of working at the moment. Secrets detection is pretty core for us, when it comes to application development, because we're spread out in terms of work locations. People may be using different kinds of machines to do their work, and we need to make sure that sensitive data is kept out of our codebase.

    GitGuardian is a really good, well-crafted, and polished tool. You get what you pay for. It's one of the more expensive solutions, but it is very good, and the low false positive rate is a really appealing factor. And it has taught us the size of the problem that we are facing, which was something we didn't know before. It's pretty near to perfect.

    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Tyler Oelking - PeerSpot reviewer
    Application Security Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    Top 10
    Helps increase productivity and identify and prioritize security incidents
    Pros and Cons
    • "The most valuable feature is the general incident reporting system."
    • "We'd like to request a new GitGuardian feature that automates user onboarding and access control for code repositories."

    What is our primary use case?

    Our developers use the GitGuardian platform to securely access and manage secrets within their repositories. This allows them to identify and address any potential security risks.

    How has it helped my organization?

    GitGuardian's detection capabilities are good.

    The accuracy of detections and the false positive rate are good.

    It has improved the abilities of our developers and security team.

    The playbooks help to identify and prioritize security incidents.

    GitGuardian helped us increase our secret detection rate.

    GitGuardian helped to increase our security team's productivity. It allows us to find the secrets and their repository faster. As the security team is focusing on one app to audit it, we also look at the GitGuardian findings for that app, and that is easier than looking for the secrets manually.

    What is most valuable?

    The most valuable feature is the general incident reporting system. It provides informative data with good filtering and reporting options.

    What needs improvement?

    We'd like to request a new GitGuardian feature that automates user onboarding and access control for code repositories. Ideally, when a user contributes to a repository, they would be automatically added to GitGuardian and granted access to view that specific repository. This would eliminate the need for manual user creation and permission assignment within the platform.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using the GitGuardian Platform for one and a half years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The GitGuardian Platform is stable.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The GitGuardian Platform can deploy at scale.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The pricing for GitGuardian is fair.

    What other advice do I have?

    I would rate the GitGuardian Platform eight out of ten.

    Getting started with GitGuardian required some preliminary setup on our part. This involved configuring both our on-premise GitHub Enterprise server and the GitGuardian application itself, granting the application access to the enterprise server.

    GitGuardian requires around two hours per week of maintenance. We have our scripts that add users to the tool as needed. So we have a script that looks at our GitHub server talks to that API, and uses the information from that to add users to GitGuardian. And we have to maintain those because sometimes just like with any code, we have to make sure that process is still working.

    GitGuardian's onboarding process and customer success teams were helpful.

    I recommend GitGuardian as an easy-to-use tool that tackles a major security risk often overlooked by companies. This platform can significantly improve your software development lifecycle.

    While detecting hidden functionality within a security program for application development isn't the highest priority, it does hold some value. If resources allow, it's worth considering incorporating methods to identify such secrets.

    Organizations considering the GitGuardian Platform should establish clear action points for employees who will be using the tool. This ensures everyone understands how to leverage GitGuardian effectively within their workflow.

    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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    PeerSpot user
    Mikkel Østergaard Eriksen - PeerSpot reviewer
    IT-Security Consultant at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees
    Consultant
    It has increased the security team's productivity by shifting more responsibilities to the developers
    Pros and Cons
    • "I like GitGuardian's instant response. When you have an incident, it's reported immediately. The interface gives you a great overview of your current leaked secrets."
    • "GitGuardian encompasses many secrets that companies might have, but we are a Microsoft-only organization, so there are some limitations there in terms of their honey tokens. I'd like for it to not be limited to Amazon-based tokens. It would be nice to see a broader set of providers that you could pick from."

    What is our primary use case?

    We noticed a problem with developers putting secrets in their code, and we needed a solution for this. I had previously used GitGuardian in my own hobby projects, so I knew what it was all about. I was asked to look into alternatives to ensure we had considered every possibility, but we quickly found that GitGuardian was the right solution for our use case. The company has around 100 users. 

    How has it helped my organization?

    Using GitGuardian has made developers more aware of secrets. The senior leadership at the company is impressed with how well GitGuardian works. We've also heard some good comments about how snappy the website is. We do not have a shift-left culture at our company, but we are moving toward it, and GitGuardian definitely helps with this. 

    GitGuardian has improved the collaboration between the security and dev teams. The developers have taken to the tool nicely and are using it efficiently. At the same time, it doesn't require any communication between the developers and the security team in terms of remediation because it's intuitive enough for the developers to know they need to fix an issue when they get an email notifying them about it. They also know how to fix it because GitGuardian shows that in the remediation steps.

    The solution has greatly increased our secret detection rate. When we did it manually, it took about an hour to find 50. Now, we get around 250 in an hour, and they appear instantly when we sign in. It has improved the remediation time quite a bit. We're down to nine minutes now, which is a vast improvement compared to when it was a manual process.

    GitGuardian has increased the security team's productivity by shifting the responsibility to the developers. We are almost never inside GitGuardian monitoring it. It's mostly when we need to do our weekly reporting. We generally leave it up to the developers to fix their code. That's just how the company works. 

    What is most valuable?

    I like GitGuardian's instant response. When you have an incident, it's reported immediately. The interface gives you a great overview of your current leaked secrets. It's easy to reduce the false positive rate because we can customize the detection rules to be as granular as we want. We can set up rules to say certain things should never be detected. We're happy with the false positive rate, but we notice a lot from our test certificates in our code. There is no clear way to define if a certificate is a test certificate apart from the name. I think it's a good thing that they have these false positives rather than false negatives.

    We use some of the playbooks. They help us prioritize security incidents. We're only using a limited set at the moment, but the ones we use help us identify and prioritize security incidents. 

    What needs improvement?

    GitGuardian encompasses many secrets that companies might have, but we are a Microsoft-only organization, so there are some limitations there in terms of their honey tokens. I'd like for it to not be limited to Amazon-based tokens. It would be nice to see a broader set of providers that you could pick from. 

    For how long have I used the solution?

    The company has only been using GitGuardian for a couple of months now, but I have used it for many years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    I rate GitGuardian nine out of ten for stability. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    I rate GitGuardian ten out of ten for scalability.

    How are customer service and support?

    I rate GitGuardian support ten out of ten. We had some issues with GitGuardian failing to detect some secrets. We contacted support. They resolved the problem swiftly and kept us informed throughout the process. They started the process of creating a new detection, and it's a new feature that they're working on. 

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    I previously used some open-source solutions, but they were not quite on par with GitGuardian. An open-source solution is only as good as the developers maintaining it. The developers maintaining it are not paid to maintain it, unlike those who are paid to keep a commercial solution updated. The paid solutions are way better.

    How was the initial setup?

    GitGuardian is a SaaS platform, so you don't need to deploy it. It's just a matter of onboarding users. It doesn't require any maintenance on our side. 

    What was our ROI?

    We have only used GitGuardian for four months, so it's hard to calculate a return. However, it will save us a lot of headaches with the new EU regulations in the long run. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    When we're talking about security, there is no price that is too high to keep a company safe.

    What other advice do I have?

    I rate GitGuardian nine out of ten. A secrets detection program is one of the most critical things in application development. It's easy enough to implement GitGuardian, so you don't need to test it, but you can always go with a trial because you need to know if this is the right solution for you. It's so easy to get started with GitGuardian that you don't need to go through all the bureaucracy.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Michael Schmitz - PeerSpot reviewer
    Director of Engineering at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    Real User
    Alerts us about secrets being leaked so that we can remediate, and shows vulnerabilities in open-source software
    Pros and Cons
    • "The most valuable feature is the alerts when secrets are leaked and we can look at particular repositories to see if there are any outstanding problems. In addition, the solution's detection capabilities seem very broad. We have no concerns there."
    • "We have been somewhat confused by the dashboard at times."

    What is our primary use case?

    We work for a research institute and there are a lot of disparate security practices. A lot of people work for us for short periods of time, through internships and other temporary positions, and it's been hard to communicate security best practices across the company. GitGuardian helps prevent the leaking of secrets, but it's also for educating our company about our policies.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The main benefit is that, previously, secrets would be leaked and nobody would ever hear about it. Now, we actually have alerts and the opportunity to follow up with researchers to deal with these problems. It has provided the opportunity to collaborate on remediation rather than not knowing there are issues.

    In addition, we do a review of security alerts when we open-source software. We used to have a script that we wrote that we would run to scan these repositories. It would produce a lot of noise. Now, we go to GitGuardian and immediately we have a dashboard that tells us what vulnerabilities there are.

    GitGuardian has helped to modestly increase security team productivity whenever we do a review of open-source software for security leaks. Previously, that would take about an hour per repository and now it takes five minutes. We have 1,500 repositories, which is a lot. We're open-sourcing them weekly, so it doesn't amount to a huge number of hours, but it's turned something from fairly inconvenient, that had the potential to take an hour out of someone's day, to something that's just quick, easy, minimal, and more effective.

    It has also helped to decrease false positives.

    What is most valuable?

    The most valuable feature is the alerts when secrets are leaked and we can look at particular repositories to see if there are any outstanding problems. In addition, the solution's detection capabilities seem very broad. We have no concerns there.

    In terms of the accuracy of detection and the solution's false positive rate, we had to make some adjustments, but now that we've made those adjustments we're very happy with where we are.

    We have also used the dev in the loop feature and it works well when it comes to remediating an incident. For collaboration between developers and security teams it's very good.

    What needs improvement?

    We have been somewhat confused by the dashboard at times.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We've been using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring for about a year.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    I have no concerns about its stability at all.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We also have no concerns about its scalability. Maybe we'll hit something, but I've seen no evidence of scalability issues.

    We're using it for about one-third of our organization. We'd like to use it for more.

    How are customer service and support?

    We've always gotten quick, thorough responses from their technical support.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We did not have a previous solution.

    How was the initial setup?

    It was very easy to get started. There was an amazing trial where they showed us vulnerabilities we already had.

    It requires no maintenance on our side.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    It's not cheap, but it's not crazy expensive either. We negotiate a price and it stays at that price, which is very nice.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We did evaluate other products over a fairly long period of time, but GitGuardian stood out in that it was something we would pay for and we wouldn't have to worry about it. It would just work.

    What other advice do I have?

    I would tell a security colleague who says that secrets detection is not a priority that it might be worth trying this tool out and seeing what it shows you before jumping to that conclusion.

    The importance of secrets detection to a security program for application development is tough to determine because the biggest players already detect secrets on GitHub and disable those tokens. If I pretend those don't exist, then it's extremely important. Since they do exist, it's somewhat important.

    Try out GitGuardian Internal Monitoring. It's easy to try it out and you can go from there.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    reviewer2191434 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Head of Engineering at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    Helped to decrease the overall false positive rate, but the authentication process has room for improvement
    Pros and Cons
    • "Presently, we find the pre-commit hooks more useful."
    • "It took us a while to get new patterns introduced into the pattern reporting process."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use the solution to detect any secret exposure.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The overall breadth of the solution is good. It's been able to detect most of the secrets that we have.

    The accuracy of the solution is generally good, but we have had a number of false positives. For example, sometimes we would commit a test secret, and it would not follow the action of a secret. This is because the secret contained a prefix that is commonly used in passwords, such as "password". We have been able to take action to suppress these false positives moving forward.

    The solution helps to quickly prioritize remediation. When we go back to the historical scan, it can tell us not only what vulnerabilities were exposed, but also the general risk level of each vulnerability. This allows us to prioritize remediation efforts and focus on the more critical vulnerabilities first.

    The solution helped to decrease the overall false positive rate. We have been able to decrease the number of false positives by about seven percent. When we receive alerts now, they are usually general alerts. We do not receive alerts that are specific to a door without the pull being put in place when we investigate.

    The solution increased our secret detection rate by around 80 percent.

    We detected a security issue, and we were able to fix it in the system within half a day. This was possible because we reduced the number of follow-up steps required. The solution saved our security team about 25 percent of their time. This means that we probably removed about a week's worth of incident management work. This is a significant improvement in security, and it saved our team a lot of time.

    The solution also helped reduce our mean time to remediation.

    What is most valuable?

    At the start, historical scanning was very useful because it was the first time we had done it. It allowed us to see how many secrets we had exposed. If we had only focused on current secrets, we would have missed all the secrets that had been committed in the past. So, initially, the historical scan was really useful.

    Presently, we find the pre-commit hooks more useful. These hooks allow us to set up a local development environment where we can scan for secrets before we commit them to the repository. This saved us a lot of time.

    What needs improvement?

    It took us a while to get new patterns introduced into the pattern reporting process. If there is a way to automate this process so that we can include our own patterns in our repositories, that would be very useful.

    The authentication process could be improved. A single sign-on system would be very helpful.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring for one and a half years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The solution is stable.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The solution is scalable, so we can create instances for each scan that we run. This means that we will never have any issues with load or performance. We have 100 end users the utilize the solution.

    How are customer service and support?

    The technical support has been very helpful. The system is also pretty intuitive, so we haven't had to contact them very often.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    What was our ROI?

    We have seen a 10 percent return on investment. Resource-wise, creating a secret once it has been detected is a significant undertaking. Early detection has saved a lot of time, and I think there would be various penalties. Theoretically, if we continued to explore secrets, we could also save and compromise.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    I compared the solution to a couple of other solutions, and I think it is very competitively priced.

    What other advice do I have?

    I give GitGuardian Internal Monitoring a seven out of ten. The solution is really good, but the false positives that we had to work with lower the solution's overall score.

    When we first started using the solution, we had to address some areas quickly. We had pushed through some public-facing features because we wanted to start working in the open. However, this prompted us to realize that we weren't quite ready to do that. So we had to make all of our clusters private again, or as private as possible. The thought of working in the open had to be reviewed at the start.

    The solution does not require maintenance. It is used extensively and is part of our security check pipeline. It is included as part of the pipeline in any repository that is created. It is also included in the repository itself. Each project is included as a pre-commit process. Additionally, it is included in our deployment pipeline because it is well integrated into our productivity tools. 

    Secret detection is a very important part of a security program for application development. It gives us the confidence to commit our work to a shared environment, especially if we want to make it public. Secret detection helps to ensure that confidential information is not exposed.

    For those using an open-source tool, I would suggest pointing out what sort of support they might need. If they're comfortable using it on their own, then that's fine. But if they need support, it would be helpful to have a support package available.

    People should do a proof of concept first because the way it will be configured for them might be different. I don't know if we can figure it out for sales for another organization. So, having a proof of concept to fully understand how it will work best for them is useful.

    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Edvinas Urbasius - PeerSpot reviewer
    Cybersecurity Consultant at LCG
    Real User
    Its straightforward UI is easy to access and monitor.
    Pros and Cons
    • "GitGuardian has helped to increase our security team's productivity. Now, we don't need to call the developers all the time and ask what they are working on. I feel the solution bridged the gap between our team and the developers, which is really great. I feel that we need that in our company, since some of the departments are just doing whatever and you don't know what they are doing. I think GitGuardian does a good job of bridging the gap. It saves us about 10 hours per week."
    • "For some repositories, there are a lot of incidents. For example, one repository says 255 occurrences, so I assume these are 255 alerts and nobody is doing anything about them. These could be false positives. However, I cannot assess it correctly, because I haven't been closing these false positives myself. From the dashboard, I can see that for some of the repositories, there have been a lot of closing of these occurrences, so I would assume there are a lot of false positives. A ballpark estimate would be 60% being false positives. One of the arguments from the developers against this tool is the number of false positives."

    What is our primary use case?

    Since we have a lot of internal teams, the main team running this tool is composed of developers. Because of the security aspects of GitGuardian, they figured that we needed to bridge the gaps and work together.

    GitGuardian creates a lot of alerts in the code. If someone uses new passwords or secrets, then we can see in which repository as well as who used it and left their password in the code. We monitor these things. However, they haven't given us a permission to work with alerts since it is more for analysis purposes right now, seeing what problems we have in the company, e.g., we are seeing a lot of people just dumping passwords in the code, which is not a good approach.

    Our main strategy is focusing on moving testing quality and performance earlier on in the development process. Developers are focusing on this quite heavily.

    We are using the latest version.

    How has it helped my organization?

    It quickly prioritizes remediation, but individual teams get to decide how they do things. The problem, where we work, is that we work in an agile setup. Each team decides how they want to do it. Sometimes, developers are prioritizing different things though. That is the reason why we started working with developers. We were trying to push the security agenda, because developers would just like to work on code. Most of them don't care about security. While this tool has helped with prioritization, a problem can be that developers are not taking the security prioritization into the mix.

    Two weeks ago, I spoke with the main lead of the developer team. They said that we shouldn't close alerts ourselves, but the tool helps. From a security perspective, we collect the data since we will use it in the future with analysis, but the developers are closing the alerts. GitGuardian really helps us to collaborate since we can just copy and paste a particular incident, then ask them, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?" That really helps.

    GitGuardian has helped to increase our security team's productivity. Now, we don't need to call the developers all the time and ask what they are working on. I feel the solution bridged the gap between our team and the developers, which is really great. I feel that we need that in our company, since some of the departments are just doing whatever and you don't know what they are doing. I think GitGuardian does a good job of bridging the gap. It saves us about 10 hours per week.

    What is most valuable?

    I like the ease of the UI. The UI is very straightforward. It is easy to access and monitor. There are not a lot of hoops to jump through. Click on it, and everything is in the main dashboard. This is really helpful. With other systems that we are using in our company, we have a lot of other dashboards, and sometimes you need to click five times to see something. With GitGuardian, it is very easy to access alerts, which is very nice. I like the UI aspect of it because it is very easy to use.

    The span of the solution's detection capabilities is good and very quick. Alerts and incidents poop up immediately.

    The range of technology that the solution covers is huge, which is nice. There are broad SMTP credentials for generic passwords. 

    The documentation is good and very insightful.

    What needs improvement?

    I am unsure if they have a mobile app. That could be a feature or improvement in the future. A lot of our security dashboards don't have a phone app. A phone app helps because you can monitor things on the go. We are using the Darktrace solution that allows alerts on our phones, and we configure the alert threshold. That helps a lot. I think that a mobile app could be something that could be added in the future pipeline, if there is any demand.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    From a security perspective, we received access, as analysts, six months ago. We are using it every day to analyze things.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Performance-wise, I haven't observed any bugs or problems. It worked from day one. We never had any hiccups, and I haven't observed anything bad.

    No maintenance is needed from our side.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    From the developer's perspective, they have said that there may be a problem with scaling. This may be a potential problem in the future.

    How are customer service and support?

    The technical support has been very nice. The salespeople and technical people at GitGuardian are very approachable. We have no issues connecting with them. I reach some of them on LinkedIn, so I don't even have to create a support ticket or something. If I have a question, I just write to them on LinkedIn, and say, "Hey guys, what is up with that?" or, "What is this problem?" They are very quick to answer, and I like that approach. They are very open to communication. It is not very formal. In some other companies, you have to create a ticket and wait three days. Because they started very recently, they have a different approach, which is good. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

    It is easy to contact GitGuardian. Contact them for a demo. I would start there. That would be my advice because the people working there are very friendly and knowledgeable. 

    They were very eager to provide a demo to us. It was just one hour and they gave us information with an explanation.  

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    GitGuardian was our first tool of this type.

    How was the initial setup?

    It has worked from day one. The UI and design are very easy to understand; it is not complicated. The left menu has incidents, parameters, and API integration settings. It is so obvious, so there are no issues with it. Whereas, other systems have a problem. For example, we are using McAfee, and in order to find something, you need to jump through settings, going to this and that. With GitGuardian, I am seeing everything in one place and don't need to do a lot of button gymnastics.

    What was our ROI?

    GitGuardian has helped us increase our secrets detection rate by a lot, in the ballpark of 60%.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    With GitGuardian, we didn't need any middlemen. 

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We use the GitHub integration. In our company, we use a lot of different systems. I can see CircleCI, Azure, GitHub Actions, and other alert options. In the future, we will implement that. However, just knowing that there are options is already nice since some other security tools don't have many options. That is what I like about GitGuardian, there are a lot of choices. You can plan your strategy about how you will implement things and what you are going to do.

    What other advice do I have?

    There are product owners, senior developers, and day-to-day developers using this solution. There are 40 members connected to it, including 35 developers who are using it. My colleagues and I spend at least two hours a day going to the dashboard and looking into things.

    If a security colleague at another company said, "Secrets detection is not a priority," then he is a very bad guy. It is a huge problem now with all the secrets in the code. It is important to monitor them, as it is a growing problem. I just heard a podcast this morning about security, where they talked about Symantec who did a research study about this particular issue. It seems like a lot of apps have this problem. It is really important to monitor these things and know about them in the code. Otherwise, you risk exposing things, then malicious actors can use them. 

    The security guy needs to go back to school, do some training, and really be open-minded about it since it is a growing problem. It will continue to grow as a problem since a lot of developers forget that IT security aspect. They just copy and paste stuff, then leave it in the code and forget about it. That is how attacks happen; somebody slipped, making a mistake or misconfiguration.

    Secrets detection to a security program is very important for application development because developers are just ignoring it. They just commit the code, then the secrets are there. I feel GitGuardian is a good tool because it shows this to your face. As we continue monitoring, we plan to do a presentation of our findings to management.

    Overall, I would give it a seven out of 10. There are a lot of good things about GitGuardian, but there were some hiccups with the development. I feel there are some small things that are not working for our developer team. The solution is great, but it would be bad to say, "10," without acknowledging some of the problems. So, seven is good and fair.

    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free GitGuardian Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: January 2025
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free GitGuardian Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.