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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Free secrets scanning for unlimited private GitHub repos

My name is Nir! I am one of the three co-founders of arnica.io. I’ve worn many hats in cyber security over the years – sys admin, pen-tester, security architect, and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). What really gets me excited about my work is making security easy and effective for developers and ops teams! In my last role, at one of the top 3 FinTechs, following the attack against Solarwinds, the CEO asked me what we are doing to secure our software supply chain. I met with 15+ vendors, did a few POCs, but unfortunately each solution either increased operational cost or was too…

Arnica provides secrets scanning for unlimited private GitHub repositories at no cost. The tool detects exposed credentials and sensitive information in code to help development and operations teams secure their… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Free secrets scanning for unlimited private GitHub repos launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Arnica▲97

    Behavior based software supply chain security

    2022 · arnica.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Detect secrets in source code, public and private!

    2018 · gitguardian.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3IB
  4. 4
    Redential▲116

    A developer credential that proves what you built, NDA safe.

    Jul 2026 · redential.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5
  6. 6

    Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.

    2013 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I built this as a small side project to learn and experiment, and I ended up with this! I used a subdomain from my personal portfolio, and everything else runs on free tiers. The project uses Nuxt, SVG, Cloudflare Workers, D1 (SQL), KV, Terraform, and some agentic coding with OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. What started as a joke among friends turned into a fun excuse to build something end to end, from zero to production, and to explore a few things I’d never touched before. I’d really appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

    Jan 2026 · certificate.brendonmatos.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8PS

    Hey HN, it's Farrukh and Umar. We're building listen.dev–a tool for proactive security monitoring in GitHub Actions to secure software releases from supply chain threats. Why we built this: As friends and collaborators for over a decade, we've been working on various startup ideas in dev tools and infrastructure. In 2017, while building an ML ops toolkit on Kubernetes, we got hacked. During a pilot with a fintech customer, our cluster became victim to a crypto-jacking attack. As it turned out, a dependency in our container base image contained malware (a Monero miner) which triggered inside…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I tend to create a private certificate authority for every side project, in order to create TLS certs for local development. I find it useful to have local development closely resemble production when at all possible, and "real" certificates are an important element. Anyway I got tired of having these CA private keys on my local machine, especially as I started thinking about setting up a private CA for my company (https://riza.io). So I started thinking about what the simplest way to host a private CA might be. You really only need two things: 1) secret storage, to hold the CA's…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hi HN, I've been building this tool for the past couple of weeks to solve a problem that seems universal across development teams: sharing environment variables securely. You know the drill - someone needs the staging database URL, so it gets shared over chat. Production API keys end up in plaintext files. Or you set up some complex secret management system that becomes a single point of failure during critical deployments. At Zerodha, we're a stock broker with strict regulatory requirements. Our infrastructure needs to be auditable, and our data must stay with us for instant recovery. But…

    2025 · kiln.sh · its alternatives →

  11. 11JR

    Hello Hacker News! We’re Willem, Roeland, Felix and Madeline from Aikido Security (https://aikido.dev/) We’re building a “no BS’ application security platform. It’s the platform we wish existed, but couldn’t find. Willem, our CTO had to manage (application) security at many of his previous startups, and honestly, hated it. Most security tools we had to use made us feel dumb. They were super complex and riddled with false positives. Their platform was behind the book a demo button. They had intransparent pricing models and honestly charged us way too much. We think most of…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Last week I wrote about building a scanner that writes its own exploits. A cron job runs Claude Code every night, it reads new CVEs, writes proof-of-concept checks, tests them against vulnerable and patched Docker instances, and opens PRs. I review and merge in the morning. That post was about how t

    Feb 2026 · attackerview.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I built a GitHub app that detects it in pull requests, notifies or blocks them. Alongside it, I published a Semgrep ruleset for any stage of the CI/CD. I started this after getting frustrated by all the FUD around malicious code - lots of noise, little effort to solve it. Having said that, it's still a major attack vector - a stored RCE, with the codebase itself as the sink. Feedback is appreciated. The app, PRevent - https://github.com/apiiro/PRevent The ruleset: https://github.com/apiiro/malicious-code-ruleset The research:…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I've always been fascinated by cryptographic principles, so I decided to dive deep into zero-knowledge proofs and implement a Groth16 proof verifier entirely in Rust. This project validates cryptographic proofs and demonstrates how succinct, verifiable computations can be achieved. Using Rust's powerful libraries like arkworks, I implemented pairing checks, public input commitments, and proof validation logic while ensuring the code remains modular and efficient. I handled the complexities of affine group operations, scalar multiplications, and optimized public input verification to make…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    Phynd▲9

    Affordable, automated vulnerability scanning—no blind spots

    2025 · phynd.io · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hello, for some time I've been developing this project now that I am happy that it finally can see the light. I love Tor, but I believe the biggest thing with Tor is that the nodes are strangers which in itself requires some sort of level in just that, complete strangers. For this reason, I decided to build this private network inspired by the Onion router. Unlike other public networks, GiralNet is not for anonymous connections to strangers. It is built for small teams or groups who want privacy but also need a level of trust. It assumes that the people running the nodes in the network are…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Democratising Cybersecurity

    2025 · thefirewall.org · its alternatives →

  18. 18AC

    I built this toolkit with my colleague to dive deep into OS internals and automate the identification of privilege escalation vectors. Written in pure C without external dependencies, it explores everything from Linux capabilities and Docker escapes to Windows token manipulation and service permissions. We believe that the constant struggle between breaking and securing systems is the ultimate driver of software evolution. This tool is our contribution to that cycle, designed for researchers who want to understand how low-level misconfigurations can be discovered and audited across different…

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    ZERO-TRUST KEY MANAGEMENT

    Dec 2025 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    For at least a few years (since before COVID), in my circle everbody wants an AI tool that finds vulnerabilities in binaries. I have my reservations about such a tool because of my perception that AI is overhyped, so I decided to build one myself to see how useful it could be (or not). I was actually kinda surprised how well it worked for my collection of binaries with known CVEs. It definitely has false positives and negatives, as any static analysis tool would, but I think its actually somewhat usable. I dont think the results are super actionable, but interesting nonetheless. I still…

    2025 · pwnscan.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21AF

    https://github.com/inoda/private_journal Built this to use myself, and I'm curious if anybody would be interested in using it. I'm also wondering if anybody has tips to make it more secure (I'm super super new to encryption and whatnot). The security is probably a bit overkill since chances are that nobody cares about what I'm journaling, but it is fun to implement from a code standpoint.

    2019 · its alternatives →

  22. 22SP

    Morning HN. I had an issue recently where I wanted to share some private Github repositories with a larger audience than usual (25k+) on Youtube and was simply considering making my code public. Came up with an idea to build a middleman service that handles user access/management, generate share links and even paywall individual repos. Thought I might as well share here in case there's another dev out there who might be interested in sharing a private repo. Keen to get any feedback as I'm currently building

    2024 · repobear.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hello HN! I built a pre-commit code scanner that checks your staged changes for security vulnerabilities every time you run 'git commit'. I am an inexperienced programmer and this is my first personal project. Any feedback, positive or negative, big or small, relevant or not, would be greatly helpful and appreciated! The tool requires Gitleaks and Python to run, you will also need to use your own AI API key, which I understand is a big setup friction. You can check out my demo video instead if that is more convenient: https://youtu.be/ZYe5vWFRTus?si=9Fv8DhTHktwDK4mV Thank you…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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