We're a team of 15, heavy on microservices, using a mix of GitHub and self-hosted GitLab. Our stack is typical Node.js/Python/Go. We've had two incidents in the last year where secrets leaked to repositories, thankfully caught by manual review. We're done trusting manual reviews.
We need a scanner that hooks into our CI/CD (mostly GitHub Actions, some Jenkins pipelines) and pre-commit. It must catch the obvious (AWS keys, Slack tokens) but also our own internal API keys. False positives are a pipeline killer—if it cries wolf every other commit, devs will just bypass it.
We've narrowed it to Claw and GitGuardian after initial tests, but the real-world experience seems to vary wildly. Budget isn't the primary constraint; not missing a leak is.
**Key questions:**
* **Detection accuracy:** Which one has fewer false positives *and* fewer false negatives in practice? GitGuardian's known pattern database is huge, but Claw's custom regex engine seemed simpler to tune for our internal secret formats.
* **CI/CD integration pain:** We need a single, unified status check in our PRs. Which tool requires less babysitting and pipeline YAML gymnastics to get a reliable pass/fail?
* **Self-hosted option:** We considered self-hosting for air-gapped projects. GitGuardian has an on-prem version; Claw is SaaS-only. Was the on-prem setup a nightmare for anyone?
Our test config for Claw looked like this in a GitHub Action:
```yaml
- name: Claw Scan
uses: claw-hq/scan-action@v1
with:
fail_on_secrets: true
custom_patterns: 'internal_api_key=s*["\']?[A-Za-z0-9]{32}["\']?'
```
For GitGuardian, we used their `ggshield` CLI in a similar step.
In our limited trial, Claw was faster but flagged some placeholder strings in our configs. GitGuardian was more thorough but felt heavier. I'm looking for battle scars from teams that have run these in production for more than 6 months. Which one actually works without making the dev team hate you?
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