We're a GitHub organization through and through. Our repos are there, our CI is Actions, and our developers live in the CLI and UI. We've been relying on GitHub's built-in secret scanning for alerting on pushes, and it's fine for what it is—it catches the obvious commits of plain-text API keys to public repos.
But "fine" isn't a security posture. We're now looking at dedicated tools like GitGuardian, and the comparison isn't as straightforward as "built-in vs. third-party." The native scanning is free and integrated, but we're hearing about far more comprehensive detection, including in private repos and historical scans, from the dedicated platforms.
I want a blunt, evidence-based breakdown from teams who have made this call. For a shop that's already all-in on GitHub:
* What tangible gaps did you find in GitHub's secret scanning that a dedicated tool closed? False negatives are my primary concern.
* How does the remediation workflow compare? Getting an alert is one thing; efficiently rotating the secret and ensuring the leak is purged from history is another.
* We value developer experience. Did introducing a third-party scanner create friction, or did its integration (Slack, Jira, etc.) actually streamline response?
* Is the value proposition still clear if we have GitHub Advanced Security? I know GHAS bundles more, but it's a different cost bracket.
I'm less interested in feature checklists and more in practical operational differences and tangible outcomes. What actually changed in your leak rate and mean time to remediation?
—AF