We're migrating our CI/CD from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. Need to lock down secret scanning. Retail company, so compliance is heavy (PCI DSS). Infrastructure is split:
* AWS (EC2, RDS, S3)
* GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Storage)
* Plenty of custom Node.js/Python services.
Evaluating GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) secret scanning vs. standalone tools like GitGuardian or TruffleHog. Must integrate with GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
Primary concerns:
* Scan accuracy (low false positives).
* Pre-commit hooks.
* Coverage for both cloud providers' secret patterns.
* Cost for 200+ developers.
Current GHAS setup in test org:
```yaml
# .github/workflows/secret-scanning.yml
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
scan:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Secret Scanning
uses: github/secret-scanning-action@v2
```
Heard mixed reviews on custom pattern support for GCP service account keys. What's the real-world experience? Is GHAS enough, or do we need a third-party layer?
I'm a data engineering lead at a 500-person e-commerce retailer with a similar hybrid AWS/GCP footprint and the same PCI DSS burden. We run secret scanning for over 300 repos in GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and after a full POC last year, I pushed to drop our third-party tool and standardize on GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) with custom patterns.
* **False Positive Rate & Accuracy:** GHAS's core pattern matching for AWS keys and BigQuery service accounts is reliable, but its generic GCP service account key detection is weak. You must write and maintain custom patterns for your GCP key formats, which we did. After tuning, our false positive rate sits around 5%, compared to GitGuardian's 2-3% out of the box. TruffleHog open-source was over 15% for us without heavy regex tuning.
* **Cost for 200+ Developers:** GHAS is bundled with GitHub Enterprise Cloud, so your marginal cost is zero. GitGuardian's enterprise pricing started at $8/user/month for our size with a 250-seat minimum, plus a 20% premium for the required PCI-compliant data handling. TruffleHog's enterprise platform quote was in the $5-7/user/month range. The third-party tools add $12k-$20k+ annually that GHAS does not.
* **Pre-Commit & Integration Effort:** GHAS secret scanning is a push-and-pull-request check; it's not a pre-commit hook. You enforce it via branch protection rules. GitGuardian and TruffleHog offer a local pre-commit hook, but getting 200 devs to adopt it consistently is an ops chore. For GHAS, our integration was adding the Actions workflow and setting rules in the UI - maybe two hours of DevOps time.
* **The Real Limitation:** GHAS only scans the Git history of the repo it's enabled on. It will not scan your live cloud environments (like S3 buckets or running EC2 instances) for stray secrets. GitGuardian has a separate "Infrastructure as Code" module that does that, but it's another $4/user/month. If you need cloud environment scanning, GHAS alone is insufficient.
My pick is GHAS with custom patterns for GCP keys, because your primary requirement is CI/CD scanning integrated with GitHub Enterprise Cloud and you want to avoid a new vendor and cost line. If you also have a requirement to periodically scan your AWS and GCP production environments for accidental secret leakage, tell us, because that changes the answer to needing a third-party layer.
—davidr
Your point about the marginal cost of GHAS being zero is spot on for the licenses, but don't forget the non-zero cost of the engineering time to build and maintain those custom GCP patterns. That's a recurring internal tax, especially when GCP changes formats or your own key issuance standards evolve.
For our team, that maintenance overhead alone justified the GitGuardian spend. Their 2-3% false positive rate for our GCP services meant our security engineers weren't wasting hours each week triaging noise. The time saved more than paid for the license.
The real question is whether you have the dedicated AppSec or platform engineering cycles to treat your custom patterns as a proper product. Most retail dev teams I've seen are stretched too thin.