A new open source secrets scanner, Betterleaks, launches as a faster successor to Gitleaks with AI-ready capabilities and community-driven governance, backed by Aikido Security.
A new open source secrets scanner, Betterleaks, has been launched by the original creator of Gitleaks, positioning itself as a faster and more flexible successor to one of the most widely used open-source secret detection tools.
Designed as a drop-in replacement for Gitleaks, Betterleaks introduces improved scanning speed, new filtering techniques, configurable validation, and expanded detection capabilities. The project is sponsored by Aikido Security but operates as an independent open-source initiative with community governance and is released under the MIT licence.
The new project emerged after the creator lost full control over the Gitleaks repository and name.
“To be transparent, I don’t have full control over the Gitleaks repo and name anymore. It sucks, but it also gives me the opportunity to start something fresh. Something… better?” the developer said.
The creator also joined Aikido Security as Head of Secrets Scanning to pursue the broader goal of building the most capable open-source secret detection tool.
“I joined Aikido Security as Head of Secrets Scanning with a simple goal: build the best open source secrets scanner. So giddyup, we’re building it.”
Betterleaks maintains compatibility with existing Gitleaks workflows, allowing existing CLI options and configuration files to work without modification while delivering faster scanning.
Version 1 introduces features such as rule-defined validation using Common Expression Language, token-efficiency scanning based on BPE tokenisation, automatic detection of doubly and triply encoded secrets, a pure Go architecture, expanded provider detection rules, and parallelised Git repository scanning.
Future releases are expected to add broader source scanning, LLM-assisted detection, automated secret revocation, permission mapping, and further performance improvements.
The project will be maintained by multiple contributors, including Richard Gomez of Royal Bank of Canada, Braxton Plaxco of Red Hat, and Ahrav Dutta of Amazon.
Betterleaks also joins the open source security ecosystem supported by Aikido Security alongside projects such as Aikido Safe Chain, Aikido Zen, Aikido Intel, and Opengrep.
Built for both developers and AI agents, the tool’s CLI design enables efficient automated scanning in AI-assisted development environments such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.
