GitHub Advanced Security alternative for teams that ship every week
GitHub Advanced Security is a good tool, and many teams should keep it. This page is for the ones who are looking for something else: a check that runs on every pull request, catches the logic mistakes behind real incidents, and costs the same whether you have three developers or ten.
GitHub security looks for vulnerabilities, vulnerable dependencies and leaked secrets. Zelsis checks for those too, and also for what your users will hit: payments that charge twice, slow pages, screens that break on a phone, store review rejections, and pages that look unfinished. One flat price instead of a charge per committer.
Price and focus side by side
| Zelsis | GitHub Advanced Security | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid plan | $19/mo flat per account; team of 10 for $49/mo | Code Security 30 USD/mo plus Secret Protection 19 USD/mo, each per active committer |
| Free plan | Unlimited scans, 3 saved projects, 5 fix prompts / month | CodeQL, Dependabot and secret scanning on public repositories |
| Focus | Logic bugs behind real incidents (auth, payments, caching, database rules), plus secrets, dependencies and CI/CD config, gated on every pull request | Code scanning (CodeQL), dependencies and leaked secrets, built into GitHub |
GitHub Advanced Security figures from their pricing page, October 2026. Prices change; check theirs before you decide.
What Zelsis checks that most security tools do not
Security scanners look for known vulnerability patterns. Zelsis looks for those too, and also for the mistakes that cost money or customers without being a CVE: a checkout that trusts the price sent by the browser, a pay button that charges twice, a page that runs one database query per product, a migration that locks the orders table during a deploy, a cookie banner with no way to refuse. Each finding has the file, the line and a fix you can paste into your AI assistant.
Only rules that have caught a documented flaw, or were reviewed as true positives, can fail the check. Everything else shows up as a warning, so the gate stays quiet enough that nobody turns it off. The benchmark is published with what we miss.
When to stay with GitHub Advanced Security
Stay with GitHub Advanced Security if your code already lives on GitHub, you are fine paying per active committer, and vulnerability scanning with CodeQL is the coverage you need. Zelsis does not try to replace a full security platform.
Choose Zelsis if you mainly want each pull request checked before it merges, across logic, performance, deploy safety, privacy and security, at one flat price per account. Plenty of teams run both: the other tool for its platform, Zelsis as the release check.
How it compares with an AI reviewer
We ran Zelsis and CodeRabbit on the same five pull requests with planted flaws and published every comment. Read the comparison.
Check your own repo
Public repositories scan free. Paste a GitHub URL on the dashboard and every finding comes with the file, the line and a fix.
Scan a repository free