In the polar oceans in winter, fractures and leads are the hotspots of exchange between the ocean and atmosphere which are otherwise well separated by sea ice. By altering the heat, gas, and momentum fluxes they play a crucial role in atmospheric, ecological, and oceanic processes. At the same time, leads represent a part of the present state of strain of the ice cover, opening up the possibility to study ice rheology. The transient nature of leads and their narrow appearance has set limits to the detection of leads from satellites. Different approaches using active and passive sensors from the microwave and infrared spectrum are employed so far to observe leads by means of satellite data. They make use of the strong contrast between leads and the surrounding ice pack in (i) surface temperature, (ii) microwave backscatter, (iii) emission or (iv) a change in ice drift speed. With the increasing availability of high-resolution SAR data for the Arctic, we explored the potential to use SAR derived sea ice deformation to estimate lead fractions. We calculated sea ice drift and divergence with a spatial resolution of 1.4 km from daily Sentinel-1 scenes. We obtained the divergence-based lead fraction of a region by summing up all positive divergence pixels multiplied by the respective time step length. We derived a second lead fraction product from the deformation fields that calculates the position of linear kinematic features (LKFs) first. The advantage is a skilled noise reduction, and a tracking algorithm of the deformation zones. We compared divergence- and LKF-based lead fractions to several other established lead fraction products in the Transpolar Drift along the drift track of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) between October 2019 to April 2020. We used lead fractions from helicopter-borne infrared surveys at a grid resolution of 5 m, classified Sentinel-1 (SAR) scenes at 80 m, MODIS (thermal infrared) at 1 km, AMSR2 (passive microwaves) at 3.25 km, and CryoSat-2 (altimeter in Ku-band) at 12.5 km. Since the methods rely on different physical properties of the water and ice in leads and are affected by different constraints, derived mean lead fractions vary by 1-2 magnitudes between the products. For example, infrared, SAR and microwave radiometer-based algorithms do not only detect open-water leads but also leads with thin ice up to a certain thickness, which differs between the products. Common lead events were identified across products. The time series mostly indicated a phase of increased lead activity during freeze-up in autumn 2019 and spring 2020. We used the different lead fraction time series to estimate new ice formation in the leads and compared the results to ice thickness and oceanographic measurements obtained during the MOSAiC campaign. Results yield lower and upper bounds for ice formation and brine expulsion in and from leads. Due to the wide range of lead fractions obtained from different methods, we conclude that the specific lead fraction product must be chosen depending on research question. Divergence- and LKF-based lead fractions provide valuable information in addition to established lead fraction products at high spatial resolution and independent of cloud coverage.