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  1. Stackups
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  3. Secrets Management
  4. Secrets Management
  5. AWS Secrets Manager vs Vault

AWS Secrets Manager vs Vault

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vault
Vault
Stacks816
Followers802
Votes71
GitHub Stars33.4K
Forks4.5K
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager
Stacks135
Followers157
Votes5

AWS Secrets Manager vs Vault: What are the differences?

AWS Secrets Manager and Vault are both popular options for managing and securing secrets, but they differ in several key aspects. Here are the main differences between the two.

  1. Integration with Cloud Providers: AWS Secrets Manager is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, allowing seamless integration with other AWS services. On the other hand, Vault is platform-agnostic and can work across multiple cloud providers.

  2. Scalability: AWS Secrets Manager is a fully managed service provided by Amazon, offering automatic scaling and high availability. In contrast, Vault requires manual setup and configuration for scaling and availability.

  3. User Management: AWS Secrets Manager leverages AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for user authentication and access control. Vault, on the other hand, provides its own built-in user management system with fine-grained access control policies.

  4. Secret Types: AWS Secrets Manager primarily focuses on managing credentials and secrets for AWS services, such as database credentials, API keys, and encryption keys. Vault, on the other hand, is more flexible and supports various secret types beyond AWS-specific use cases.

  5. Secret Rotation: AWS Secrets Manager provides built-in automation for secret rotation, ensuring that credentials are regularly updated without manual intervention. Vault offers a similar feature, but it requires custom scripts or plugins to enable automation.

  6. Open Source vs Managed Service: Vault is an open-source tool developed and maintained by HashiCorp, allowing complete control and customization. AWS Secrets Manager, on the other hand, is a managed service provided by Amazon, offering ease of use without the need for infrastructure management.

In summary, AWS Secrets Manager is closely tied to the AWS ecosystem, offering seamless integration and managed scaling, while Vault provides a flexible, platform-agnostic solution with its own user management system and extensive customization options.

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Detailed Comparison

Vault
Vault
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager

Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.;Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.;Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.;Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with it. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.;Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
33.4K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
816
Stacks
135
Followers
802
Followers
157
Votes
71
Votes
5
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 17
    Secure
  • 13
    Variety of Secret Backends
  • 11
    Very easy to set up and use
  • 8
    Dynamic secret generation
  • 5
    AuditLog
Pros
  • 5
    Managed Service
Integrations
No integrations available
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora

What are some alternatives to Vault, AWS Secrets Manager?

Doppler

Doppler

Doppler’s developer-first security platform empowers teams to seamlessly manage, orchestrate, and govern secrets at scale.

IBM SKLM

IBM SKLM

It centralizes, simplifies and automates the encryption key management process to help minimize risk and reduce operational costs of encryption key management. It offers secure, robust key storage, key serving and key lifecycle management for IBM and non-IBM storage solutions using the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP).

Docker Secrets

Docker Secrets

A container native solution that strengthens the Trusted Delivery component of container security by integrating secret distribution directly into the container platform.

EnvKey

EnvKey

Securely store config and manage access in an end-to-end encrypted, auto-syncing desktop app. Connect your apps in minutes in any language with an environment variable and a line or two of code.

Knox-app

Knox-app

Knox is a SaaS (Secrets as a Service) that helps you manage your keys, secrets, and configurations. Start in minutes and close the widest security breach. You cannot keep storing secrets in your git repo or sharing them by email or slack me

Keywhiz

Keywhiz

Keywhiz is a secret management and distribution service that is now available for everyone. Keywhiz helps us with infrastructure secrets, including TLS certificates and keys, GPG keyrings, symmetric keys, database credentials, API tokens, and SSH keys for external services — and even some non-secrets like TLS trust stores. Automation with Keywhiz allows us to seamlessly distribute and generate the necessary secrets for our services, which provides a consistent and secure environment, and ultimately helps us ship faster.

LocalKeys

LocalKeys

LocalKeys is a local-first secret manager for developers. It replaces vulnerable .env files with an AES-256-GCM encrypted vault that works completely offline and requires explicit approval before any process can access your secrets.

Infisical

Infisical

It is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) secret manager that enables teams to easily manage and sync their environment variables.

Torus CLI

Torus CLI

Torus simplifies the modern development workflow enabling you to store, share, and organize secrets across services and environments. With Torus, you can standardize on one tool across all environments. Map Torus to your workflows using projects, environments, services, teams, and machines.

Confidant

Confidant

Confidant is a open source secret management service that provides user-friendly storage and access to secrets in a secure way, from the developers at Lyft.

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