--- title: "IBM deprecated the HashiCorp Boundary Community Edition. What’s next?" canonical: "https://infisical.com/blog/hashicorp-boundary-community-edition-deprecation" published: "2026-10-12" tags: ["Technical"] source-index: https://infisical.com/llms.txt --- # IBM deprecated the HashiCorp Boundary Community Edition. What’s next? On October 9th, a HashiCorp employee made an [unceremonious post](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/deprecation-of-boundary-community-edition/77828) in the HashiCorp forums: The Community Edition (a source-available version maintained on GitHub) of Boundary is being deprecated. The company gave neither advance notice nor an explanation beyond wanting to focus on its paid products.  The GitHub repository is now archived and HashiCorp (under IBM’s ownership) will *“instead focus all our R&D efforts towards Boundary’s commercial editions (Enterprise and HCP) in order to turn it into a market leading human and agentic privileged access solution.”* The community was unhappy. Boundary is security infrastructure many organizations rely on. HashiCorp (and, by extension, IBM) is giving them three options: 1. Pay for an expensive enterprise license 2. Garner the internal resources to maintain and develop a tool they never worked on before 3. Evaluate new tools and execute an unplanned migration None of these options is fun. But this kind of situation can be the consequence when an important vendor gets acquired by a larger company with different intentions. Because this isn’t the first time HashiCorp gets backlash from its community, especially after the IBM acquisition. ## How HashiCorp changed after the IBM acquisition Acquisitions can have multiple winners, but end users are rarely among them. HashiCorp was officially acquired by IBM in February 2025. Since then, IBM has made multiple unpopular decisions to cater to enterprise customers: - HCP Vault Secrets (a lower-priced plan for Vault) was discontinued. - HCP Vault Dedicated Starter (another plan for smaller orgs) was discontinued. - The generous Terraform free plan has been replaced by a much stricter one that makes resource-based pricing mandatory. - HCP Consul Dedicated shut down completely. - HCP Vagrant Registry shut down. Users also describe slower support on IBM’s ticket system and rapid price increases. IBM does invest in HashiCorp’s products (e.g. Vault 2.0 shipping in 2026), but there’s a clear direction: HashiCorp’s focus is on large enterprises and IBM will continually prune whatever doesn’t serve that direction. The IBM team itself is usually explicit about wanting to focus on higher-end commercial products. This path started with deprecating lower-priced products and free plans, and now seems to continue with community editions. This begs the question anyone using HashiCorp products needs to ask themselves: ## Is the Boundary Community Edition deprecation just a test run? Boundary is one of HashiCorp’s lesser-known products and is far less popular than its star products Vault and Terraform. But that doesn’t mean that deprecating its Community Edition doesn’t have consequences for other users of HashiCorp products. If you use any other HashiCorp Community Edition, you have to ask yourself whether the infrastructure you rely on is still part of IBM’s plans for the future. Perhaps Boundary was a convenient starting point to gauge the community’s reaction. Of course, this is speculation, and nobody can know whether IBM plans to phase out other community editions. But deprecating the Vault or Terraform Community Editions with no advance notice would pull the rug out from many organizations’ infrastructure. This would be especially severe in the case of Vault: ceasing to maintain a secrets manager means potentially exposing organizations to vulnerabilities. IBM’s approach is valid, and perhaps a good way to maximize the ROI on their $6.4 billion investment. But that doesn’t mean end users need to live with IBM’s decisions. If you’re currently using HashiCorp products (especially the Community Editions), it’s good to know: 1. Where do you migrate if the product gets deprecated? 2. How much time and money do you budget for a potential migration? 3. What price increases are you willing to stomach if you’re pushed to use enterprise? Or, if you don’t want to worry about what IBM does next, just choose Infisical to replace Vault. ## Infisical as a Vault and Boundary alternative If you’re currently using HashiCorp Vault and are worried about the future of your security stack under IBM’s reign, check out Infisical [Secrets Management](https://infisical.com/platform/secrets-management) (and, if you’re using Vault PKI, [Certificate Management](https://infisical.com/platform/certificate-management)). If you’re looking to replace Boundary, look into [Infisical PAM](https://infisical.com/platform/pam). Infisical’s core is [open source](https://github.com/infisical/infisical) under the MIT license and Infisical can be hosted on any cloud or your own infrastructure. It’s also much simpler than Vault for two reasons: - It has built-in what Vault requires you to assemble: secret rotations, integrations, approval workflows, and access controls come out of the box. - It’s built on Postgres and Redis, not proprietary languages and storage solutions. If you’re worried about the future of HashiCorp products under IBM’s ownership, check out Infisical by reading our [docs](https://infisical.com/docs), starting a [free trial](https://app.infisical.com/signup), or [talking to our team](https://infisical.com/talk-to-us).
](https://images.ctfassets.net/rzezkvk1rm65/43xIgh6Q5sHexJQdphFTQh/b6db412d85975dd5c2a7ba0eb003f6aa/boundary-ce-archived-repo.png){kind=link}