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# Infisical vs. BeyondTrust Secrets Safe

Published: 2026-08-31 · Tags: Resources · Canonical: https://infisical.com/blog/infisical-vs-beyondtrust-secrets-safe

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If your organization already runs BeyondTrust for privileged access, Secrets Safe looks like the natural place to put application secrets. It’s already approved by finance and security and naturally integrates with BeyondTrust’s other solutions like its Privileged Access Management (PAM).

It’s worth checking whether Secrets Safe earns that default position as a secrets manager because BeyondTrust and Infisical come from opposite directions.

* BeyondTrust started with privileged access management for human administrators and added a secrets store later.
* Infisical’s [secrets management](https://infisical.com/blog/secrets-management-complete-guide) platform was purpose-built for that use case for applications and engineering teams.

Both technically “do” secrets management and have some feature overlap, but the products differ.

This post covers what each product is, how they compare across the dimensions that usually decide an evaluation, and which situations each one actually fits.

## The three BeyondTrust products involved

Evaluating BeyondTrust can be difficult to navigate because secrets management spans three products. A feature that exists in one may not apply to all. An important aspect of good secrets management is centralization, so understanding how the products differ is important to avoid creating parallel secrets management infrastructure.

**Password Safe** is BeyondTrust’s [privileged access management](https://infisical.com/blog/privileged-access-management) product, and the oldest of the three. Its unit of work is the *managed account*: a privileged account on a discovered asset, such as a Windows domain admin, a local root account, or a service account. Password Safe handles the lifecycle of those accounts and their credentials:

* Account discovery
* Credential storage
* Credential rotation on a schedule or after use
* Human check-out brokering with approval workflows.
* Recording resulting sessions for audit.

Password Safe is a robust PAM solution that has overlap with secrets management capabilities, but is built for controlling which people reach which infrastructure, not managing application secrets.

**Secrets Safe** is the application-secrets store, and it lives as a section inside the same BeyondInsight console Password Safe runs in. Its unit of work is the *safe*: a container holding key-value secrets, files, or credential objects. Applications can retrieve secrets through the REST API, a CLI, or an integration.

As an object, safes differ from managed accounts, which means a Password Safe capability doesn’t automatically extend to safes. Secrets Safe is available for self-hosting or as a managed cloud solution.

**Workload Credentials** is the newest, a cloud-native secrets product with its own interface, its own `secrets` CLI, and its own platform layer and doesn’t share the BeyondInsight console. It is a more modern developer experience that also features dynamic secrets. As of August 2026, it is in beta, cloud-only, and not self-hostable.

Workload Credentials is BeyondTrust’s most advanced secrets management solution, but its separate interface negates some of the benefits of using the same vendor for multiple things, and cloud-only makes it a non-starter for any teams that require self-hosting or air-gapped deployments.

|  | Password Safe | Secrets Safe | Workload Credentials |
| :---- | :---- | :---- | :---- |
| **What it manages** | Managed accounts on discovered assets | Key-value secrets and files in safes | Static and dynamic secrets |
| **Primary audience** | Security and IT administrators | Applications and platform teams | Developers |
| **Interface** | BeyondInsight console | Section within BeyondInsight | Separate cloud interface |
| **Rotation** | Yes, scheduled or on check-in | No, staleness reporting only | Dynamic secrets in beta |
| **Approval workflows** | Yes, for account check-out | No | No |
| **Availability** | Generally available, self-host or cloud | Generally available, self-host or cloud | Beta, cloud only |

Because Password Safe isn’t suited to secrets management and Workload Credentials is still somewhat immature, most teams already using BeyondTrust evaluate Secrets Safe. Its main benefit is the direct integration with BeyondInsight, but many teams also evaluate Infisical for better developer experience, advanced capabilities, and a more specialized secrets management product.

## What Infisical is

[Infisical](https://infisical.com) Secrets Management is open-source security infrastructure. Its open source core is MIT-licensed, and it runs as stateless containers on PostgreSQL and Redis. Infisical can run as a managed cloud service or on any self-hosted or hybrid setup. Every capability is available in both deployment models.

Infisical differs from BeyondTrust in a few ways:

* Infisical stores secrets in projects, which contain environments (typically development, staging, and production), folders, and individual secrets. This hierarchy enables better access scoping and an easier way to find secrets in the interface.
* Applications and pipelines authenticate as machine identities rather than with issued API keys.
* Secrets reach workloads by being pulled through an SDK, CLI, or Kubernetes Operator, or by being pushed out to other systems that need them.
* Infisical’s Agent Proxy brokers credentials to AI agents so they can use tools without holding actual credentials.

Infisical started as a secrets management platform but now offers separate certificate management, key management, and [PAM](https://infisical.com/blog/introducing-infisical-pam) products.

To understand whether Infisical or BeyondTrust Secrets Safe is the right choice for your organization, it’s worth comparing them directly in aspects that matter.

## BeyondTrust vs. Infisical: Which secrets manager is better?

Secrets managers typically differentiate on two layers. The first is the “secrets” part: how well a tool does at secret storage, delivery, and similar things. The “management” part is about the administration: how easy it is to configure and enforce desired workflows, policies, logs, and more.

The right tool for any given organization needs to check both boxes. The most important is where secrets live.

### Secrets storage and organization

Secrets Safe stores key-value secrets, files, and credential objects inside safes. Safes can hold subfolders, but there is no environment abstraction and folders carry no permissions of their own. Separating development, staging, and production therefore requires either a naming convention within a safe or multiple safes. There is also no secret referencing between secrets, which can mean the same value is stored in multiple places. This can create silent drift that only surfaces when a build fails.

Infisical models environments as first-class objects inside a project, with folders underneath them. It also includes a comparison view that surfaces drift between environments, such as a key added in staging but never in production. [Secret referencing](https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/secret-reference) with `${SECRET_NAME}` lets a shared value like a database password live in one place and resolve into every connection string that uses it.

But organization is only one puzzle piece. Another important part of security is “Who can access this?”

### Access control and permissions

BeyondTrust's documentation states that Secrets Safe permissions are assigned safe-wide and cannot be set on individual secrets. The only per-secret control is ownership, which grants full control rather than a narrow (e.g. read-only) grant.

Because permissions are applied at the safe level rather than to individual secrets, teams that need different access boundaries may need to split secrets across additional safes. Requiring a new safe for each level of access means replicating services and managing the same secret in multiple places. If you also separate safes for development, staging, and production environments, you need to create dozens of safes. If that’s too complex, the only option is to compromise your desired security posture.

Infisical can scope roles via [role-based access control (RBAC) or attribute-based access control (ABAC)](https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/access-controls/overview) to individual secrets, folders, environments, and projects. One project can hold production and development side by side while only a few engineers can read production values. Access can also be granted temporarily, expiring automatically rather than requiring someone to remember to revoke it. This enables you to manage secrets in one place and give everyone the secrets they need, whether they’re a superadmin, app team engineer, or temporary contractor.

Rotations are another common pain point of secrets management. Unless they’re automated, they’re usually the most laborious recurring workflow in secrets management.

### Rotation

BeyondTrust only offers rotations in its PAM solution Password Safe and applies to managed accounts. Secrets in Secrets Safe are not rotated by the platform. Secrets Safe has staleness reporting, which surfaces when a value last changed so an administrator can revoke the old credential, issue a new one wherever that happens, and store it in Secrets Safe. That is a useful inventory feature, but not rotation.

Infisical ships [dozens of rotation templates](https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/secret-rotation/overview) covering most major databases, cloud IAM vendors, Okta, Datadog, Cloudflare, and Windows and Linux local accounts. This is in addition to direct secret syncs with tools and other integrations. Secrets rotate automatically on a schedule or ad-hoc, with Infisical invalidating the old credential, issuing a new one, and storing it in Infisical. Many automated rotations are dual-phase rotations, which means the old secret isn’t invalidated until the new one has propagated everywhere it needs to. This means an application never picks up an invalid credential partway through a rotation.

One way to avoid rotations is to use dynamic secrets: These are time-bound credentials issued on demand and invalidated minutes to hours after use.

### Dynamic secrets

Secrets Safe doesn’t support dynamic secrets. BeyondTrust’s new Workload Credentials does but currently only for AWS assume-role credentials and Azure service principal passwords. Databases, where standing credentials tend to accumulate, are not covered.

Infisical carries 30 [dynamic secret](https://infisical.com/blog/secret-rotation-vs-dynamic-secrets) templates spanning PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Snowflake, cloud IAM, Kubernetes, LDAP, and SSH. Each credential is generated per request and revoked automatically when its lease expires. The lease’s time to live is configurable.

Once you’ve stored all the secrets you need, they must find their way to the correct workloads.

### Getting secrets to workloads

Secrets Safe is a retrieval-only model: applications pull secrets through the API, the CLI, or an integration. There is no push-based sync to other systems and no injection agent for virtual machines. That doesn’t always work because not all secret consumers can call the API directly. A CI provider that reads its own encrypted variables, or a platform like Vercel that expects environment variables set in its dashboard, needs a custom workaround your team writes and maintains, and that workaround has to hold a credential of its own in order to fetch the others.

Infisical supports both directions. Applications can pull through nine first-party SDKs (Node.js, Python, Go, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Rust, and C++), the CLI, or the [Kubernetes Operator](https://infisical.com/blog/kubernetes-secrets-management). Infisical can also push to 48 sync destinations including native secrets managers for the big clouds, GitHub, Vercel, Databricks, and Terraform Cloud. Infisical can stay the single source of truth while each consumer reads secrets in its native shape.

### How workloads authenticate

Applications authenticate to Secrets Safe with a static credential in one of three shapes:

* An API registration key paired with a `RunAs` user in a `PS-Auth` header
* OAuth client credentials
* A client certificate and its password.

Secrets Safe has no native cloud IAM, Kubernetes service account, or SPIFFE-based workload authentication. In a Kubernetes deployment, that means the Secrets-Agent needs [a long-lived credential of its own in order to fetch everything else](https://infisical.com/blog/solving-secret-zero-problem). BeyondTrust's own manifests set it as a literal environment variable in the pod spec, so the API key and the privileged user it runs as end up inline in a file that lives in Git.

The External Secrets Operator path moves those values behind a secretRef, but a Kubernetes Secret is base64, not encryption. Either way, a plaintext credential sits in the cluster in the exact way a secrets manager is supposed to prevent.

Infisical supports 13 [machine identity authentication methods](https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/identities/machine-identities), including Kubernetes, AWS IAM, GCP, Azure, OIDC, JWT, LDAP, and SPIFFE. For example, a pod authenticates with its service account token, while an EC2 authenticates using AWS-native identity, so nothing long-lived has to be distributed with the workload.

As teams grow, governance becomes increasingly important.

### Approvals and change governance

Unlike BeyondTrust’s PAM solution, Secrets Safe has no approval workflow for creating, reading, or changing a secret, and no self-serve access request. Access to a safe is granted by an administrator assigning a group permission. In practice, that means someone has to write a ticket, review a ticket, and manually make the change.

Infisical puts [multi-stage approval chains](https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/access-controls/access-requests) in front of both access requests and secret changes, showing reviewers a diff of which keys changed and by whom. Requests that require manual approval can also route through Slack or Microsoft Teams so approvals can happen where teams already work.

Many organizations adopt a secrets manager to comply with regulations, so logs are becoming more important.

### Audit and compliance

Both Secrets Safe and Infisical produce audit logs and stream to a SIEM. Secrets Safe logs exist in the same place Password Safe logs exist, so if your compliance program is built on BeyondTrust reports today, that can be a benefit.

Infisical [logs every secret read, write, and access change](https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/audit-logs) at the actor level, supports SSO and SCIM provisioning, and holds SOC 2 Type II certification, which covers what most auditors ask of a secrets platform.

### AI agents

To secure AI agents, BeyondTrust offers an MCP gateway that exposes Password Safe and BeyondInsight APIs to MCP clients, which gives an agent a supported way to call the platform and retrieve credentials. This makes it easier for agents to get the credentials they need. It also creates traces and logs from AI agents’ activity. But it doesn’t protect against prompt injection or keep agents from leaking the secrets they retrieve.

Infisical's [Agent Proxy](https://infisical.com/blog/agent-proxy) is a credential broker that takes the opposite approach: the agent never receives the credential. It routes outbound traffic through a proxy holding a placeholder, and the proxy substitutes the value at the network boundary. This way, a prompt-injected agent has nothing to leak because it never had a credential.

MCP gateways and agent proxies are complementary. A proxy secures your credentials while an MCP gateway is best for governance.

Of course, you do need to see which solution works on your intended infrastructure.

## Deployment and operations

Both Infisical and BeyondTrust Secrets Safe have cloud-hosted SaaS offerings. For self-hosting, things are a bit different:

Self-hosted BeyondTrust fundamentally runs on Windows Server with Internet Information Services (IIS) and a licensed Microsoft SQL Server instance. Anything else follows from the core architecture choice of being based on Windows Server.

Infisical can be used in the US or EU cloud regions or self-hosted as stateless containers backed by PostgreSQL and Redis. It also works on Kubernetes or a Linux host, with one CLI, one Terraform provider, one Kubernetes Operator, and one [Gateway](https://infisical.com/blog/infisical-gateway).

The practical difference is the surface area and the skill set. A BeyondTrust deployment brings Windows and SQL Server administration into the picture, which is fine if your organization already runs these, but meaningful new overhead if it does not.

## Which one fits your use case

**BeyondTrust Secrets Safe is the better fit if** you’re already using BeyondTrust for privileged human access and want to audit both secrets and PAM in the same dashboard.

**Infisical is the better fit if** your primary problem is application and machine credentials and you want a specialized solution. You get multiple environments, per-secret access control, automated rotation and dynamic credentials, and intuitive access policies and workflows. It also fits teams that need a self-hosted deployment with the same features as the cloud one.

## Trying Infisical against your own environment

A useful first test takes an afternoon. Sync secrets from a number of tools, import a `.env` file, or manually import some secrets to see how easy it is to store and pull secrets.

You can [start free on Infisical Cloud](https://app.infisical.com/signup), [self-host the open-source core](https://infisical.com/docs/self-hosting/overview), or [talk to an expert](https://infisical.com/talk-to-us) about your setup.