Akeyless vs HashiCorp Vault [2024]

Akeyless and HashiCorp Vault both offer robust solutions for securing, managing, and controling access to secrets across various environments. However, their approaches, features, and suitability for different organizational needs vary quite significantly.

How are these platforms different? If you remember nothing else, remember these three points:

1. HashiCorp Vault can be self-hosted and is able to support advanced secrets management use cases. At the same time, it might be too advanced for most developers' needs.
2. Akeyless is a more modern secrets management platform available as a managed solution only. It is able to use many HashiCorp-developed plugins, but it requires to go through a sales process for any advanced needs.
3. Infisical provides both cloud-managed and self-hosted options. It is easy to get started with (both technically and from the procurement perspective) and scales well to advanced enterprise use cases.

In this post, we will cover these differences in more detail, comparing features, pricing, integrations, and frequently asked questions about all three secrets management tools.

Overview

Hashicorp Vault

Hashicorp Vault is a source-available tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management. It's designed to handle multiple backends, provides secure secret storage, and tightly controls access to secrets in dynamic, multi-cloud or on-premises environments.

Akeyless

Akeyless Vault is a cybersecurity platform that offers secrets management and zero-trust access solutions, ensuring secure storage and access to sensitive data like passwords and API keys. It allows developers to automate secrets injection into applications and enforce strict access controls to prevent unauthorized access.

Infisical

Infisical is a robust infrastructure security platform designed for the secure management and automation of secrets like API keys, passwords, certificates, and access tokens. By providing automatic rotation templates, stringent access control mechanisms, and a wide range of infrastructure integrations, Infisical significantly enhances security posture and operational efficiency of some of the largest organizations in the world.

Comparing HashiCorp Vault, Akeyless, and Infisical

1. Platform

HashiCorp Vault comes in two modes: self-hosted (self-managed) and HCP Cloud (managed). Both of these hosting options modes are available in Infisical, while Akeyless is only available as a managed Cloud-based solution.

HashiCorp Vault is by default an API-first tool. It is designed to be automated, which implies that most of its features are available through the API and CLI formats. Both Akeyless and Infisical provide such abilities too. At the same time, Infisical and Akeyless focus more on developer experience – both platforms provide a self-serve dashboard UI and a range of officially-developed SDKs for the most common language (HashiCorp is only able to offer an official Go SDK).

All 3 platforms are able to provide advanced functionality around secret rotation and dynamic secret generation. Such rotation templates are mostly available for databases (e.g., MySQL, Postgres) and popular developer services (e.g., Sendgrid).

2. Pricing

HashiCorp Vault Enterprise is generally known for high pricing of its products. Depending on the infrastructure setup of a particular organization, client-based pricing can scale significantly and unexpectedly. Identity-based pricing has the advantage of being more controllable (every identity may include multiple clients within itself).

3. Integrations and Ecosystem

HashiCorp Vault provides a rich set of APIs and a vast ecosystem of integrations, allowing it to fit into any part of the application lifecycle. Certain integrations are community-developed and not maintained by HashiCorp – making their quality less predictable. Akeyless largely operates using HashiCorp Vault's network of plugins, given Akeyless' API compatibility with HashiCorp Vault. Infisical, on the other hand, has its own set of integrations with leading developer and infrastructure tools that developed by the Infisical team in-house from the first principles.

4. User experience and Ease of use

The main problem with Vault still remains the difficulty of its implementation in the open source version; and things don't get much simpler in HashiCorp Vault's costly Enterprise edition. Vault is mostly operatable through its API with its UI being largely limited in functionality. Akeyless and Infisical provide a much better user interface and developer experience.

5. Security and Compliance

HashiCorp Vault, Akeyless, and Infisical each offer robust security and compliance features, though they cater to different needs. HashiCorp Vault provides a comprehensive security model, including strong encryption, fine-grained access control, and extensive audit logging; albeit missing certain modern developer-docused functionalities. Akeyless emphasizes a zero-trust approach with distributed security architecture on Cloud, but lacks the ability to be self-hosted on customers' own infrastructure. Infisical enables seamless and secure secret management with military-grade encryption, role-based access control, and detailed audit logs, ensuring top-tier security with ease of use. Infisical also heaviliy focuses on Security Shift Left and enables developers with various workflows to manage secrets (e.g., Approval Workflows).

All three solutions support key compliance standards like SOC 2, making them reliable choices for secure and compliant secret management.

6. Support

HashiCorp Vault relies on a large community with shared knowledge based. Enterprise-grade support is also available depending on customers' requirements.

Akeyless' support is limited to paid customers only. Since Akeyless is a closed-source product and developers can't play around with it at their free time, the community around Akeyless is largely limited.

Infisical is built on top of one of the largest open source projects on GitHub which created a large developer community among Infisical's products. This community is actively helping each other with any questions that arise on Infisical's forum and Slack channel. Enterprise and priority suppport is also available for customers who need it.

Conclusion

Both Akeyless and Hashicorp Vault offer good solutions for managing secrets and sensitive data. Even though these solutions have each their own problems, the choice between the two often boils down to specific organizational needs, infrastructure setup, and personal preference.

• If you're looking for a highly-customizable solution that integrates into a multi-cloud environment even if it comes with a large maintenance overhead, Hashicorp Vault could be the way to go.

• If you are looking for a managed Cloud-based solution with good secret rotation and automation functionality, you should take a look at Akeyless. One of the drawbacks here is the smaller developer community around Akeyless' product.

• Finally, in case your organization is looking for a developer-friendly solution with low maintenance overhead that can be integrated seamlessly across all of your technology stack and systems – Infisical may be the right choice for you.

In the end, a thorough evaluation aligned with organizational security policies, compliance requirements, and infrastructure needs will guide you to the right choice. Both platforms, together with Infisical, have their strengths and can significantly bolster your secrets management practices and organization-wide security posture.