GCP Secret Manager Alternatives: 5 Options for Google Cloud Teams

GCP Secret Manager is an easy place to start on Google Cloud: there's nothing to run and IAM enforces your access policy automatically. But it can quickly lead to extra work:

• Rotation schedules only publish Pub/Sub messages, so you need to build and maintain the functions and services that rotate credentials.
• Google recommends a separate project per environment, so each new environment means manually creating another project and IAM bindings.
• If you ever move beyond GCP to AWS, Azure, or self-hosting, Secret Manager can’t sync there.

Once credentials span more than Google Cloud-native secrets, many teams start to evaluate alternatives to avoid maintaining manual rotation logic and manage secrets beyond GCP Secret Manager’s purview. The usual move is to a dedicated secrets manager like Infisical, which centralizes secrets management but can sync into GCP Secret Manager so workloads continue to consume from a source they understand.

Comparing GCP Secret Manager alternatives

Tool	Best for	Deployment	Open source	Google Cloud credentials	Environments	What it takes to run
Infisical	Google Cloud teams that want automated rotation and one place for secrets from any cloud, by environment	Cloud or self-hosted	MIT core	Rotated service account keys, dynamic GCP IAM	✓	Nothing hosted, or PostgreSQL and Redis self-hosted
HashiCorp Vault	Platform teams running one secrets system across clouds	Self-hosted, or managed on AWS or Azure	Source-available (BSL)	GCP secrets engine	Mounts and paths	A cluster and full-time Vault engineers
Doppler	Young product teams that want config hosted and won't self-host	Hosted, on-prem with Enterprise	✗	Rotated service account keys	✓	Nothing hosted
OpenBao	Vault-experienced teams that need an OSI license	Self-hosted	MPL-2.0	Separate plugin	✗	A Vault-style cluster
SOPS	GitOps teams on GKE that keep config in Git	A local CLI	MPL-2.0	✗	Per-path rules in .sops.yaml	Key management, plus encrypt and decrypt steps in every workflow

1. Infisical

Infisical offers an open-source secrets manager that centralizes secrets management. It organizes secrets from any cloud or other infrastructure in one project, whether they're used on Google Cloud, on another cloud, or in CI/CD.

Infisical rotates credentials automatically, so you don’t have to manually build and maintain rotation logic.

Infisical syncs into GCP Secret Manager, in the projects and regions you choose, so GKE and other Google Cloud services keep reading secrets where they do now. Deploy it as Infisical Cloud or on your own infrastructure.

Best for: Google Cloud teams that want to automate rotations and have a convenient way to manage secrets from anywhere separated by environments and with native access controls.

Strengths:

• Every environment lives in one project, with folders, secret references, and value search, so adding an environment doesn't mean creating another Google Cloud project.
• Rotation for 30+ targets, including GCP service account keys, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Stripe, and OpenAI.
• Dynamic secrets for 30+ targets, including GCP IAM, databases, Kubernetes, LDAP, and Kafka.
• A CLI that injects the right environment's secrets into a local process, and SDKs for nine languages, so local development doesn't start with a gcloud call per value.
• Workloads on Google Cloud authenticate with their service account through GCP Auth, without a secret zero to hand out, and GKE clusters receive secrets through the Kubernetes operator, CSI driver, or injector.
• Syncs into 50+ destinations, including GCP Secret Manager, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault, GitHub, and Vercel.
• Approval policies, access requests, and temporary access, with versioning and point-in-time recovery per environment and folder.

How it improves on GCP Secret Manager:

• Environments are part of each project rather than a separate Google Cloud project, so access is set once with roles per environment.
• Rotation changes the credential itself on a schedule, with no Pub/Sub subscriber to write or keep alive.
• If you adopt another cloud or self-hosted resources, the same project can sync into AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, or other tooling to keep secrets management centralized.
• Changes to production secrets can wait on an approval.
• The GCP Secret Manager sync supports global or regional secrets and replica regions, and can import existing secrets on the first sync.

Pricing model: free to self-host under the MIT core, with an enterprise license for advanced features, and a free tier plus paid plans on Infisical Cloud.

2. HashiCorp Vault

HashiCorp Vault, now an IBM company, is a secrets and encryption manager that you self-host as Community or Enterprise, or rent as HCP Vault Dedicated.

It isn't a complete product out of the box, but a set of primitives and plugins that teams build on extensively. Teams need to build auth methods, workflows, and policies themselves. Many teams also build their own Vault interfaces. This is why large enterprises often have multiple full-time Vault engineers. Vault is powerful, but comes with a large additional cost.

Vault can reach Google Cloud through its native GCP secrets engine, but HCP Vault Dedicated only runs on AWS or Azure. Keeping Vault next to Google Cloud workloads means self-hosting the cluster and staffing it. That's a reasonable trade for a platform team with Vault experience, but a poor one for any team that doesn’t want another in-house service to maintain.

Best for: platform teams that want a single secrets and encryption system across Google Cloud and other environments, and can staff it.

Strengths:

• Various secrets engines for many types of credentials and environments.
• Short-lived database credentials with leases and revocation, across many databases.
• The transit engine encrypts and decrypts data for applications as a service.
• Fine-grained, path-based policies with templating.

Limitations:

• Running Vault yourself means sealing and unsealing, storage, high availability, upgrades, and people who know its policy language.
• Without an environment object, each team designs its own layout of mounts, paths, and policies.
• Secrets Sync into cloud stores, control-group approvals, and namespaces need Vault Enterprise.
• Its Business Source License is source-available, not an OSI open-source license.

Pricing model: Vault Community costs nothing. Enterprise is quoted by sales, without public prices. HCP Vault Dedicated charges hourly for the cluster, and some tiers add an hourly per-client charge.

3. Doppler

Doppler is a hosted platform for application secrets and config, organized as projects with environments and configs, and reached through a dashboard, CLI, API, and syncs.

Doppler is a hosted home for environment variables: it lets you create a project, fill in environments, and connect a sync, just like Infisical.

It documents automatic rotation for GCP service account keys, and moving to self-hosting later means an Enterprise contract. It fits product teams that want hosted environment variables and expect to stay on SaaS.

Best for: young product teams that want their config and secrets hosted and have no plans to self-host.

Strengths:

• An environment model with config inheritance, so shared values are set once.
• Rotation for GCP service account keys and AWS targets.
• Syncs into other clouds, CI/CD systems, and hosting platforms.
• Change requests, versions with rollback, and per-secret access logs.
• A Kubernetes operator.

Limitations:

• It's closed source, and self-hosting comes only with Enterprise, which means a sales cycle before running it yourself.
• Rotating anything beyond the documented AWS and GCP targets means writing your own integration.
• Dynamic secrets are Enterprise only, and documented for AWS IAM and Azure service principals.
• Teams that need certificate management, secret scanning, or privileged access buy those elsewhere.

Pricing model: per seat per month, with paid add-ons also priced per seat.

4. OpenBao

OpenBao forked Vault after the 2023 license change and is developed in the open as a Linux Foundation project in the OpenSSF Sandbox, under MPL-2.0.

Best for: Vault-experienced teams that want an OSI license and are prepared to run and support it themselves.

Strengths:

• An MPL-2.0 license and documented open governance.
• Namespaces and control groups in the open-source edition.
• Familiar Vault engines carry over: KV v2, PKI with ACME, SSH, transit, Kubernetes, LDAP, and databases.
• An official Helm chart, an injector, and a CSI provider for Kubernetes.

Limitations:

• OpenBao removed Vault's AWS, Azure, and GCP secrets engines and cloud IAM auth methods from the core part of the product. They still exist as plugins the OpenBao project maintains, but each one has to be installed and registered separately.
• Dynamic database credentials cover five engines (Cassandra, InfluxDB, MySQL and MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Valkey), so SQL Server and MongoDB need another route.
• It needs a cluster to run and secure, with Raft or PostgreSQL for high availability, so the Vault expertise stays on the team.
• Limited number of full-time maintainers, some of which have competing incentives for further development.

Pricing model: free and open source.

5. SOPS

SOPS is an open-source command-line tool that encrypts secret values so they can live in Git. On Google Cloud, the encryption key can be a Cloud KMS key and IAM on that key decides who can decrypt.

This adds another layer to secrets management because it requires managing encryption keys and adds encryption and decryption workflows to your team’s workload. It’s a separate mechanism from dedicated secrets management tools, but some GitOps teams like it.

Best for: teams on GKE that run GitOps and want secrets versioned and reviewed with the rest of their config.

Strengths:

• Encrypted files keep their keys readable, so pull requests still show which setting changed.
• Cloud KMS holds the key, so access follows the IAM roles a Google Cloud team already manages.
• No server or managed service to pay for beyond the KMS key.
• Flux and Argo CD integrations, so decryption happens as part of a deployment.

Limitations:

• It encrypts files rather than serving secrets, so there's no API, rotation, dynamic secrets, or dashboard.
• Revoking someone's access means re-encrypting with new keys and changing the secret values themselves.
• Secret names stay readable in the file.
• Audit comes from Git history and Cloud KMS logs, not a record of its own.

Pricing model: free, with Cloud KMS billed separately.

Moving from GCP Secret Manager to Infisical

Most teams start with a GCP Secret Manager sync that imports the project's existing secrets and then keeps them updated by pushing from Infisical. This makes Infisical the source of truth, but the services reading Secret Manager don't notice the change.

FAQ

What are the alternatives to GCP Secret Manager?

Most teams that outgrow GCP Secret Manager (also called Google Secret Manager) move to a secrets manager like Infisical, which works beyond GCP and has environments, built-in rotation, and approvals. It fits Google Cloud teams that would otherwise build those pieces around Secret Manager, and teams adding a second cloud, since it syncs into Secret Manager as well as AWS and Azure.

Is GCP Secret Manager free?

GCP Secret Manager is free only up to an allowance. Beyond it, Google bills per active secret version per location, per 10,000 access operations, and per rotation notification. Bills grow mostly when versions pile up, since every active version in every location counts.

Can GCP Secret Manager rotate secrets automatically?

GCP Secret Manager doesn't rotate secrets by itself. A rotation schedule publishes a message to a Pub/Sub topic, and a subscriber you build has to create the new credential and store it as a new version.

Should I use HashiCorp Vault or GCP Secret Manager?

GCP Secret Manager suits teams that run on Google Cloud and want nothing to operate. HashiCorp Vault suits teams that need dynamic credentials across many systems and have the people to run and operate Vault as an internal service. Teams that want one system across clouds without a cluster to run usually move to a secrets manager like Infisical, which manages the secrets centrally and syncs them into Secret Manager and the other clouds' stores.

To manage your Google Cloud secrets, and the ones outside it, in one place, sign up and connect your first project today, or talk to an expert about your setup.