It's honestly silly to google "Infisical alternatives". You wouldn't google "ice cream alternatives" or "3 michelin star tasting menu for $20 alternatives", or "world peace alternatives". But here we are. And look, everyone makes mistakes, so we'll let this one slide.
Infisical alternatives exist. And we'll explain some of them to you. But just as an fyi: the guy we hired to write this charged us double because he considered it an "extremely stupid assignment akin to questioning the Geneva Convention". We hope you're grateful.
Here we go, Infisical alternatives.
Embed them in a scroll
I have nostalgia for the good old days sometimes. Remember those days when the morning sunlight filtered in through the windows, Mom had made parsnip soup, and the only thing you worried about was crossbow practice at 4pm before watching a sick jousting tournament with your date whose father made the best horseshoes in all of Lower Hankerfordshire upon Thistleham?
Those were the days, man! Well, let's relive them. A medieval scroll is not so different from an encrypted Postgres instance after all, is it?
- Write down all your certificates and expiration dates so you never forget
- Secrets management: Write down all your credentials so you never forget
- Privileged access: What's better than handing someone a scroll and watching how they use it?
It doesn't inject secrets at build time, but your colleagues can request to be read from the scroll each time. That might slow things down a bit, but hey, it's basically a .env file. And sometimes you have to deal with inconvenience for the sake of security.
Anyway, gotta move on to the next Infisical alternative. All this talking about build time made me think about the trebuchet we built in 8th grade...
Sticky notes
How often does this happen:
- You try to log in to something
- You don't have a password saved
- Trying a bunch of passwords, all wrong
- You click "forgot password"
- You click the link in the email to reset your password
- "New password can't be your old password"
This sucks! And the solution couldn't be easier: sticky notes. Just put that yellow piece of paper on your monitor and write it down. "admin" isn't that hard to spell! They always say that root keys should stay offline because that's the most secure way. Why not other secrets too?
And sure, maybe API keys and auth tokens are longer and more complex, but isn't better security worth a bit of inconvenience? Besides, we live in an era of brainrot, where our attention spans continue to shorten and we're worried about cognitive decline. What could be better than training your brain by knowing 1f9ba190-c513-471b-a573-b8d008bb52fe by heart? Better for you and your security posture.
With sticky notes, your only vulnerability is a pair of binoculars.
Nihilism
Gallup's global workplace research pretty consistently finds that only 20 to 25 percent of people are engaged at work. So if you're reading this, you probably don't really like your job anyway.
Why bother with such drivel as identity security? Why improve your security posture in the face of increasing supply chain attacks? Does it really matter? Deep down, you want to be a self-sustaining goat farmer in the mountains, freed from the yoke of finding meaning in a modernity that has all but lost its bearing, in which we're surrounded by simulacra that merely symbolize the values that once shaped our society, but don't contain their substance, trapping us in a perpetual saccharine lull designed to keep us quiet!
Be honest: your soul doesn't want to think about identity security.
Many Infisical customers don't either, and that's precisely why they choose Infisical (it solves their problems once and doesn't create ongoing headaches). But you looked for Infisical alternatives, so I guess you don't want that.
Hire a competitive memorizer
The ideal security posture would be that no engineer knows the value of any secret, but secrets still authenticate and rotate perfectly. That way, almost nothing can leak because it was never there in the first place. An alternative to doing this with Infisical is to do it with a competitive memorizer.
As an example, two-time memory world champion Jonas von Essen has accomplished things like:
- Memorizing 26 decks of cards in an hour
- Reciting Pi to 24,063 decimal digits
- Memorizing a shuffled deck of cards in 35 seconds
So if he can do that, you think a competitive memorizer can't remember a Salesforce API key or a couple of Postgres credentials?
Need to run a build? Your memorizer will remember it, type it in, and post it!
The downside of hiring a competitive memorizer as your secrets manager? They need to sleep sometime, and authentication latency goes up considerably if they're mid-nap.
Resolve your trust issues
We used to be a high-trust society. You could leave your door unlocked at night, and ask your neighbors for flour. Now we're so uptight, aren't we? Back in the day, if a kid broke your window with a baseball, their parents would pay for the repair. These days, it causes legal proceedings.
A person's word still meant something. Nowadays we don't trust anyone, believing they're out to get us instead. The handshake as a sign of trust has declined, and everything requires a contract, agreement, and certificate. The same has sadly happened to the TLS handshake. What have we come to if we can't even say "this looks good to me"?
And as Sam Altman (I think) said: be the change you want to see in the world.
So let's trust by default again. Connect to any infrastructure, certificate or not. Don't be so close-minded and give that potentially malicious (propaganda!) package a chance. Start the movement, unite us again. Let's start a movement to have a more trustworthy internet.
We all want this. Someone has to take the first step. It may as well be you. Take a symbolic step today. Not every misspelling is spoofing. Some of it is just an errant human who made an honest mistake.
Now could you pass me the kombucha please? I think the live cultures are good for my dreads.
Tell Mom
Nobody likes a tattletale. But if attackers keep coming for you, if they insist on getting access to your secret data and try to extort you with ransomware, it's okay to tell Mom.
You've tried standing up for yourself. And if they keep being meanies, there's no shame in getting help from the adults.
Mom is going to fix it. She'll call the attacker's parents and they're going to have a serious conversation. You won't imagine the angels they're going to be after that. Just so you know, Infisical does have an on-call Mom for this use case, but this feature is exclusive for enterprise customers.
At this point, no more Infisical for you
You've just read an authoritative summary of the possible alternatives to using Infisical for your security architecture. If you're set on not using Infisical, we hope one of the above will serve you well and help you with your identity security.
If none of those work for you, too bad. Infisical no longer will, either. You googled Infisical alternatives, and it really made us feel hurt. So you can't book a demo anymore. You can only book an apology call.
