Best Passwordstate Alternatives: What to Actually Use Instead

Passwordstate is a self-hosted, web-based enterprise password management tool from Click Studios. It's common in finance, government, and defense orgs where cloud access is restricted or banned outright. A lot of teams also use it as a makeshift secrets manager, storing API keys, auth tokens, and service credentials alongside human passwords. Community packages like devblackops/PasswordState exist to make programmatic access less painful.

The problem: Passwordstate's security track record has eroded the trust that justifies running it.

The Security Timeline

Three major incident clusters define the pattern:

2021: Supply chain compromise. An attacker compromised Click Studios' download server and distributed a malicious moserware.secretsplitter.dll through the in-app Global In-Place Upgrade mechanism. Any instance that pulled the update began exfiltrating stored records and host system metadata to attacker infrastructure via the Moserpass malware. Click Studios took 28 hours to respond. Attackers subsequently launched a phishing campaign impersonating Click Studios, distributing a fake patch meaning the incident response process itself became an additional attack vector.
2022: Critical API authentication bypass (CVE-2022-3875, CVSS 9.1). Discovered by modzero AG, this flaw allowed an unauthenticated remote attacker to forge API tokens and retrieve plaintext passwords with nothing more than a target's username. It was part of a broader set of seven vulnerabilities disclosed that year, including access control bypasses (CVE-2022-3876), stored XSS (CVE-2022-3877), and hard-coded credentials. All were patched in builds 9611 and 9653.
2024 and 2025: Repeated authentication bypass flaws. CVE-2024-39337, discovered by Bastion Security, allowed full account takeover using only a victim's Active Directory username, bypassing both password and MFA requirements through a partial session flaw. Click Studios patched this in build 9858 in March 2024. Then, in August 2025, a separate authentication bypass was patched in the Emergency Access page (build 9972, CVE pending), exploitable via a crafted URL. The Register noted this was the fourth authentication bypass to hit Passwordstate 9 since its release.

The pattern matters more than any single bug. The product's core value proposition is ‘we keep secrets off the cloud so they're safer,’ but the implementation has repeatedly failed to protect those secrets. Combine that with slow, opaque communication during incidents, and you have a trust problem that patches alone won't fix.

Choosing a Replacement: Three Different Problems

Before picking a tool, identify which problem you’re actually solving. Passwordstate is used for several distinct purposes, and the right replacement depends on which one matters most to your team.

This is the original use case: employee credentials, shared logins, WiFi passwords, vendor portal access. The core requirements are a password generator that produces high-entropy credentials, secure sharing of passwords between team members without resorting to Slack DMs or spreadsheets, and audit logging for compliance.

Problem 2: Managing Machine Secrets

API keys, database connection strings, SSH keys, CI/CD tokens, service account credentials. These need programmatic access, environment-aware scoping (dev/staging/prod), and integration with deployment pipelines. A traditional password manager is the wrong tool for this job.

Problem 3: Managing Privileged Access

Controlling who can access critical infrastructure, under what conditions, and for how long. This includes session recording, credential checkout/checkin, and approval workflows for elevated access. This is the domain of Privileged Access Management (PAM) — a category Passwordstate's audience frequently needs but that traditional password managers don't addressƒ well.

Option A: KeePass / KeePassXC — Local-Only Password Storage

Use when: Cloud is not an option and the scope is strictly human passwords for individuals or very small teams.

KeePass and its cross-platform fork KeePassXC store credentials in an encrypted local database file (.kdbx, AES-256 or ChaCha20). By default, KeePass runs locally without requiring a server or cloud component, and does not expose credentials over the network unless you add a sync or sharing layer.

Here's what the two variants look like in practice:

KeePass: Windows-native (runs on Mac/Linux via Mono, but the experience is rough).
KeePassXC: Native builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux with a modern interface.
Both are open source and free.
Built-in password generator with configurable entropy.
Browser integration available via extensions (KeePassXC-Browser).
YubiKey and hardware key support in KeePassXC.

Where it falls short:

No built-in multi-user access control. Sharing means sharing the database file and a master key, or running a sync layer on top (e.g., Syncthing, a network share). This creates its own operational headaches.
No role-based permissions. Everyone with the master key sees everything.
No centralized audit trail.
Patching is manual and decentralized. When CVE-2023-32784 dropped (which allowed extraction of the master password from process memory), every KeePass instance across an organization needed a separate, manual update. There's no push mechanism or centralized update management.
Plugin ecosystem (especially in KeePass) introduces supply chain risk — plugins aren't vetted with the same rigor as the core application.

KeePassXC is a solid personal password vault. As an enterprise password management solution for a team of 50+, it requires significant operational overhead to make it work, and the lack of centralized controls makes it a poor Passwordstate replacement for organizations that need audit trails or onboarding/offboarding workflows.

Similar tools: Enpass, RoboForm

Option B: 1Password — Cloud Password Management Done Well

Use when: Cloud is acceptable, the primary need is human credential management, and the team values UX and fast onboarding.

1Password is a cloud-hosted password manager with a polished UI, granular vault permissions, and clean onboarding/offboarding workflows. When someone leaves the org, revoking access is a single admin action and credentials stay within the company.

What makes it relevant to this audience:

Integrated TOTP support: When sharing passwords between team members, the 2FA token travels with the credential, which eliminates the "can you send me the MFA code" problem.
Watchtower monitors stored credentials against known data breach databases and flags compromised or reused passwords.
Secrets Automation and SDKs: 1Password has invested significantly in developer-facing features. Service Accounts provide scoped, programmatic access to vault items. Open-source SDKs for Python, JavaScript, and Go allow secrets to be fetched at runtime without hardcoding. 1Password Connect enables self-hosted secrets access via a private REST API with local caching for high availability.
CI/CD integrations: Pre-built integrations for GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, and others allow secrets to be injected into deployment pipelines.
Agentic AI security: 1Password now supports credential management for AI agents, including TOTP-based MFA for autonomous workflows and human-in-the-loop approval for credential access — a feature increasingly relevant as teams adopt agentic automation.
CLI (op) for scripting and automation, including SSH key management and signing Git commits.

Where it falls short:

It's cloud-hosted. For orgs with strict data residency or air-gapped requirements, this is a non-starter.
While secrets automation capabilities have matured significantly, the abstractions for environment scoping (dev/staging/prod as a first-class concept), dynamic secrets generation, and automated credential rotation are not as deep as purpose-built secrets management platforms. 1Password remains strongest as a human credential manager with solid developer integrations, rather than a full secrets lifecycle platform.

Similar tools: Dashlane, LastPass (though LastPass has had its own significant data breach history, so evaluate carefully)

Option C: Bitwarden — Open Source, Self-Hostable Password Management

Use when: The team needs enterprise password management with the option to self-host, and open source matters for auditability or policy compliance.

Bitwarden is an open-source password manager that offers both cloud-hosted and self-hosted deployment options. For teams migrating from Passwordstate specifically because of self-hosting requirements, Bitwarden is arguably the most natural replacement — it provides real multi-user access control without giving up on-premises deployment.

Key technical properties:

Open source and audited. Bitwarden's codebase is publicly available on GitHub and undergoes regular third-party security audits. The platform is SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliant.
Self-hostable. Deploy on your own infrastructure using Docker or Helm charts for Kubernetes. All vault data stays on your servers — relevant for organizations with strict data residency requirements.
Granular access control. Organizations, collections, and groups provide role-based permissions. You can structure credentials by department, project, or sensitivity level and control who sees what.
SSO integration. Enterprise plans support SAML 2.0 and OIDC, with SSO authentication decoupled from vault decryption to maintain zero-knowledge encryption. Compatible with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Ping Identity, and other standards-compliant providers.
SCIM provisioning. Automated user and group provisioning through your identity provider. When someone is deactivated in your directory, their Bitwarden access is automatically revoked.
Secrets Manager. Bitwarden offers a dedicated Secrets Manager product for storing and injecting machine credentials (API keys, tokens, certificates) into applications and CI/CD pipelines. This provides a basic secrets management capability within the Bitwarden ecosystem.
CLI and API access for scripting and automation workflows.
Send for secure, time-limited credential sharing with external parties.

Where it falls short:

The self-hosted deployment carries operational overhead. You are responsible for database maintenance, backups, SSL certificates, and updates. The setup isn't complex, but maintaining it at enterprise scale requires dedicated attention.
Zero-knowledge SSO configuration (Key Connector) is non-trivial for self-hosted deployments and requires significant IT resources to implement securely.
Bitwarden's Secrets Manager is functional but newer and less feature-rich than purpose-built platforms when it comes to environment-scoped secrets, dynamic credential generation, or rotation automation.
The UX, while solid, is generally considered less polished than 1Password, particularly for non-technical users during onboarding.

Option D: Cloud-Native Secrets Managers — AWS, Azure, GCP

Use when: The team already runs workloads on a major cloud provider and needs managed secrets management with deep platform integration.

If your infrastructure is primarily on one of the major clouds, the native secrets management service is often the simplest path for machine credentials. These are fully managed, tightly integrated with IAM, and require zero additional infrastructure to deploy.

AWS Secrets Manager:

Native integration with AWS IAM for fine-grained access control and automatic credential injection into Lambda, ECS, EKS, and other AWS services.
Built-in automatic rotation for RDS, Redshift, DocumentDB, and other AWS database credentials via Lambda rotation functions.
Cross-account and cross-region secret replication for disaster recovery.
Pay-per-secret pricing ($0.40/secret/month) plus API call charges — cost can add up at scale.
Limited to the AWS ecosystem. If you run multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, you'll need to manage secrets separately for non-AWS workloads.

Azure Key Vault:

Unified management of secrets, encryption keys, and certificates in a single service.
HSM-backed key storage options (FIPS 140-2 Level 2 and Level 3) for organizations with strict cryptographic requirements.
Deep integration with Azure AD / Microsoft Entra ID for access policies and managed identities, allowing Azure resources to authenticate without stored credentials.
Native integration with Azure DevOps, App Service, AKS, and other Azure services.
Secret versioning and soft-delete for recovery, but no built-in automatic rotation — rotation requires Azure Functions or custom automation, which adds operational complexity.

GCP Secret Manager:

Automatic replication across regions with configurable replication policies (automatic or user-managed).
Integration with IAM and Workload Identity Federation for fine-grained access control across GCP services.
Built-in versioning, audit logging via Cloud Audit Logs, and integration with Cloud Functions for rotation workflows.
Simple, straightforward pricing ($0.06/10,000 access operations, plus per-version storage costs).
Like the others, tightly coupled to the GCP ecosystem. Multi-cloud teams will need a separate solution for non-GCP workloads.

The common limitation across all three: These services are excellent for secrets consumed within their respective cloud ecosystems but create fragmentation in multi-cloud or hybrid environments. They also don't address human credential management. You'll still need a password manager for employee passwords, shared accounts, and vendor portal access. And none of them provide the environment-scoping model (dev/staging/prod as a first-class construct) that developer-focused secrets management platforms offer natively.

Option E: Infisical — Secrets Management and PAM for Machine Credentials and Infrastructure Access

Use when: The real pain is managing API keys, tokens, and service credentials across environments and pipelines — or when the team needs privileged access controls for infrastructure like databases and servers.

Infisical is an open-source platform for secrets management, certificates, and privileged access management, built for developer and infrastructure workflows. If the team has been stuffing machine credentials into Passwordstate and pulling them out with custom scripts, this is the purpose-built replacement. It is not a traditional password manager for human login credentials — it's an enterprise-grade platform for managing the secrets, certificates, and privileged access that modern infrastructure demands.

Key technical properties:

Environment-aware by design. Secrets are scoped to environments (dev, staging, production) natively, not through naming conventions or folder hacks.
Native CI/CD integrations. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Kubernetes operators, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, and others. Secrets are injected at runtime without hardcoding them or storing .env files in repos.
Dynamic secrets. Generate ephemeral, short-lived credentials on demand for services like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ. These credentials are automatically revoked after expiration, eliminating the risk of stale, long-lived credentials.
Automated secret rotation. Rotate credentials at configurable intervals for databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, OracleDB), AWS IAM, Auth0, LDAP, and other services, with overlapping validity periods to prevent downtime during rotation.
CLI and SDK access. Fetch secrets programmatically via client SDKs (Node, Python, Go, Ruby, Java, .NET) and the Infisical CLI. The Infisical Agent can inject secrets into applications without modifying application code.
Certificate management (PKI). Create and manage internal certificate authorities, issue and renew X.509 certificates, and integrate with external CAs like Let's Encrypt and DigiCert. Supports ACME and EST enrollment protocols.
Self-hostable. The platform is open source (MIT license for core) and can run on your own infrastructure — relevant for orgs that left Passwordstate specifically because they needed to avoid third-party cloud dependencies.
Access controls and approval workflows. RBAC, attribute-based access controls, temporary access with automatic expiration, access requests with multi-step approval chains, and comprehensive audit logging across all operations.

Infisical PAM: Privileged Access Management

For teams where Passwordstate served as a de facto PAM tool — managing who can access critical databases, servers, and infrastructure — Infisical PAM addresses this directly. Many of the security failures in Passwordstate's history (particularly the Emergency Access bypass vulnerabilities) stem from exactly the kind of privileged access problems that a proper PAM solution is designed to prevent.

Infisical PAM provides centralized, policy-based control over access to infrastructure resources like databases and servers. The architecture uses a Gateway-based model: a lightweight Infisical Gateway is deployed within your network and acts as a secure bridge to private resources. Users never get direct network access or see underlying credentials. Instead, connections are proxied through the Gateway, with credentials injected automatically.

How the access lifecycle works:

Discovery: A user logs into Infisical and sees a catalog of resources (databases, servers) and accounts they're permitted to access.
Request and Approval: The user requests access to a specific resource and account (e.g., "Production PostgreSQL" as read_only). If an approval policy is configured, the request is routed through a multi-step approval workflow — designated approvers receive notifications and can approve or reject. Break-glass bypass is available for emergency scenarios where configured.
Credential Injection: Once approved, Infisical establishes a secure tunnel through the Gateway and injects the credentials for the target account automatically. The user never sees the underlying password or key.
Session Recording: All session activity is recorded. For database connections, Infisical captures every query executed and its corresponding response. Recordings are encrypted at rest, cached locally on the Gateway during the session, and uploaded to the Infisical platform for centralized, long-term storage once the session concludes. This asynchronous approach means sessions remain operational even if connectivity to the Infisical platform is temporarily interrupted.
Automated Credential Rotation: Credentials for PAM resources can be rotated automatically, ensuring that even if a credential is somehow exposed, its useful lifetime is limited.

Infisical PAM currently supports resources including Active Directory, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS IAM, SSH, and Windows Servers, with additional resource types being added over time. For SSH access, Infisical supports signed SSH certificates for ephemeral, short-lived access to infrastructure.

For teams currently storing passwords for both humans and machines in Passwordstate, a practical migration path is: 1Password or Bitwarden for human credentials + Infisical for machine secrets and privileged infrastructure access. This separates concerns cleanly and gives each problem the right tool.

Similar tools: Doppler (not open source), HashiCorp Vault (operationally heavy — running it well is a job in itself, though HCP Vault offers a managed option that reduces the burden), and for PAM specifically: CyberArk, Delinea, and BeyondTrust.

Operational Gotchas

Migrating secrets out of Passwordstate is manual and messy. Passwordstate's export tooling is limited. Expect to write scripts against its API to extract credentials and validate completeness carefully. The API has rate limiting that can affect bulk exports, so plan accordingly. Rotate any secrets that were stored during the 2021 compromise window if that hasn't already been done.

"Self-hosted" doesn't automatically mean "more secure." Passwordstate is self-hosted. It was still compromised multiple times. Self-hosting shifts responsibility for underlying OS patching, network hardening, database maintenance, and monitoring to your team. For self-hosting to actually improve security, you need: a hardened OS with timely patch management, network segmentation isolating the password/secrets manager, database encryption at rest, monitoring and alerting on anomalous access, and a defined SLA for applying security updates. If those practices aren't solid, self-hosting increases risk rather than reducing it.

Don't let password managers become your secrets manager. Password managers are designed for interactive human use — logging into websites and sharing credentials with coworkers. Machine secrets (API keys, DB connection strings, certificates) have different access patterns, lifecycle requirements, and rotation needs. Mixing them in one tool creates blind spots in both audit trails and access control.

Audit what's actually in Passwordstate before migrating. Teams are often surprised to discover stale credentials, shared service accounts with no owner, or secrets that should have been rotated years ago. A migration is a good forcing function to clean house.

Credential rotation post-migration is non-optional. After moving secrets to a new platform, rotate them. The migration process itself creates a window where credentials exist in two systems, export files, or shell histories. Treat the migration as a potential exposure event and rotate accordingly.

Where to Go From Here

The right move depends on what's actually in your Passwordstate instance. Before evaluating any tool, export a full inventory and categorize what you're storing: human credentials in one bucket, machine secrets in another, and privileged infrastructure access in a third.

If the inventory is almost entirely human passwords (login credentials, shared accounts, WiFi keys), a dedicated password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden covers the gap with less operational overhead than Passwordstate ever had. Bitwarden is the stronger choice if self-hosting is a requirement. If the inventory is heavy on API keys, tokens, and service credentials, those belong in a secrets manager like Infisical or a cloud-native option (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager) depending on your infrastructure, not a password vault. If the team needs privileged access controls for databases, servers, and other infrastructure, that's a PAM problem. Infisical PAM or dedicated PAM tools like CyberArk address it directly.

The concrete next step is to audit your Passwordstate instance. Run the export, tag every entry as "human," "machine," or "privileged infrastructure," and flag anything that hasn't been rotated in the last 12 months. That inventory is the migration plan. Everything else (tool selection, environment mapping, integration work) follows from knowing exactly what you're protecting and how it's accessed.

Passwordstate's repeated security failures make a clear case that staying put carries real risk. But migrating without a plan just moves the mess to a new platform. Start with the audit. The tooling decision gets straightforward once you know what you're working with.