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Infisical vs HashiCorp Vault
Vault has shined the light on Secrets Management. Infisical makes it accessible to every developer.
Looking to improve your secret management processes?Talk to an expert
I think if I was HashiCorp Vault team’s PM, I’d be worried. Your team has done such a great job at UX. I was astonished to see a product with such a great integration catalog. I think you aced it — modern developers are desperate for out of the box integrations with 100+ services they have to use every day.— Alexander Klizhentas, CTO & Co-founder at Teleport
Executive Summary
HashiCorp Vault follows a “building blocks” philosophy. It offers flexible primitives for secrets management, identity-based access, and dynamic secrets. Vault can accommodate complex use cases, but this flexibility comes with trade-offs:
- Engineering overhead: Assembling a complete secrets management system requires substantial effort to develop custom workflows, integrations, plugins, and dashboards. This leads to high setup costs and ongoing maintenance burden.
- Adoption challenges: Vault’s learning curve for managing secrets, policies, authentication, and sealing can make it difficult for developers to use effectively. When secrets management tools are hard to use, teams often develop workarounds, and those workarounds can introduce the very risks you’re trying to eliminate.
Infisical takes a different approach: security through simplicity.
Secrets management tools must be easy for end users to understand. Otherwise, they struggle to address the problem they’re meant to solve: secrets sprawl.
- Built-in functionality: Native RBAC, audit logging, access request workflows, temporary access, a modern dashboard UI, first-party SDKs, secret sharing, and 60+ integrations — significantly reducing time-to-value, engineering overhead, and operational risk.
- Complete developer lifecycle support: From local development to staging, CI/CD, IaC, and production — secrets are managed consistently and securely.
- Security without bottlenecks: Security and platform teams gain visibility and control without causing friction, while developers benefit from self-service tooling that’s intuitive and compliant by default.
The result: Faster adoption, better security hygiene, and fewer manual processes — all delivered out of the box.
Infisical
HashiCorp Vault
Why It Matters
Open Source
Fully open source under MIT license with 25,000+ GitHub stars. Transparent codebase reviewed by the security community.
Source-available under BSL 1.1 since August 2023. Not OSI-approved open source.
Open source security products allow community review of the codebase. MIT licensing provides protection against license changes and vendor lock-in, while giving security teams full audit capability.
Dashboard UI
Modern, responsive dashboard designed for both developers and security teams. Configure secrets, view audit logs, manage access without CLI.
CLI and API-first with a basic UI. Most workflows require command-line expertise or custom API scripting.
Security tools are most effective when they're widely adopted. A dashboard accessible to all team members (and not just CLI-proficient engineers) helps drive consistent usage and reduces shadow practices.
RBAC
Native role-based access control with intuitive UI. Assign roles and scope permissions by project, environment, folder, or secret.
Policy-based access using HCL. Powerful but requires writing and maintaining policy documents. No visual role management.
Visual role management reduces the risk of misconfiguration and makes it easier to audit permissions across teams, especially as organizations scale.
Approval Workflows
Built-in approval workflows with configurable chains, native Slack/Teams notifications, and self-serve UI.
Control Groups provide multi-party authorization. Requires CLI/API integration and custom notification setup.
Built-in approval workflows with native Slack/Teams integration reduce setup time and ensure consistent governance without custom development.
Access Requests
Self-serve access request portal. Developers request temporary or scoped access with built-in approval gates and auto-expiration.
TTL-based tokens and leases. No native self-serve UI, requiring external ticketing systems or custom development.
Self-serve access requests reduce bottlenecks on security teams while maintaining audit trails and approval gates automatically.
Temporary Access / JIT
Native just-in-time access with configurable TTLs, approval requirements, and automatic revocation. Visual tracking of dynamic secret leases.
Tokens and leases support TTLs. Dynamic secrets provide time-limited credentials. No unified UI for tracking.
Just-in-time access is a core principle of zero trust. Native JIT support simplifies implementation and provides centralized visibility into active temporary grants.
Change Request Workflows
Git-style change request proposals for secrets. Review before changes go live with full version history.
No native equivalent. Requires building custom PR-like workflows using external tools.
Change review workflows for secrets apply the same rigor as code review, helping catch errors and enforcing separation of duties before changes reach production.
Access Tree Visualization
Visual, hierarchical view of who has access to what across users, roles, groups, and environments.
No equivalent visualization. Auditing requires CLI queries and manual policy analysis.
Visualizing access hierarchies makes it faster to answer audit questions and identify overly broad permissions across the organization.
Workflow Integrations
Native Slack and Microsoft Teams integration for access requests, approvals, and secret change alerts.
No native Slack/Teams integration. Requires custom webhook development or third-party tools.
Native integrations with collaboration tools meet teams where they already work, improving response times for approvals and alerts.
Project & Environment Separation
Logical separation by project and environment with independent access controls, versioning, and audit trails.
Namespaces (Enterprise only) or mount path conventions. Requires careful policy design.
Clear project and environment boundaries help prevent cross-environment credential leakage, such as accidentally using production credentials in development.
Secret Versioning
Automatic versioning with timestamps, author tracking, and ability to view and restore any previous version.
KV v2 secrets engine supports versioning with configurable limits. CLI-based management.
Both platforms support versioning. Infisical surfaces version history through its dashboard, making it accessible to team members beyond CLI users.
Point-in-Time Recovery
Snapshot and restore secrets to any previous state. Roll back entire folders or environments.
KV v2 supports version rollback for individual secrets. No environment-wide snapshot.
Environment-wide snapshots enable faster recovery from bulk misconfigurations, compared to rolling back secrets individually.
Environment Comparison
Side-by-side dashboard view comparing secrets across environments. Spot missing or mismatched values instantly.
No native comparison UI. Requires manual diffing via CLI/API or custom tooling.
Side-by-side environment comparison accelerates debugging of environment-specific issues and helps ensure configuration consistency across stages.
Secret Referencing
Reference secrets across projects, environments, and folders. Single source of truth that updates everywhere.
Requires custom scripting or Terraform. No native cross-project referencing.
Cross-project secret referencing establishes a single source of truth, so rotating a shared credential propagates automatically rather than requiring updates in multiple locations.
Secret Sharing
Secure, zero-knowledge sharing via expiring links with full audit trail.
No native secret sharing. Teams often resort to less secure sharing methods.
Secure sharing with expiration and audit trails provides a sanctioned alternative to ad-hoc sharing methods like messaging or email.
Project Templates
Default environments, roles, naming conventions. New projects inherit organizational standards.
No equivalent. Each project requires manual configuration.
Templates enforce consistent project structure and security baselines across the organization without manual setup for each new project.
Dynamic Secrets
24 templates: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Oracle, MSSQL, Cassandra, Redis, RabbitMQ, Snowflake, AWS IAM, AWS ElastiCache, Azure Entra ID, Azure SQL, GCP IAM, LDAP, Elasticsearch, Couchbase, Mongo Atlas, SAP ASE, SAP HANA, Vertica, GitHub, TOTP, K8s service accounts.
Database secrets engine with ~15 plugins (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, MSSQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Redis, Snowflake, Couchbase, Elasticsearch, more). Separate engines for AWS, Azure, GCP, AliCloud, LDAP, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, SSH, TOTP. Some engines (Consul, Nomad, HCP Terraform) are HashiCorp ecosystem-specific.
Both platforms offer broad dynamic secrets coverage with comparable breadth across databases and cloud providers. Infisical integrates dynamic secrets with its JIT access and approval workflows for unified governance.
Secret Rotation
Native secret rotation support for databases, LDAP, and cloud vendors with the ability to define custom rotation periods.
Comprehensive rotation through secrets engines. Static role rotation, root credential rotation, configurable TTLs.
Both platforms handle rotation well. Infisical's dashboard-driven configuration provides a lower barrier to entry for teams setting up rotation for the first time.
Secret Syncs (Push)
35+ destinations: AWS Parameter Store, Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP, GitHub, Vercel, Terraform Cloud, 1Password, Heroku, Fly.io, more. Secret Syncs are available as part of the open source version.
Secrets Sync to AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, Vercel. Enterprise license required.
Broad sync support at accessible tiers enables a single source of truth with automatic distribution to downstream services.
SDKs
First-party SDKs for 10+ major programming languages (including Node.js, Python, Go, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, C++) with auth, caching, and lifecycle management built in.
Official Go client. Other language SDKs are community-maintained with varying quality.
First-party SDKs ensure consistent quality, timely updates aligned with platform releases, and direct vendor support across languages.
CLI
Full-featured CLI for secret injection and local development. infisical run injects secrets into any process.
Powerful CLI for all operations. Requires more setup for environment variable injection.
Infisical's CLI is optimized for developer workflows with single-command secret injection. Vault's CLI offers broader operational capabilities.
CI/CD
Native integrations with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Bitbucket, Jenkins, TeamCity, Azure DevOps.
Official GitHub Action and strong CI/CD support through CLI/API.
Both platforms integrate with major CI/CD providers. Infisical offers more turnkey integrations; Vault provides flexibility through its CLI/API.
Agent
Lightweight agent for VMs and non-Kubernetes workloads. Fetches and injects secrets, handles token refresh, and renders secrets to files or environment variables.
Vault Agent runs as a daemon on VMs with auto-auth, template rendering, caching, and process supervision. Mature and widely deployed.
Both provide agents for traditional infrastructure. Vault Agent has more templating flexibility; Infisical Agent prioritizes simplicity and faster setup.
Kubernetes
Operator syncs to K8s Secrets via CRDs with auto-reload for Deployments, DaemonSets, StatefulSets. ConfigMap support. Bi-directional sync. Agent Injector (sidecar) renders secrets to volumes. CSI Provider for ephemeral volume mounts.
Vault Secrets Operator syncs to K8s Secrets with dynamic secrets and transit encryption. Vault Agent Injector with template rendering, caching, auto-auth. Vault CSI Provider with similar capabilities.
Infisical's operator supports auto-reload across more workload types and offers bi-directional sync. Vault's operator provides tighter integration with its dynamic secrets and transit engines. Both support sidecar and CSI patterns.
Internal CA
Create private CA hierarchies with root and intermediate CAs. Visual certificate management dashboard.
PKI secrets engine with full CA hierarchy support. Mature and feature-rich.
Both support internal PKI. Infisical provides a visual management dashboard; Vault offers deep CLI/API-driven configurability.
External CA Integration
Integrate with Let's Encrypt, DigiCert, Microsoft AD CS, Google Trust Services, SSL.com, any ACME-compatible CA.
No native external CA enrollment. CIEPS for policy enforcement. Requires separate tooling for public certs.
External CA integration allows teams to manage both internal and public certificates from a single platform, reducing tool sprawl.
Enrollment Methods
API, ACME (automated certificate management), EST (Enrollment over Secure Transport).
API-based enrollment. cert-manager integration. No native ACME server.
ACME support enables compatibility with standard certificate automation tools like certbot and existing ACME workflows.
Certificate Syncs
Push certificates to AWS Certificate Manager, Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault.
No native certificate sync destinations. Requires custom automation.
Certificate sync automates distribution to cloud services, reducing manual steps in certificate deployment workflows.
Certificate Alerts
Configurable expiration alerts and webhook notifications for lifecycle events.
PKI alerting in recent versions (1.15+).
Expiration alerts help prevent outages caused by overlooked certificate renewals.
Certificate Discovery
Automatically scan network infrastructure — IP ranges, CIDR blocks, and domains — across TLS ports to discover deployed certificates. Schedule recurring scans, view certificate installations mapped to endpoints, and auto-import discovered certificates into Infisical. Supports scanning through Gateway for private networks.
No certificate discovery capability. Vault PKI only tracks certificates it issues. No network scanning or inventory of externally-issued or deployed certificates.
Most organizations don't know where all their certificates are deployed. Infisical discovers certificates across your infrastructure automatically — eliminating blind spots and preventing surprise expirations.
Privileged Access Management
Built-in PAM with session recording for database queries, SSH, RDP, and K8s access. Credential rotation. Full audit trails. SSH certificate-based authentication included as a native access method.
No native PAM. HashiCorp Boundary is a separate product. Boundary records SSH sessions only and no database query recording.
Infisical includes PAM with broader session recording coverage as part of the core platform. SSH certificate auth replaces static key management with short-lived credentials. Vault requires the separate Boundary product for privileged access workflows.
Gateway
Deploy with a single CLI command. Outbound-only SSH tunnels — no inbound firewall rules required. Dynamic secrets for air-gapped resources.
Requires VPC Peering, Transit Gateway, VPN tunnels, or Boundary (separate product).
Infisical's Gateway provides a lightweight option for connecting to private network resources without complex VPN or peering configurations.
Secret Scanning
Built-in scanning for 140+ secret types across Git repos and infrastructure.
HCP Vault Radar is a separate SaaS product with separate licensing.
Infisical includes secret scanning in the core platform. Vault offers comparable capabilities through a separately licensed product.
Encryption
AES-256-GCM encryption at rest. FIPS 140-3 compliant.
AES-256-GCM encryption. FIPS 140-2 validated options with HSM.
Both use strong encryption standards. Infisical supports FIPS 140-3; Vault offers FIPS 140-2 validated options with HSM integration.
KMS / BYOK
AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP Cloud KMS, or custom HSM. You control root encryption keys.
Transit and KMS engines. ADP module (Enterprise) for some external KMS features.
Both support external key management. Infisical includes KMS integration at accessible tiers; some Vault KMS features require Enterprise licensing.
KMIP
Acts as KMIP server for legacy HSMs, databases, enterprise tools.
KMIP secrets engine in Enterprise.
Both support KMIP for integration with enterprise tools and legacy infrastructure.
Compliance
SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, FIPS 140-3.
SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP (HCP Vault), PCI-DSS guidance.
Both platforms support major enterprise compliance frameworks. Vault's FedRAMP authorization may be relevant for U.S. federal workloads.
Storage Backend
PostgreSQL — battle-tested, horizontally scalable, and already familiar to most ops teams. Works with RDS, Cloud SQL.
Raft consensus for HA deployments. Requires managing leader election, peer coordination, quorum, and complex failure recovery.
Operational Model
Stateless application servers with Postgres persistence. Configure via environment variables, Helm charts, or Terraform.
Requires seal key management, storage backend tuning, HA coordination, and careful backup procedures. Unsealing adds operational overhead.
High Availability
Multiple stateless instances behind load balancer with shared PostgreSQL. Standard patterns.
Raft cluster with 3-5 nodes, network configuration, and unsealing coordination.
Upgrades
Rolling deployment of stateless instances. Database migrations handled automatically.
Careful version upgrade procedures, seal migration considerations, cluster coordination.
Air-Gapped
Full support with Gateway for connecting to isolated resources. Offline packages available.
Strong air-gapped support. Requires careful seal key management and cluster bootstrapping.
Looking to improve your secret management processes?Talk to an expert
Migration Path
Already using HashiCorp Vault?
Infisical’s Secret Sync feature can push secrets directly to HashiCorp Vault, enabling gradual, low-risk migration:
- Parallel Operation: Run Infisical alongside Vault. Sync secrets from Infisical to Vault so existing applications continue working.
- Migrate Gradually: Update applications one at a time to pull from Infisical directly. No big-bang cutover.
Validate and Decommission: Once all applications are migrated, decommission Vault infrastructure at your own pace.
Ready to Get Started?
- Start Free — Full-featured free tier. No credit card required.
- Book a Demo — See Infisical in action with your use cases.
- Read the Docs — Dive into technical documentation.
Starting with Infisical is simple, fast, and free.
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