Compare Infisical to GCP Secret Manager
See for yourself how GCP Secret Manager fares against Infisical's SecretOps platform.
Meet the contenders
Meet Infisical Infisical is the leading open source SecretOps platform that is designed to securely store secrets, orchestrate them across your full development lifecycle, and provide best-in-class developer experience.
Meet GCP Secret Manager GCP Secret Manager is a secure and convenient storage system for API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data.
Infisical vs GCP Secret Manager: The Short Version
Infisical vs GCP Secret Manager: The Long VersionInfisical is suitable for you if:
You need a single source of truth to manage secrets across your engineering team and infrastructure (incl. local development, CI/CD, and production).
You care about developer experience including dev onboarding and time-to-production processes.
You are looking to get started as fast as possible.
You fall in our free tier; free and easy to use is excellent, especially when you find out Infisical is the #1 SecretOps platform on GitHub!
GCP is suitable for you if:
You prefer to work with a single infrastructure provider (in particular, Google Cloud Platform).
You are looking for a more manual and low-level solution and are willing to go through manual setup and higher maintenance cost to achieve a more unique structure.
Infisical
GCP
Why does it matter?
OFFERS
PARTIALLY OFFERS
DOES NOT OFFER
Architecture & Security
Open Source
Yes, Infisical is an open source product with a community consisting of thousands of developers – link to GitHub repo.
No, GCP SM is closed source.
Using open source security products is considered to be the best practice. Open codebases are reviewed by thousands of security practioners for any kinds of vulnerabilities – something that is not possible when a product is close source. In addition, it gives you direct overview of and input into the product's roadmap.
Hosting Options
Offers a hosted cloud product – signup here.
Self-hostable on your own infrastructure – instructions here.
Offers a hosted cloud product.
Hosting is only limited to Google Cloud.
Infisical can be self-hosted on any cloud or on your own infarstructure – significantly minimizing vendor lock-in and improving your company's compliance posture. Having the option of using a Cloud-hosted product is also very important if your team doesn't have the capacity to think about hosting a product themselves.
Encrypted Secrets Storage
Infisical uses TLS for encryption in transit as well as AES256-GCM for symmetric encryption and x25519-xsalsa20-poly1305 for asymmetric encryption operations – security brief here.
Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256-bit encryption keys.
Encrypted Storage is important to make sure that your data stays safe and compliant.
Zero-knowledge Architecture
Infisical uses secure remote password (SRP) to handle authentication and public-key cryptography for secret sharing and syncing; secrets are symmetrically encrypted by keys decryptable only by members of the project – security brief here.
Not available.
Zero-knowdlge architecture ensures that only users themselves are able to decrypt their data – NOT Infisical (or any of Infisical's employees).
Developer Experience
Project & Environment Separation
Out of the box, Infisical allows you to structure your secrets into projects (they often correspond to git repositories) and environments (e.g., dev, staging, prod) – read more.
With GCP Secret Manager, users have to think of the structure themselves.
Proper structure allows developers to navigate and find right secrets easier and quicker.
Environment Comparison
Infisical lets developers immediately see the differences in secrets across various environments via a web dashboard overview.
After setting up a custom structure with GCP Secret Manager, users have to find differences manually or write custom scripts for that.
Being able to easily see this, allows developers to spot bugs in seconds as well as makes programs more reliable.
Secret Referencing
Infisical lets developers reference secrets within the projects.
Not available.
Secret referencing helps establish the single source of truth and minimize bugs related to updating values in different places.
Personal Secret Overrides
Developers can override secrets for themselves while keeping the values unchanged for rest of the team/infrastructure – docs here.
Not available.
This is useful for local development in order to not disrupt the workflow of your teammates as well as for compliance purposes (e.g., Database Access Tokens should be unique for every developer)
Deeper Secret Structures
Infisical lets you form secrets into directories from which you are then able to organize them into any structure you want.
Path-based secrets are default in GCP, allowing you to create a structure you need.
As your product/project grows, this will be very important to allow for scaling.
Secret Versioning
Yes, granular secret versioning with timestamps.
Yes, fairly identical secret versioning structure to what Infisical offers.
It is useful to know how the value of a certain secret has been changing over time for debugging and compliance purposes.
Point-in-time Recovery
Yes, you can roll back secrets in any projects to any snapshot. It works in a way comparable to git commits.
Not available.
Whenever someone makes a mistake in adding/editing/deleting a secret (or one simply needs to rollback a deployment), this becomes very handy.
Ways to access secrets
Command Line Interface
Infisical offers a fully language- and platform-agnostic CLI. It allows to automatically inject application secrets as environment variables – docs here.
Not available.
This way tends to be the easiest to get set up with secrets management. It also enables fully synchronized local development – also in larger teams.
SDKs
Infisical currently offers SDKs for Python and NodeJS, and more are under active development – docs here.
Available for most of the languages (including Python and NodeJS).
SDKs tend to be a more reliable way of accessing secrets even though it requires more work – which often makes it a preferred choice for larger teams.
Third-party Integrations
Infisical lets you push secrets to various 3rd-party services (e.g., Vercel, Github Actions, Circle CI) – ultimately becoming a true single source of truth for you secrets. You can find the docs here.
Not available.
Automatic 3-rd party integrations create a single source of truth for your secrets in Infisical. From there, with just a couple clicks, you can distribute across other infrastructure secrvices that your company is using.
API
Universal API that lets you perform a range of secret oprations – docs here.
Universal API with fairly deep capabilities of secret operations.
API gives you maxium flexibility with what you want to do with your application secrets – even though it is the right choice for only very few teams.
Compliance
Git-style Activity Logs
Available – docs here.
Available in a very granular way.
Activity/audit logs let you establish the highest level of compliance across you organization. They're especially important in the secret management domain given how sensitive application secrets are.
Access Controls
Infisical lets you set up access controls for every user and environment. You can specify if developers are able to access certain secrets, edit them, or only add the news ones to a particular environment – docs here.
Available in a very granular way.
Access controls are paramount for ensuring compliance and security as your organization starts growing. They are also incredibly useful for preventing accidental errors in adding/editing/deleting secrets.
Secret Rotation
Available. Allows for both automatic rotation and [dynamic secrets](https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/dynamic-secrets/overview) generation – docs here.
Available, but requires a lot of setup work through Cloud Functions. No dynamically generated secrets.
Access controls are paramount for ensuring compliance and security as your organization starts growing. They are also incredibly useful for preventing accidental errors in adding/editing/deleting secrets.
Manage your developer secrets with Infisical
Whether you're a single developer, medium-sized team, or a large enterprise, any of the options could work for you. Contact us if you have any questions.
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