Infisical vs Hashicorp Vault

Using open source security products is considered to be the best practice. Open codebases are reviewed by thousands of security practitioners for any kinds of vulnerabilities – something that is not possible when a product is closed-source. In addition, it gives you direct overview of and input into the product's roadmap.

Infisical can be self-hosted on any cloud or on your own infrastructure – 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 Storage is important to make sure that your data stays safe and compliant.

Proper structure allows developers to navigate and find right secrets easier and quicker.

Quick environment comparison accelerates debugging and enhances application reliability by preventing environment-specific issues.

Secret referencing helps establish the single source of truth while eliminating inconsistencies from manual secret duplication.

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)

As your product/project grows, this will be very important to allow for scaling.

It is useful to know how the value of a certain secret has been changing over time for debugging and compliance purposes.

Whenever someone makes a mistake in adding/editing/deleting a secret (or one simply needs to rollback a deployment), this becomes very handy.

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 tend to be a more reliable way of accessing secrets in certain environments – which often makes it a preferred choice for larger teams.

Automatic 3rd-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 services that your company is using.

API gives users maximum flexibility with what they want to do with your application secrets – even though it is the right choice for fewer teams.

Agent-based approach eliminates the need to modify application logic by enabling clients to decide how they want their secrets rendered through the use of templates.

Teams running Kubernetes often struggle with keeping secrets in sync between their secret manager and their clusters. The operator solves this by automating the synchronization both ways and managing secret lifecycles, saving DevOps teams hours of manual work.

Direct pod injection eliminates the need to store secrets as Kubernetes resources, reducing exposure and attack surface. Combined with service account authentication, this creates a more secure and maintainable secret delivery pipeline.

Native Authentication Methods allow organization to solve secret zero problem and go fully multi-cloud.

Webhooks can be used to trigger changes to your integrations when secrets are modified, providing smooth integration with other third-party applications.

SSH key management traditionally leads to security risks from permanent, untracked keys scattered across servers. Using short-lived certificates instead of static keys eliminates these risks and provides clear audit trails of who accessed what and when

Developers frequently need to share secrets with team members, contractors, or other third parties, which can be risky due to potential leaks or misuse. Infisical offers a secure solution for sharing secrets over the internet.

In order to fight secret sprawl and fully centralize secrets management, it is important for a secrets management solution to manage certificate lifecycle.

Centralizing encryption keys reduces security risks, enables automated rotation, and simplifies compliance tracking. Essential for teams handling sensitive data or meeting security standards.

Activity/audit logs let you establish the highest level of compliance across you organization. They're especially important in the secrets management domain given how sensitive application secrets are.

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.

Development teams often face a dilemma: wait for lengthy approval processes or compromise security with permanent access grants. Temporary access solves this - no more forgotten permissions or compliance headaches.

Approval workflows ensure the highest levels of compliance and reliability when performing secret changes. Similar to git PRs, every change of secrets in sensitive environments will have to be reviewed based on the predefined policies.