Infisical vs Hashicorp Vault

Vault has shined the light on Secrets Management. Infisical makes it accessible to every developer.

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"I think if I was Hashicorp Vault team's PM, I'd be worried. Your team has done such a great job at U.X. 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, Founder/CTO at Teleport
Alexander Klizhentas, CTO & Co-founder at Teleport
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Securing the future of AI with Infisical
"Infisical provided all the functionality and security settings we needed to boost our security posture and save engineering time. Whether you're working locally, running kubernetes clusters in production, or operating secrets within CI/CD pipelines, Infisical has a seamless prebuilt workflow."Adrien Carreira, Head of Infrastructure, Hugging Face
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Meet the contenders
Infisical Logo Meet Infisical Infisical is the leading open source secret management platform that is designed to securely store secrets, orchestrate them across your full development lifecycle, manage certificate lifecycle, monitor secret leaks, and more.
HashiCorp Logo Meet Hashicorp Vault Hashicorp Vault is a source-available tool designed to manage and secure sensitive data in modern computing environments. It provides a secure storage system for API keys, passwords, certificates, encryption keys, and other sensitive data.
Infisical vs Hashicorp Vault: Comparison
Infisical LogoInfisical
Infisical LogoHashiCorp
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 tens of thousands of developers – link to GitHub repository.
No. On August 10th, 2023, HashiCorp announced that they are switching their license to BSL, which is not an open source license.
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.
Hosting Options
Offers a hosted cloud product – signup here.
Self-hostable on your own infrastructure – read instructions.
Offers a hosted cloud product.
Self-hostable on your own infrastructure.
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 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 – read security brief.
Vault uses a security barrier which automatically encrypts all data leaving Vault using a 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher in the Galois Counter Mode (GCM) with 96-bit nonces.
Encrypted Storage is important to make sure that your data stays safe and compliant.
Secret Operations
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 Hashicorp Vault, 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 Hashicorp Vault, 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 and Importing
Infisical lets developers reference secrets within the projects – across environments and folders – read documentation.
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 – read documentation.
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 users organize secrets into folders to create any structure necessary.
Path-based secrets are default in Vault, 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.
Available.
Whenever someone makes a mistake in adding/editing/deleting a secret (or one simply needs to rollback a deployment), this becomes very handy.
Secret Management
Command Line Interface
Infisical offers a fully language- and platform-agnostic CLI. It allows to automatically inject application secrets as environment variables, modify secrets, and more – read documentation.
Vault has a CLI, but it does not have certain functionalities such as injecting secrets as environment variables, etc.
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 official SDKs for Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, C#, and more are under active development – read documentation.
Official SDK is available for GO. Other SDKs are only community-managed.
SDKs tend to be a more reliable way of accessing secrets in certain environments – 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 read documentation.
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 operations – read documentation.
Universal API with very granular capabilities of secret operations.
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
Available – read documentation.
Available.
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.
Kubernetes Operator
Available – read documentation.
Available.
Secrets Operator is a Kubernetes controller that retrieves secrets from Infisical and stores them in a designated cluster. It uses an InfisicalSecret resource to specify authentication and storage methods. The operator continuously updates secrets and can also reload dependent deployments automatically.
Native Authentication Methods
Support many native authentication methods including Azure, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, and more.
Available for a wide range or services – including AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, Oracle, and more.
Native Authentication Methods allow organization to solve secret zero problem and go fully multi-cloud.
Webhooks
Vault supports webhooks for Kubernetes.
Webhooks can be used to trigger changes to your integrations when secrets are modified, providing smooth integration with other third-party applications.
Other
Secret Sharing
Available. Read documentation.
Not available.
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.
Certificate Lifecycle Management (PKI)
Infisical can be used to create a Private Certificate Authority (CA) hierarchy, issue X.509 certificates for internal use, and more. Documentation available here.
HashiCorp Vault's PKI secrets engine generates dynamic X.509 certificates and provides granular capabilities for managing certificates and certificate authorities throughout their lifecycle.
In order to fight secret sprawl and fully centralize secrets management, it is important for a secrets management solution to manage certificate lifecycle.
Encryption as a service
Not available. Coming soon. Reach out to [email protected] for timeline.
Available. The transit secrets engine primary use case is to encrypt data. This relieves the burden of data encryption and decryption from the application developers and moves the burden to Vault.
Encryption as a service can be helpful for organizations who process a lot of sensitive data (e.g., finance, healthcare).
Compliance
Audit Logs
Available – read documentation.
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.
Role-based 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 – read documentation.
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.
Access Requests
Infisical lets developers request (temporary or permanent) access to sensitive secrets and environments – read documentation.
Not available.
Access requests enable developers to move faster. Automatic access revocation using the temporary access functionality ensures the higher levels of compliance.
Approval Workflows
Infisical lets organization set up secret change policies for highly sensitive environments – read documentation.
Not available.
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.
Secret Rotation and Dynamic Secrets
Available. Allows for both automatic rotation and dynamic secrets generation – read documentation.
Available with a wide variety of templates.
Secret rotation allows your team save a lot of time and reduce risks of rotating secrets manually. Secret rotation becomes fully automated which dramatically improves your security posture.
Is Infisical right for you?Here's our (short) sales pitch.We're biased (obviously), but we think Infisical is a tool better than HashiCorp Vault if: You are looking for a developer-focused solution that will last you many years ahead. With Infisical, you get much more than just a secure key-value storage (e.g., secret scanning, certificate management, secret sharing, and more). You value transparency. We're open source and open core under the MIT license. You want to try before you buy. Infisical is self-serve with a generous free tier. Check out our product page and read our documentation to learn more.If you have any questions or want to schedule a product demo, you can talk to one of our experts.
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