Infisical vs Hashicorp Vault

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.

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 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.

Being able to easily see this, allows developers to spot bugs in seconds as well as makes programs more reliable.

Secret referencing helps establish the single source of truth and minimize bugs related to updating values in different places.

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 even though it requires more work – which often makes it a preferred choice for larger teams.

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 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.

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

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 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 enable developers to move faster. Automatic access revocation using the temporary access functionality ensures the higher levels of compliance.

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.