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Secrets managers in 2026

4 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. 30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. SOPS leads with 24k stars, ahead of OpenBao. 27 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (12), Apache-2.0 (10) and AGPL-3.0 (3).

Commercial secrets managers

  1. 1
    HashiCorp Vault Enterprise HashiCorp

    Building block Production-ready A large organisation needs central secrets management across many teams and clouds, with compliance features.

    Commercial
  2. 2
    AWS Secrets Manager Amazon Web Services

    AWS Secrets Manager allows you to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets through their lifecycle.

    Building block Production-ready Your workloads run on AWS and you want secrets managed with IAM rather than another vendor.

    Commercial
  3. 3
    1Password Secrets Automation AgileBits

    Securely store, manage, automate, and share secrets for your applications and infrastructure where and when you need them. 1Password secrets management has you covered.

    Developer tool Production-ready Your company already uses 1Password and wants infrastructure secrets in the same place as staff passwords.

    Commercial
  4. 4
    Doppler Doppler

    Doppler's secrets management platform helps teams secure, sync, and automate secrets across cloud and on-prem environments with security and developer-friendly workflows.

    Developer tool Production-ready A development team wants to stop passing .env files around and sync secrets to many platforms easily.

    Commercial

New open-source projects

  1. 1
    Keypaste notinferred

    A KeePass-compatible password and secrets manager for people who work with AI agents.

    Complete system Experimental You use AI coding agents and want them to use API keys only with your approval.

    ★ 752 AGPL-3.0 C# Active, pushed yesterday

Open-source secrets managers

Complete systems you can adopt 2

  1. 1
    OpenBao openbao

    OpenBao is a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and keys.

    Complete system Production-ready You need Vault-style secrets management but want to avoid HashiCorp's BSL license.

    ★ 8.8k MPL-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
  2. 2
    FreeIPA freeipa

    Mirror of FreeIPA, an integrated security information management solution

    Complete system Production-ready You manage many Linux servers and need centralised logins, sudo rules and certificates, often alongside Active Directory.

    ★ 1.3k GPL-3.0 Python Active, pushed today

Developer tools 7

  1. 1
    SOPS getsops

    Simple and flexible tool for managing secrets

    Developer tool Production-ready You keep infrastructure config in Git and want secrets encrypted alongside it, often with Flux or Helm.

    ★ 24k MPL-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
  2. 2
    Dotenvx dotenvx

    a secure dotenv—from the creator of `dotenv`

    Developer tool Production-ready Your team shares .env files and wants them encrypted in the repo without adopting a secrets server.

    ★ 5.9k BSD-3-Clause JavaScript Active, pushed 3 days ago
  3. 3
    Git-secret sobolevn

    :busts_in_silhouette: A bash-tool to store your private data inside a git repository.

    Developer tool Usable A small team wants a few secret files in Git and already uses GPG.

    ★ 4.1k MIT Shell Active, pushed 35 days ago
  4. 4
    Secretspec cachix

    A declarative interface for every secret provider.

    Developer tool Experimental You want one declaration of required secrets that works across developer machines and CI with different backends.

    ★ 1.6k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today
  5. 5
    Pwd.sh drduh

    Manage secrets with Bash and GnuPG symmetric encryption

    Developer tool Usable You want a tiny, auditable shell-based secret store that can be decrypted with plain GnuPG.

    ★ 1.6k MIT Shell Active, pushed 15 days ago
  6. 6
    Berglas GoogleCloudPlatform

    A tool for managing secrets on Google Cloud

    Developer tool Production-ready You run workloads on Google Cloud and want a simple way to load secrets into Cloud Run or GKE apps.

    ★ 1.3k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed 12 days ago
  7. 7
    Kingfisher mongodb

    Detect secrets + live validation. Map blast radius. Revoke fast. Use the CLI or embed in Rust and Python.

    Developer tool Usable You want fast secret scanning with live validation in pre-commit hooks or CI.

    ★ 1.3k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed 4 days ago

Lists, courses and other material 1

  1. 1
    WrongSecrets OWASP

    Vulnerable app with examples showing how to not use secrets

    List, course or other material Production-ready You run security training or want developers to learn secrets-management mistakes hands-on.

    ★ 1.5k AGPL-3.0 HTML Active, pushed today

All 30 open-source secrets management projects

Compared head to head

Looking for an alternative to

Open-source licenses

  • Permissive: 23. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
  • Network copyleft: 3. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
  • Weak copyleft: 2. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
  • Strong copyleft: 2. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.

Languages

Go 10, Shell 5, Rust 3, Python 3, TypeScript 3, JavaScript 2, HTML 1, C# 1, C 1 and Java 1.

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