Keypaste vs OpenBao
Keypaste and OpenBao are both secrets management software. Keypaste is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 703 GitHub stars. OpenBao is open source under MPL-2.0, with 8.8k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Keypaste when
- You use AI coding agents and want them to use API keys only with your approval.
- Pick OpenBao when
- You need Vault-style secrets management but want to avoid HashiCorp's BSL license.
Side by side
A KeePass-compatible vault for logins and project environment variables that runs commands with secrets injected and asks you before an AI agent receives any secret.
A community fork of HashiCorp Vault under the Linux Foundation that stores and issues secrets, certificates and encryption keys with fine-grained access policies.
Two months old; only a CLI is published and the desktop app has no release yet.
Running a secrets server well (unsealing, HA, backups) takes real operational care.
Experimental
Production-ready
Command line and desktop app
Self-hosted server and command line
C#, .NET and MCP
Go and PostgreSQL
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Open source, MPL-2.0 (weak copyleft)
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
703 GitHub stars
8.8k GitHub stars
New: started 1 month ago, no tagged release yet.
Established: started 3 years ago, latest release v2.7.2.
Other comparisons
More secrets managers
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.