Shelve

Judgement

What it is

Complete system

What it does

A secrets and environment variable manager with a web app, CLI and GitHub sync, letting teams share .env values per project and environment.

Adopt it when

A small team wants a simple shared place for environment variables that it can self-host.

Watch out

Mostly one developer and a young project.

Ready for

Usable

Runs as

Self-hosted server, cloud service and command line

Built with

TypeScript, Vue and Nuxt

How established

Established: started 2 years ago, latest release @shelve/cli@5.3.0.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Shelve → TypeScript → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

Open-source alternatives to Shelve

1. 1
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2. 2
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3. 3
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4. 4
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5. 5
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6. 6
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7. 7
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8. 8
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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.

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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.

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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.

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