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Akeyless Secrets Management vs HashiCorp Vault comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akeyless Secrets Management
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
13th
Ranking in Secrets Management Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
AI Security (17th)
HashiCorp Vault
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
4th
Ranking in Secrets Management Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Enterprise Password Managers category, the mindshare of Akeyless Secrets Management is 1.6%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HashiCorp Vault is 4.6%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Password Managers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HashiCorp Vault4.6%
Akeyless Secrets Management1.6%
Other93.8%
Enterprise Password Managers
 

Featured Reviews

DeepakReddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr.Devops engineer at Scaler
Centralized secret management has improved multi-cloud security and automated key rotation
I sometimes feel that there are documentation gaps in Akeyless Secrets Management. The documentation could be more detailed for advanced integrations and troubleshooting. Some organizations feel that there is a trust concern because the secrets are stored in Akeyless Secrets Management and it is not open-sourced. It is completely closed-source. If something goes wrong or someone hacks Akeyless Secrets Management, there is a huge drawback. These are concerns my organization and many other organizations are facing. The UI/UX could be better on the homepage and many other pages. Pricing transparency should also be improved. The pricing should include discounted pricing for regular customers or regular enterprise customers.
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Centralized secret management has strengthened security and simplified compliance across cloud-native environments
Configuring HashiCorp Vault since we are mainly using it in Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters took some time and effort to align with our deployment. The initial setup can be a little confusing and complex for someone who is newer. However, it is not impossible to achieve, but it will take some time to understand the product. The ACLs within HashiCorp Vault, such as policies and AppRole authentication, were not intuitive at first. However, we slowly became habituated to the product once we began using it. Once we moved past the learning curve of these challenges, HashiCorp Vault becomes a critical security layer of our workloads. The only minor challenge is the initial setup complexity, especially for teams new to HashiCorp Vault's authentication methods and storage backends. Other than that, it works flawlessly.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Akeyless Secrets Management has positively impacted my organization as it helped store our secrets in a right way, in a proper controlled way where you can view, update, and at the same time, it helps in updating the passwords very effectively in the cloud running environment."
"Akeyless Secrets Management has positively impacted our organization because it has improved security through simpler credential rotation policies."
"Akeyless Secrets Management stands out because it combines SaaS simplicity with a Zero-Knowledge cryptographic design, reducing operational overhead without fully sacrificing control."
"I would recommend others to use Akeyless Secrets Management; it is a brilliant security platform, very easy to use, and does exactly what it says it should."
"Akeyless Secrets Management is a very good tool, and I have not used a better one than it."
"We were using it because we have compliance requirements around secret management. Having a secure vault and encrypting data was an additional requirement. When we looked at it first, we were just looking for a vault, like a lockbox. The greatest benefit of HashiCorp is its ability to manage encryption on the fly. It provides encryption of data at rest, in use, in transit, on the fly, and linked with applications, which was really attractive."
"Overall, HashiCorp Vault is a mature product offering enterprise-level security solutions."
"The solution is stable. It has been working perfectly without any problem."
"HashiCorp Vault has given strong value in terms of compliance, automation, and security hygiene—it eliminated hard-coded secrets in our code and pipelines, and it simplified secret rotation via automation, so we did not need manual credential updates."
"HashiCorp Vault has reduced the workload regarding rotating secrets and securely managing them."
"The benefits from HashiCorp Vault include significant advantages in security lifecycle management itself."
"HashiCorp Vault has positively impacted security governance that we have by greatly reducing the risk of a leak and then a bypass, but overall, it's increased the security of our organization."
"The most valuable feature of HashiCorp Vault is that it's an open source solution. Second, it's cloud agnostic, so it's very easy to maintain and control, which is why we prefer HashiCorp."
 

Cons

"Some organizations feel that there is a trust concern because the secrets are stored in Akeyless Secrets Management and it is not open-sourced."
"Akeyless Secrets Management could be improved in several areas. The initial setup was quite difficult for me."
"Akeyless Secrets Management platform could be improved with a more beginner-friendly interface."
"It would be helpful to have more advanced features."
"HashiCorp Vault can be improved more because it has provided only metadata and API paths."
"The product is complicated to install."
"We could use more documentation, primarily to do with integrations."
"I would rate the stability a six out of ten. There are some bugs and glitches. We are in touch with the vendor to resolve them."
"A drawback for some clients who have to be PCI compliant is that they still need to use and subscribe to an HSM (Hardware Security Module) solution."
"I would like to see better integration of HashiCorp Vault with SAP products."
"Setting up HashiCorp Vault can present operational challenges because deploying it involves complex initial setup, especially for a highly available cluster with integrated storage, auto-unseal, disaster recovery, and multi-authentication methods."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"I am using the open-source version of Vault and I would have to buy a license if I want to get support."
"The AWS version is much cheaper than HashiCorp Vault."
"The product is expensive."
"It could do everything we wanted it to do and it is brilliant, but it is super pricey. To be fair to HashiCorp, we drove the price up with our requirements around resiliency. Because of the nature of our company, we don't really operate in the cloud."
"In my case, the open-source version works well. It's advisable for small to medium-scale organizations, but for large-scale organizations, you should go with the enterprise version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
University
11%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Akeyless Secrets Management?
Akeyless Secrets Management could be improved in several areas. The initial setup was quite difficult for me. The documentation and tutorials must include end-to-end examples for Kubernetes and CI/...
What is your primary use case for Akeyless Secrets Management?
Akeyless Secrets Management is used to store secrets such as database credentials and TransUnion certificates for the production environment. For example, a team stores PostgreSQL usernames and pas...
What advice do you have for others considering Akeyless Secrets Management?
The advice that I would personally give regarding Akeyless Secrets Management is that before adopting any secrets management platform, you should define what your security and compliance requiremen...
Which is better - HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager?
HashiCorp Vault was designed with your needs in mind. One of the features that makes this evident is its ability to work as both a cloud-agnostic and a multi-cloud solution. As a cloud-agnostic sol...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HashiCorp Vault?
The pricing setup cost for HashiCorp Vault is quite expensive, especially if you consider it against native, cloud-native equivalent tooling. So within GCP, I'm thinking about Secret Manager, AWS S...
What needs improvement with HashiCorp Vault?
Setting up HashiCorp Vault can present operational challenges because deploying it involves complex initial setup, especially for a highly available cluster with integrated storage, auto-unseal, di...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cimpress
Adobe, SAP Ariba, Citadel, Spaceflight, Cruise
Find out what your peers are saying about Akeyless Secrets Management vs. HashiCorp Vault and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.