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AWS Secrets Manager vs BeyondTrust Password Safe comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

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

AWS Secrets Manager
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
BeyondTrust Password Safe
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Enterprise Password Managers category, the mindshare of AWS Secrets Manager is 18.0%, down from 21.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BeyondTrust Password Safe is 3.4%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Password Managers
 

Featured Reviews

Atul-Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensures dynamic secret retrieval and automates security measures
AWS Secrets Manager is a fully managed service that allows our applications to retrieve secrets dynamically at runtime. This protects sensitive information, such as keys or credentials, from being compromised. It also automates the secrets, eliminating the need for manual rotation, thereby providing significant security and efficiency benefits. Furthermore, secrets are encrypted at rest using the AES 256-bit standard encryption algorithm.
Ali Hatamleh - PeerSpot reviewer
Smart tooling streamlines account organization and access through advanced grouping features
The features I find valuable in Password Safe include password retention and management, session privilege monitoring, live monitoring and recording, and the use of PS automation scripts for creating connections. The smart tooling and smart group features are also important as, after finalizing discovery, they auto-collect accounts in the environment and organize them in Smart Groups for easy access.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the management of credentials."
"All our workloads are running on AWS, so integration with our workload is much easier on AWS Secrets Manager than going with another solution such as Thycotic."
"The most valuable feature is security."
"Integrating with other services was straightforward, especially within the AWS environment."
"Secrets Manager helps in retrieving the enrollment variables used by the code."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Secrets Manager is its seamless integration with various AWS services."
"It's highly scalable, so I'd rate it a ten out of ten."
"The solution is very scalable."
"The actual innovations offered by the vendor stand out to me. They are quick to respond to market demands and the changing environment of privileged access management."
"Overall, I rate BeyondTrust Password Safe as nine out of ten."
"It simplifies your compliance and tracking to benchmark other credentials and analytics."
"BeyondTrust Password Safe has good reporting and Smart Rules which makes it convenient. Though Smart Rules are convenient, those who do not have much experience with such things may find it difficult to understand how these things work. Otherwise, I find Smart Rules very convenient to work with."
"The CI/CD and REST API are also satisfactory; the solution has a full PAM feature set and they all work well."
"BeyondTrust Password Safe is a good PAM tool."
"The product has improved security and login due to the system recordings. In case, there is a doubt that someone has done something which they shouldn't have been doing, we can just go back and check what the user actually did."
"Smart Rules is a nice feature in BeyondTrust. It is a unique feature that BeyondTrust has as compared to other vendors such as CyberArk. With Smart Rules, you can do automatic onboarding of accounts. There are a lot of options and features. For example, you can do onboarding based on different AD attributes. It is a nice feature in BeyondTrust that some of the other PAM vendors don't have. With other vendors, we have to create our own scripts, whereas, with BeyondTrust, we can just use the in-built Smart Rules."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement in AWS Secrets Manager could be expanding integration options beyond AWS services."
"The solution's initial setup process is complicated."
"There is a need for better environmental implementation, such as having a security fund as a solution."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integrating with certain other platforms."
"If you don't have enterprise support, then you will not be able to get through to them to get the help. It is not only applicable to AWS Secrets Manager. It is also applicable to any service on AWS."
"If you add one more layer of security to AWS Secrets Manager, even the programmer will not be able to see the secrets."
"We occasionally have problems with rate limits, although that is a problem more generally with AWS."
"AWS Secrets Manager could support hybrid infrastructure."
"It has crashed on us in the past."
"We'd like to have incremental backups to ensure the solution's information is protected regularly."
"Its documentation can be improved. Its documentation is currently complicated, and it is not good. It needs to be better. Their technical support can also be improved. It is not bad, but it can be better."
"We face screensaver timeout issues and problems with the server. I would like the product to include a server visibility feature."
"There are multiple features that have issues, although they could be specific to our environment. What we have seen is that whenever a user gets added to the authentication store, the sync between Password Safe and the authentication store, which is generally easy, takes a lot of time. It does not occur immediately."
"Documentation is the primary area of improvement."
"If there was one thing, it would be having the documentation standardized. They should keep the documentation consistent. For example, when BeyondTrust updated one of their admin guides, they left out the information on the discovery account requirements, and then over a period of time, we ended up having to search multiple different documents to put together a string of information for a specific topic, which was problematic. It was minor, but it was problematic. Standardized documentation would be the one thing I would suggest."
"The database instance onboarding should be simplified. The problem is that you can scan the assets and databases inside a server, but you cannot onboard them or manage them with the smart tools. It has to be done manually. I think they should try to include more custom platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is somewhat high."
"We purchase a monthly license for the product."
"We've observed that AWS Secrets Manager pricing is based on a per-secret-per-month model. As a result, we prefer to divide our secrets into individual pieces to increase security and grant specific access permissions to certain secrets, systems, or individuals. However, this approach results in higher costs. Therefore, we have been exploring ways to combine our secrets into groups to reduce expenses and simplify management. Nonetheless, we acknowledge that this issue may not be related to the secret manager's functionality."
"I don't believe there is a license cost for the solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"It has subscription-based licensing. BeyondTrust is three times less expensive than CyberArk."
"The pricing structure is better than the competitors. It's much cheaper than CyberArk. They do the licensing on the basis of assets, not on the number of users. For CyberArk, they base the licensing on the number of users, and they have an expensive model of pricing. BeyondTrust has a cheaper model."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"When you buy Password Safe and perform your initial Discovery, you have all these servers that are added to your assets in BeyondTrust, but you're not using a license until you actually start managing the systems. BeyondTrust's licensing is based on the systems when they're managed, which means when an administrator is able to connect to the server through BeyondTrust with a managed account. There would be a privileged account on the endpoint when the licensing starts. A significant advantage to that is that there are many organizations that want to evaluate their environment prior to automatic management."
"At the time, BeyondTrust was significantly cheaper than CyberArk. Pricing-wise, if I remember correctly, it goes by assets. The pricing was negotiated for our instances based on the number of assets that we onboard into the system. It is a little different from CyberArk, where the pricing is by users. So, it depends. If you have a lot of assets, it can get very expensive."
"The pricing of BeyondTrust is very good as compared to other products. That was the main reason we decided to go with BeyondTrust at first."
"This solution is not cheap—it's a very expensive solution. Very, very expensive compared to the features and functions that they offer."
"The product is quite affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Azure Key Vault or AWS Secrets Manager?
Azure Key Vault is a SaaS solution. You can easily store passwords and secrets securely and encrypt them. Azure Key Vault is a great solution to ensure you are compliant with security and governanc...
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 do you like most about AWS Secrets Manager?
The most valuable feature of AWS Secrets Manager is its seamless integration with various AWS services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
Pricing is managed by a different team, however, I know it's less expensive than CyberArk Privilege Access. BeyondTrust's pricing for the cloud platform is affordable.
What needs improvement with BeyondTrust Password Safe?
I believe one improvement could be having the last used passwords appear more automatically whenever I check for passwords associated with a frequently used system.
What is your primary use case for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
I find that BeyondTrust Password Safe is a very effective application for password management. I find it very easy to use and update.
 

Also Known As

No data available
BeyondTrust PowerBroker Password Safe
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Autodesk, Clevy, Stackery
Aera Energy LLC, Care New England, James Madison University
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Secrets Manager vs. BeyondTrust Password Safe and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.