CipherTrust Secrets Management vs Secrets Manager

CipherTrust Secrets Management, powered by Akeyless Vault, centralizes secrets, credentials, certificates, API keys, and tokens for DevOps tools and cloud workloads. It can create, store, rotate, and remove these items, with use cases including automated credential rotation, secrets sharing, just-in-time secret generation, and audit logs of secret use. Thales describes support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, multiple tenants, on-premises systems, and legacy systems. Named integrations include GitHub, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. The product supports dynamic secrets, CI/CD injection, secret rotation, Kubernetes integration, and audit logs. Authentication standards listed are FIDO2.1, U2F, and WebAuthn, with NFC support; biometric unlock is not supported. CSM is available through self-hosted and web access, with a cloud deployment model also listed. It can run independently or alongside CipherTrust Manager, but needs a separate license. Pricing is on request, and a 90-day free trial is available.

Secrets Manager is a free, open-source, self-hosted system for storing application secrets in encrypted form, managing them through a web interface, and injecting them into processes with a command-line tool. Users organize secrets by organization, project, and environment, import.env files, edit or reveal values, keep versions, roll back, and soft-delete entries. The `secrets run` command supplies environment secrets to a child process and its descendants without creating a.env file. Documented workflows cover Node.js, Python, npm, and Next.js; CI or deployment can use an API URL, token, and environment ID. User and service-account grants can be scoped to projects or environments, and revealing values requires explicit permission. AES-256-GCM envelope encryption uses a separate data key per value, while plaintext values are not stored in the database. Audit events include secret reveals, and values are withheld if audit writing fails. Docker Compose starts PostgreSQL, Redis, backend, and frontend; local Kubernetes manifests are also provided. A user-generated master key is mandatory and lost keys make secrets unrecoverable. The repository is MIT licensed.