Doppler vs Secrets Manager

Doppler is a secrets manager for storing and managing sensitive application secrets through a dashboard, API, and command-line tool. It centralizes secret management with config syncs, secret referencing, and automatic rotation on eligible plans. Its MCP server lets AI agents request secrets natively, and Doppler says per-seat pricing adds no fees for AI agents or other non-human identities. Developers can use a CLI, SDKs, API, webhooks, and a VS Code extension with two-way sync. Listed integrations include AWS Secrets Manager, Terraform Cloud, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, GCP Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, Vercel, and Okta. Security controls include scoped tokens, fine-grained access, breach detection, encrypted fallback files, and trusted IP allow lists. Doppler says it encrypts and tokenizes secrets using AES-256-GCM and is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified. Deployment is available in the cloud or on-prem. The Developer plan is free for three users, with additional users at $8 a month. Team costs $21 per user per month and is free for 14 days. Enterprise pricing is custom.

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.