September 9, 2026
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- AWS Secrets Manager is a managed service with almost no operational burden, billed at $0.40 per secret each month, which makes cost rise with secret count.
- HashiCorp Vault is cloud-agnostic and generates dynamic, short-lived credentials, and its Community edition is free to license but not free to run.
- The break-even sits higher than most teams assume: at $0.40 per secret, AWS has to reach several thousand secrets before it costs what a fraction of an engineer costs to run Vault.
- Vault’s direction now sits with IBM, which acquired HashiCorp in February 2025; Vault 2.0 moved to IBM’s versioning model, and HCP Vault Secrets reached end of life on July 1, 2026.
- If you want dynamic secrets across clouds without a cluster or a per-secret bill, the answer is not either of these two.
QUICK ANSWER: AWS SECRETS MANAGER VS HASHICORP VAULT
AWS Secrets Manager is Amazon’s managed service for storing and rotating secrets inside AWS, encrypted with KMS and access-controlled through IAM. HashiCorp Vault is a cloud-agnostic secrets platform, now owned by IBM, that issues dynamic credentials with leases and runs wherever you deploy it. The tradeoff in a sentence: a cloud-native service buys tight integration within one platform at the cost of cross-provider portability.
- Choose AWS Secrets Manager for workloads concentrated in AWS that want native IAM and nothing to maintain.
- Choose Vault for multi-cloud or hybrid estates that need dynamic short-lived credentials, if you can staff it.
- Neither fits if you want dynamic secrets across clouds without running infrastructure or paying per stored secret.
What Is the Difference Between AWS Secrets Manager Quick Facts
| Question | Short Answer |
|---|---|
| Who owns each? | Secrets Manager: AWS. Vault: IBM, which completed its $6.4B HashiCorp acquisition in February 2025 |
| Is Vault open source? | Source-available under the Business Source License since 2023; OpenBao is the community fork |
| Which does dynamic secrets? | Vault. Secrets Manager stores static secrets and rotates them on a schedule via Lambda |
| Which works across clouds? | Vault by design. Secrets Manager can reach outside AWS through IAM Roles Anywhere, but it is not a multi-cloud control plane |
| How do they bill? | Secrets Manager: $0.40 per secret each month plus $0.05 per 10,000 API calls. Vault: free Community plus infrastructure and staff, or Enterprise and HCP via sales |
| Which is easier to run? | Secrets Manager, decisively. G2 reviewers rate it easier to set up and administer |
| What changed recently? | Vault 2.0 shipped April 13, 2026 under IBM’s versioning model; HCP Vault Secrets reached end of life July 1, 2026 |
and HashiCorp Vault?
Both store secrets, encrypt them, control who reads them, and log the result. The similarity stops at the architecture, and the architecture decides everything else.
AWS Secrets Manager is a service you consume. Amazon runs it, scales it, and keeps it available. Secrets are encrypted with KMS, access is governed by IAM policies, and an AWS workload authenticates using the role it already has, so there is no bootstrap credential to protect. Rotation is built in for RDS, Redshift, and DocumentDB, and anything else rotates through a Lambda function you write. There is no cluster, no storage backend, and nothing to upgrade.
HashiCorp Vault is a system you operate. You choose a storage backend, run a highly available cluster, solve unsealing, and own upgrades and capacity. What you get for that work is reach and capability. Vault authenticates workloads through a long list of methods, runs on any cloud or on-prem, does encryption as a service through its transit engine, issues certificates through its PKI engine, and generates dynamic secrets that expire on their own.
So the question is not which tool is better. It is which bill you would rather pay, because each sends a different one.
Architecture: A Service You Consume Versus a System You Run
A detail worth clearing up: this is not AWS versus not-AWS. Plenty of teams run Vault on AWS, using EC2 or EKS for compute and AWS KMS for auto-unseal, which means the comparison is often a managed AWS service against a self-run platform sitting on AWS infrastructure. The two can even work together, since Vault can sync secrets into Secrets Manager for hybrid setups.
Secrets Manager’s model is a regional managed service, and its identity story is the strongest thing about it. An EC2 instance, a Lambda function, or a pod using IRSA authenticates with an IAM role that AWS already trusts. Vault has to solve that same bootstrap problem itself, which is the classic secret zero question. Its AWS auth method handles it well by validating IAM identity, but it is a thing you configure rather than a thing you get. Vault also has to be unsealed, whether through cloud KMS auto-unseal or Shamir key shares held by multiple people, and that ceremony has no equivalent on the managed side.
Does AWS Secrets Manager Do Dynamic Secrets?
No, and this is the functional gap that settles more evaluations than any other.
Secrets Manager rotates. You store a database password, and on a schedule a Lambda function changes it at the source and updates the stored value. That shortens the life of a credential from forever to thirty or ninety days, which is a real improvement over a password in a config file. Between rotations, though, it is still a static credential, and anything that reads it holds a working password until the next cycle.
Vault generates. A workload asks for database access, Vault mints a credential scoped to that request with a lease and a time to live, hands it over, and revokes it when the lease expires. A credential that exists for one hour and then stops working is a smaller problem than one that exists for ninety days and might be sitting in a log. That capability, more than multi-cloud reach, is why teams take on the burden of running Vault.
The fair counterpoint: if your systems need a static password that a legacy service expects to stay the same, dynamic secrets are a feature you will not use, and AWS’s rotation plus IAM is likely enough. Rotation for anything outside the supported AWS databases means writing and maintaining your own Lambda, which is where teams often find the managed simplicity starts to leak.
Which One Handles Multi-Cloud Better?
Vault, and this is the reason most teams reach for it. It is cloud-agnostic by design, authenticates workloads across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and on-prem through native auth methods, and applies one policy model to all of them. Vault 2.0 pushed further with Workload Identity Federation, which lets Vault authenticate to the major clouds using OIDC tokens instead of long-lived static credentials when syncing secrets.
Secrets Manager deserves more credit here than it usually gets. IAM Roles Anywhere lets workloads outside AWS authenticate with X.509 certificates and assume IAM roles, so the service is not strictly locked to instances running in AWS. What it is not is a control plane for Azure or GCP resources. If your estate is AWS and intends to stay that way, none of this costs you anything. When a second cloud arrives, you are either running a native store in each one, which is how secret sprawl starts, or adding a platform that spans them.
How Does the Pricing Compare?
The two models barely resemble each other, which is why the comparison goes wrong so often.
Secrets Manager charges $0.40 per secret each month, prorated hourly, plus $0.05 per 10,000 API calls. Nothing is hidden and nothing is negotiated. The total tracks secret count in a straight line, and replication multiplies it, because every regional copy is charged as a separate secret. Replicate one credential into two more regions and you are paying for three. There is no permanent free tier, though accounts created after July 15, 2025 receive up to $200 in general AWS credits. Rotation is bundled into that per-secret price; the only additional cost is running the rotation function itself. Our separate guide to AWS Secrets Manager cost digs into how that bill behaves across environments and regions; the question here is how it compares with running Vault.
Vault’s Community edition costs nothing to license, and that is where the simple story ends. You pay for servers, storage, load balancers, monitoring, and the engineers who keep it healthy. Vault Enterprise and HCP Vault Dedicated are quoted through sales rather than published. HashiCorp also discontinued HCP Vault Secrets, its lighter managed tier, with end of sale in June 2025 and end of life on July 1, 2026, pointing users toward HCP Vault Dedicated or the Community edition, so teams that took the inexpensive managed on-ramp have spent the past year migrating off it.
Where Does Vault Become Cheaper Than AWS Secrets Manager?
This is the calculation worth running before an architecture decision hardens, and the result surprises people, because the intuition runs backward. The instinct says AWS charges per secret and Vault is free, so Vault must be cheaper as usage grows. The instinct is right about the shape of the curves and wrong about where they cross.
AWS is a straight line. At $0.40 per secret each month, a secret costs $4.80 a year. One thousand secrets is roughly $4,800 a year before API calls. AWS’s own published example puts about 10,000 secrets in steady state at more than $4,000 a month, which is around $48,000 a year.
Vault is close to flat, and almost none of it is the license. A modest cluster is a small line item. The engineering time is not. Independent analysis of Vault’s real costs puts even a conservative estimate at 10% to 20% of one senior engineer’s time, which is $15,000 to $40,000 a year fully loaded, before any Enterprise licensing. Worked estimates that include a quarter of an engineer’s time land a self-hosted Vault around $40,000 a year at 1,000 secrets, most of it people.
Set those against each other and the crossover falls somewhere between roughly 3,000 and 8,000 secrets, depending on how much of an engineer Vault really consumes in your environment. Below that line, the managed service is cheaper than the labor alone. Above it, the per-secret bill starts to rival a platform engineer’s salary, which is the point at which the conversation usually starts.
| WHAT THE MATH IS REALLY TELLING YOU At a few thousand secrets you are choosing between a bill from AWS and a bill from your own payroll, and both of them scale in the wrong direction. AWS grows with every secret you store. Vault grows with every hour someone spends keeping it alive. Teams that notice this usually stop asking which of the two is cheaper and start asking why they are paying either. |
Two caveats matter here. Vault’s cost buys capability, not just storage: dynamic secrets, encryption as a service, PKI for a large certificate footprint, and the namespaces and audit posture regulated industries need. If you use those, the comparison is not like for like and Vault can be worth every hour. And AWS’s number climbs faster than the secret count suggests once replicas and environments multiply, so run the math on your real estate rather than a tidy number.
AWS Secrets Manager vs HashiCorp Vault: Full Comparison
| Dimension | AWS Secrets Manager | HashiCorp Vault |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Managed AWS service, nothing to run | Self-hosted cluster, or HCP Vault Dedicated |
| Ownership | Amazon Web Services | IBM, since February 2025 |
| Licensing | Proprietary managed service | Business Source License since 2023; OpenBao is the fork |
| Multi-cloud | AWS-centric; IAM Roles Anywhere extends reach | Cloud-agnostic by design |
| Dynamic secrets | No; static secrets with scheduled rotation | Yes, the most mature implementation available |
| Rotation | Built in for RDS, Redshift, DocumentDB; Lambda for the rest | Leases and TTLs, with automatic revocation |
| Encryption as a service | KMS handles encryption of stored secrets | Transit secrets engine |
| Certificates and PKI | Via ACM, a separate service | PKI secrets engine, updated in 2.0 |
| Authentication | IAM roles, IRSA for Kubernetes pods | Many methods: cloud IAM, Kubernetes, OIDC, AppRole |
| Secret zero | Solved by IAM for AWS workloads | Configured through auth methods; unsealing to manage |
| Pricing | $0.40 per secret each month plus API calls | Free Community plus infrastructure and staff; Enterprise via sales |
| Operational burden | Effectively none | High unless you buy the managed tier |
| Best for | AWS-native workloads, minimal overhead | Multi-cloud or hybrid estates that need dynamic secrets |
What Changed for Vault Under IBM?
IBM completed its acquisition of HashiCorp in February 2025 for about $6.4 billion, and the results are now in the product rather than in speculation. Vault 2.0, released April 13, 2026, is the first major version change since 1.0 landed in 2018, and the jump from 1.21 straight to 2.0 exists to align with IBM’s versioning. The platform now follows IBM’s support policy, which guarantees at least two years of standard support for major releases. HashiCorp also discontinued the Starter tier and sunset HCP Vault Secrets.
The release has substance. Workload Identity Federation takes static credentials out of secret syncing, SCIM 2.0 provisioning arrived in beta, the storage engine got faster under high-volume load, and the PKI engine picked up better certificate lifecycle automation. Nobody is letting this product rot.
The concern to weigh is direction. Vault’s roadmap now serves IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy, with Red Hat OpenShift, Ansible, and Guardium as the natural integration targets. If you live in that ecosystem, that is a benefit. If you adopted Vault as a neutral, cloud-agnostic tool, the questions to ask at renewal are the ordinary post-acquisition ones about pricing, support responsiveness, and whose priorities shape the roadmap. The 2023 license change from MPL to the Business Source License, which produced the OpenBao fork, belongs to the same conversation for teams that need license neutrality. Akeyless published its own read on what the IBM acquisition means for secrets management for the longer version.
Choosing Between AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault
Reduced to the decision teams really make:
| Your Situation | Reach For |
|---|---|
| All-in on AWS, want minimal maintenance | AWS Secrets Manager |
| AWS-native, mostly RDS credentials, modest secret count | AWS Secrets Manager |
| Multi-cloud or hybrid, need dynamic secrets, can staff it | HashiCorp Vault (or HCP Vault Dedicated) |
| Need encryption as a service or PKI for a large certificate footprint | HashiCorp Vault |
| Want to avoid BSL licensing | OpenBao, or a managed platform |
| Dynamic secrets and multi-cloud, no engineer to spare | A managed, SaaS-delivered platform such as Akeyless |
| Already run both and cannot consolidate yet | Govern them centrally rather than migrating |
Most teams land in the first or third row. The last two are the rows a comparison page rarely includes, and they describe where a growing number of estates now sit.
The Third Option: Dynamic Secrets Without the Cluster or the Per-Secret Bill
Look again at what each tool asks you to accept. AWS gives you a service that never asks for maintenance and charges you for every secret you keep, inside one cloud. Vault gives you every cloud and credentials that expire on their own, and asks for engineers. Both are defensible. Neither gives a cloud-first team what it wants, which is Vault’s capability on AWS’s operational profile.
That is the space Akeyless occupies. It is SaaS-delivered, so there is no cluster, no storage backend, no unsealing, and no upgrade weekend, and it brokers short-lived credentials across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem from one control plane. It fills the gap a hosted, cloud-first team without the appetite to run infrastructure is left with once Vault’s operational cost enters the conversation.
Two things separate it from both. The first is the trust model, and it matters more here than the feature list. Choosing HCP Vault to escape the cluster means your secrets live in HashiCorp’s own AWS environment, which raises the data sovereignty questions that regulated industries have to answer. Akeyless is managed too, but Distributed Fragments Cryptography keeps key material split so it is never assembled anywhere, including on the vendor’s side, so you offload the operations without handing over the trust. The second is that adopting it is not a bet against what you already run: through the Universal Secrets Connector, Akeyless can govern existing AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault stores with consistent rotation, access control, and audit, without migrating a secret.
How Akeyless Approaches the Tradeoff
The Challenge
A team weighing these two is picking which problem to own. Stay native and watch the per-secret line grow while the estate stays inside one cloud, or take on Vault and staff it. Teams that choose often end up with both anyway, because different groups solve it differently, and then nobody can answer a simple audit question across the whole estate.
The Approach
Akeyless delivers ephemeral credentials, certificate lifecycle management, key management, and privileged access as managed, SaaS-delivered infrastructure under one policy model. Workloads authenticate with the identity they already carry, whether that is an AWS IAM role, a Kubernetes service account, or a certificate, and receive just-in-time credentials scoped to the task at hand. Existing AWS, Azure, GCP, and HashiCorp Vault stores come under unified visibility through Multi-Vault Governance rather than a migration project, and the whole thing runs on a zero-knowledge foundation with post-quantum-ready cryptography.
The Outcome
Teams get the short-lived, identity-based access that made Vault worth the trouble, without the cluster that made it expensive, and across every cloud rather than one. Customers report lower total cost of ownership and faster deployment than self-hosted alternatives, plus a single audit trail spanning environments. The Akeyless vs. HashiCorp Vault and Akeyless vs. AWS Secrets Manager breakdowns go deeper on each head-to-head.
What This Looks Like for Real Teams
Wix moved from a network-based model to identity-based access and found the platform straightforward to operate as it grew.
| “Akeyless revolutionized our approach to security, shifting our paradigm from trusted networks to zero-trust access. The simplicity of Akeyless has enhanced our operations and given us the confidence to move forward securely.”Shai Ganny, SecOps Team Lead, Wix |
The Bottom Line
Both tools are good at the job they were built for. If your workloads live in AWS, your secret count is measured in hundreds, and IAM already handles your access control, Secrets Manager is the right answer and the rest of this is academic. If you run several clouds and need credentials that expire on their own, Vault has earned its standing, and Vault 2.0 shows it is still moving under IBM.
What changes the decision is the math. Run it on your own estate before you commit, because the two bills grow in different directions and neither one rewards you for growing. If the answer comes back as a choice between paying AWS for every secret you keep and paying an engineer to keep Vault alive, that is worth pausing on. It usually means the real choice is not between these two.
FAQs About AWS Secrets Manager vs HashiCorp Vault
Is HashiCorp Vault Better Than AWS Secrets Manager?
Neither is better in the abstract. Vault does more: dynamic secrets, multi-cloud reach, encryption as a service, and PKI. Secrets Manager does less but asks nothing of you operationally and uses IAM that AWS workloads already have. G2 reviewers rate Secrets Manager easier to set up and administer, which matches the architectures. AWS-only with modest needs favors Secrets Manager; multi-cloud with dynamic-secret requirements favors Vault, if you can staff it.
Is HashiCorp Vault Cheaper Than AWS Secrets Manager?
Usually not at small and mid scale, which is the opposite of what teams expect. Vault’s license is free, but running it costs infrastructure plus a meaningful share of an engineer, commonly estimated at 10% to 20% of a senior engineer’s time, or $15,000 to $40,000 a year. At $0.40 per secret each month, Secrets Manager has to reach several thousand secrets before it matches that. The crossover typically lands somewhere between roughly 3,000 and 8,000 secrets.
Does AWS Secrets Manager Support Dynamic Secrets?
No. It stores static secrets and rotates them on a schedule, natively for RDS, Redshift, and DocumentDB, and through your own Lambda function for anything else. Generating a credential on demand, scoped to the caller, with a lease that expires, is a Vault capability. Akeyless also provides it, delivered as SaaS.
Can AWS Secrets Manager Work Outside AWS?
Partly. IAM Roles Anywhere lets workloads outside AWS authenticate with X.509 certificates and assume IAM roles, so non-AWS applications can reach it. What it does not do is govern Azure or GCP resources, so it is not a multi-cloud control plane. Multi-cloud teams usually add a platform such as HashiCorp Vault or Akeyless that spans every environment.
What Happened to HCP Vault Secrets?
HashiCorp discontinued it. End of sale was June 30, 2025, and end of life followed on July 1, 2026, with users directed to HCP Vault Dedicated or the Community edition. Teams that adopted it as a low-cost managed on-ramp have had to migrate, which is a useful precedent when betting on any single managed tier.
Can You Use AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault Together?
Yes, and plenty of teams do. Vault can sync secrets into Secrets Manager for hybrid setups, and it is common to see native AWS storage alongside a Vault deployment serving other clouds. The cost of that arrangement is two policy models and two audit trails, which is why some teams put a governance layer over both rather than picking a winner.
