When comparing StackExchange Blackbox vs Ansible Vault, the Slant community recommends Ansible Vault for most people. In the question“What are the best shared secret managers?” Ansible Vault is ranked 1st while StackExchange Blackbox is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Ansible Vault is:
The official documentation of Ansible vault does a great job at explaining how Ansible Vault works and how to use the easy UI for encrypting, decrypting, and re-keying your secrets for storing in source control.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easily share secrets with other team members
Since the secrets file is stored in the remote VCS server, anyone that has access to it (team members) also have access to the secrets file.
Pro Free and open source
StackExchange Blackbox is free and open source. It's released under the MIT license and its source code is freely available on GitHub.
Pro Uses a VCS repo to store the secrets
SE Blackbox works with Git, Mercurial, Subversion and Perforce to store encrypted secrets file in a repository. Files are automatically encrypted and decrypted using GNU Privacy Guard.
Pro The documentation does a good job on explaining how to use it
The official documentation of Ansible vault does a great job at explaining how Ansible Vault works and how to use the easy UI for encrypting, decrypting, and re-keying your secrets for storing in source control.
Pro Allows keeping encrypted data in ansible playbooks easily
Ansible uses configuration files called playbooks which are used to describe a policy that the remote system needs to follow. Though there is often a need to keep data from these configurations files encrypted when using source control.
Doing this in Ansible's Vault is pretty easy, simply running: ansible-playbook site.yml --ask-vault-pass
will run a playbook which uses encrypted data.
Cons
Con No way of exposing just the key in the key-value pair
Ansible vault files are encrypted YAML key-value stores. The entire file is encrypted, and so it's impossible to indicate which keys are defined within the vault without also viewing values.