When comparing Amazon Key Management Service vs HashiCorp Vault, the Slant community recommends HashiCorp Vault for most people. In the question“What are the best shared secret managers?” HashiCorp Vault is ranked 3rd while Amazon Key Management Service is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose HashiCorp Vault is:
Hashicorp Vault is a free and open source tool. The source code is available on GitHub.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extremely secure
Amazon has used a lot of techniques to harden the process of storing and securing keys in its service. For example, keys are not stored on disk, nor are they allowed to persist in memory.
Amazon employees can not access a user's secret keys physically and the keys themselves are stored in the same geographical region as the application they belong to.
Pro Easy to use from a single dashboard
AWS Key Management Service offers a single unified dashboard that teams can use to manage and store their secrets used in applications hosted on AWS services. In the dashboard users can create keys, retrieve them and audit key usage through detailed information offered to them
Pro Free and open source
Hashicorp Vault is a free and open source tool. The source code is available on GitHub.
Cons
Con Does not generate certificates
KMS does not generate certificates, in order to generate them you have to roll out your own solution.