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AWS Secrets Manager vs BeyondTrust Password Safe comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Secrets Manager
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
BeyondTrust Password Safe
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Enterprise Password Managers category, the mindshare of AWS Secrets Manager is 19.4%, down from 20.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BeyondTrust Password Safe is 3.2%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Password Managers
 

Featured Reviews

ManuelTorres - PeerSpot reviewer
Simplifies and secures secret management within the AWS ecosystem, though it could enhance integration capabilities with external platforms
AWS Secrets Manager has streamlined our processes for managing secrets and their lifecycle. We typically handle everything through automation, following a predefined approach. When we undertake our developments, we seamlessly integrate the process into our workflows. Essentially, our secrets require minimal intervention; they are automatically managed by the system itself. This ensures smooth operations without the need for manual intervention. We integrate this tool with various AWS services, utilizing AWS Secrets Manager specifically for AWS resources. Any application, service, or deployment within AWS leverages Secrets Manager whenever it requires access to it.
Gary Jolley - PeerSpot reviewer
Their discovery engine is off the charts, and the ease of administration and implementation they talk about is for real
It starts with discovery. Its number one feature is discovery. The discovery engine in BeyondTrust is off the charts. When they perform a discovery, you know everything there is about a server, including what software is installed. For example, if you want to group all of your database servers together, you can do that by using discovery and Smart Rules. If a server has Microsoft SQL installed, it gets put into a group based on a Smart Rule. It makes it very easy to determine what is what in your environment. As organizations grow or acquire other companies and merge, they lose track of what they have. BeyondTrust can help you throw a rope around it very rapidly. Its user interface is really nice. It is very visual. When you first log in, based on your job role, you see what you have access to when you look at the screen. As an administrator, I see the configuration screen where I can go in and modify Active Directory and authentication connections. I can set up SAML, or I also have access to create Smart Rules. The access is based on the role that you have when you log in. I have six boxes or six categories of administration items, whereas when an admin user connects, he would only have one or two. So, based on your role, you see what you have access to. It is not like you click something and then it fails because you're not an administrator at that level. You actually see what you have access to, and BeyondTrust is very good at that. BeyondTrust provides the ability to connect by using not just the web interface but also the admin tools such as MobaXterm, PuTTY, or a lengthy list of other types of tools. You can use the connection string and connect through BeyondTrust, and it will be session recorded, keystroke logged, and highly available. When you bring up MobaXterm, you probably bring up one of the most complex ones because MobaXterm has the ability to have two, three, or four concurrent connections, which makes BeyondTrust Password Safe ideal. It is very easy to integrate session management into existing business processes. To make it easy for the engineers, we created templates of the connection strings and then used, believe it or not, Microsoft Excel to create custom strings for each of the engineers. We exported them to a text file that they could then import. In the case of PuTTY, because PuTTY stores the connections and the credentials in the registry, we had to do something different there, but the connection string is customizable enough to make the job fast and easily repeatable for all the other engineers. You don't have 20 or 30 engineers spending two or three days creating all these connection strings. I can create them in a matter of minutes with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then save them to a text file or a CSV file. It is awesome. We are able to integrate session management without disrupting business processes. One of the niceties about BeyondTrust is the ability to integrate it with ticketing systems. For example, as per Sarbanes-Oxley, we have to have a reason for why an administrator is performing something. The integration with a ticketing system is ideal rather than manually typing the reason in the reason field through the GUI where most engineers, after a while, end up just typing in Work. They don't put in enough data to make it clearly visible why they connected. The integration with the ticketing system is ideal for that. Ticket-driven access makes the work very quantifiable.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is security."
"Secrets Manager helps in retrieving the enrollment variables used by the code."
"All our workloads are running on AWS, so integration with our workload is much easier on AWS Secrets Manager than going with another solution such as Thycotic."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Secrets Manager is its seamless integration with various AWS services."
"Integrating with other services was straightforward, especially within the AWS environment."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Secrets Manager is the ability to keep data secret and assign access permissions to people to grant or restrict access."
"The most valuable feature is the management of credentials."
"It's highly scalable, so I'd rate it a ten out of ten."
"It is very easy to deploy. It's easy to use. That's the major thing I like about it."
"The solution protects organizations from internal and external threats."
"BeyondTrust Password Safe is a good PAM tool."
"The features I find valuable in Password Safe include password retention and management, session privilege monitoring, live monitoring and recording, and the use of PS automation scripts for creating connections."
"The best aspect of the product is the ability to onboard devices. You can scan the IP subnets and onboard all the devices. You can then segregate them if it's a network device or a firewall. If it's a Windows server or a UNIX, you can basically scan your IT infrastructure and onboard the efforts, which should be managed. Once they have been onboarded, then the session management and password management are easy and nicely configurable."
"Overall, I rate BeyondTrust Password Safe as nine out of ten."
"Session recording, password rotation, and password vaulting are the most valuable features."
"Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten."
 

Cons

"AWS Secrets Manager could support hybrid infrastructure."
"An area for improvement in AWS Secrets Manager could be expanding integration options beyond AWS services."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"The sidecar feature has room for improvement."
"The solution's initial setup process is complicated."
"If you add one more layer of security to AWS Secrets Manager, even the programmer will not be able to see the secrets."
"We occasionally have problems with rate limits, although that is a problem more generally with AWS."
"There is a need for better environmental implementation, such as having a security fund as a solution."
"Documentation is the primary area of improvement."
"Adding user behavior analysis to the server or messaging would be beneficial."
"The integration with Secure Remote Access must be improved."
"We'd like to have incremental backups to ensure the solution's information is protected regularly."
"If they can create a single platform to create a connector, it would be better than using the RBS server."
"The product needs to have better integration with SAP products."
"The only feature they could improve is the banners because they aren't informative. For example, if something is not correct and I open the error notification, the dialogue box simply says, "This is an error." It would be great if they could provide some valuable comments about how to fix the errors."
"The only improvement I could suggest would be standardizing documentation, but that's more the responsibility of the implementing engineer rather than BeyondTrust Password Trust itself. The documentation must be specific and narrow for implementation, not just broad guidelines."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't believe there is a license cost for the solution."
"The cost is somewhat high."
"We've observed that AWS Secrets Manager pricing is based on a per-secret-per-month model. As a result, we prefer to divide our secrets into individual pieces to increase security and grant specific access permissions to certain secrets, systems, or individuals. However, this approach results in higher costs. Therefore, we have been exploring ways to combine our secrets into groups to reduce expenses and simplify management. Nonetheless, we acknowledge that this issue may not be related to the secret manager's functionality."
"The solution is expensive."
"We purchase a monthly license for the product."
"We just pay for Password Safe. Session management is included, but we don't use it. There aren't any additional costs besides the standard licensing fees. We pay for an annual license."
"This solution is not cheap—it's a very expensive solution. Very, very expensive compared to the features and functions that they offer."
"At the time, BeyondTrust was significantly cheaper than CyberArk. Pricing-wise, if I remember correctly, it goes by assets. The pricing was negotiated for our instances based on the number of assets that we onboard into the system. It is a little different from CyberArk, where the pricing is by users. So, it depends. If you have a lot of assets, it can get very expensive."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"The product is quite affordable."
"When you buy Password Safe and perform your initial Discovery, you have all these servers that are added to your assets in BeyondTrust, but you're not using a license until you actually start managing the systems. BeyondTrust's licensing is based on the systems when they're managed, which means when an administrator is able to connect to the server through BeyondTrust with a managed account. There would be a privileged account on the endpoint when the licensing starts. A significant advantage to that is that there are many organizations that want to evaluate their environment prior to automatic management."
"The pricing structure is better than the competitors. It's much cheaper than CyberArk. They do the licensing on the basis of assets, not on the number of users. For CyberArk, they base the licensing on the number of users, and they have an expensive model of pricing. BeyondTrust has a cheaper model."
"The pricing of BeyondTrust is very good as compared to other products. That was the main reason we decided to go with BeyondTrust at first."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Azure Key Vault or AWS Secrets Manager?
Azure Key Vault is a SaaS solution. You can easily store passwords and secrets securely and encrypt them. Azure Key Vault is a great solution to ensure you are compliant with security and governanc...
Which is better - HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager?
HashiCorp Vault was designed with your needs in mind. One of the features that makes this evident is its ability to work as both a cloud-agnostic and a multi-cloud solution. As a cloud-agnostic sol...
What do you like most about AWS Secrets Manager?
The most valuable feature of AWS Secrets Manager is its seamless integration with various AWS services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
Pricing is managed by a different team, however, I know it's less expensive than CyberArk Privilege Access. BeyondTrust's pricing for the cloud platform is affordable.
What needs improvement with BeyondTrust Password Safe?
If they can create a single platform to create a connector, it would be better than using the RBS server. There are limitations when accessing or creating connectors for each application. From PVW,...
What is your primary use case for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
For BeyondTrust Remote Support, I am onboarding accounts. I create special connectors through the RDS server into one server broker to run various applications. I establish browser connections and ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
BeyondTrust PowerBroker Password Safe
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Autodesk, Clevy, Stackery
Aera Energy LLC, Care New England, James Madison University
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Secrets Manager vs. BeyondTrust Password Safe and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.