AWS Secrets Manager vs BeyondTrust Password Safe comparison

AWS Secrets Manager vs. BeyondTrust Password Safe

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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

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

BeyondTrust Password Safe

Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Privileged Access Management (PAM) (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Enterprise Password Managers category, the mindshare of AWS Secrets Manager is 18.7%, down from 20.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BeyondTrust Password Safe is 3.3%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Password Managers

Featured Reviews

Atul-Yadav

Enterprise Cloud and AI Security Architect at a security firm with 10,001+ employees

Ensures dynamic secret retrieval and automates security measures

AWS Secrets Manager is a fully managed service that allows our applications to retrieve secrets dynamically at runtime. This protects sensitive information, such as keys or credentials, from being compromised. It also automates the secrets, eliminating the need for manual rotation, thereby providing significant security and efficiency benefits. Furthermore, secrets are encrypted at rest using the AES 256-bit standard encryption algorithm.

Read full review

Gary Jolley

PAM Architect at GCA

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AWS Secrets Manager is used for storing secret information that has to be a secret from your customer and your employees."

"The solution is very scalable."

"The most valuable feature is security."

"The product is easy to use and is inexpensive."

"It's highly scalable, so I'd rate it a ten out of ten."

"Secrets Manager helps in retrieving the enrollment variables used by the code."

"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."

More AWS Secrets Manager pros

"BeyondTrust Password Safe has good reporting and Smart Rules which makes it convenient. Though Smart Rules are convenient, those who do not have much experience with such things may find it difficult to understand how these things work. Otherwise, I find Smart Rules very convenient to work with."

"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."

"The performance is good."

"I find that BeyondTrust Password Safe is a very effective application for password management."

"It is very easy to deploy. It's easy to use. That's the major thing I like about it."

"Smart Rules is a nice feature in BeyondTrust. It is a unique feature that BeyondTrust has as compared to other vendors such as CyberArk. With Smart Rules, you can do automatic onboarding of accounts. There are a lot of options and features. For example, you can do onboarding based on different AD attributes. It is a nice feature in BeyondTrust that some of the other PAM vendors don't have. With other vendors, we have to create our own scripts, whereas, with BeyondTrust, we can just use the in-built Smart Rules."

"It provides integrated password and session management in one solution, which is important for us because, from an auditing standpoint, we are accountable for the type of access being used. We need to ensure that accounts are securely stored and there is the right type of accountability around who is gaining the access. After gaining it, how they're using it, where they're using it, etc."

"It simplifies your compliance and tracking to benchmark other credentials and analytics."

More BeyondTrust Password Safe pros

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."

"The sidecar feature has room for improvement."

"AWS Secrets Manager could support hybrid infrastructure."

"The solution's initial setup process is complicated."

"There is room for improvement in terms of integrating with certain other platforms."

"If you add one more layer of security to AWS Secrets Manager, even the programmer will not be able to see the secrets."

"The price of the solution could improve."

"If you don't have enterprise support, then you will not be able to get through to them to get the help. It is not only applicable to AWS Secrets Manager. It is also applicable to any service on AWS."

More AWS Secrets Manager cons

"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 integration with Secure Remote Access must be improved."

"Its documentation can be improved. Its documentation is currently complicated, and it is not good. It needs to be better. Their technical support can also be improved. It is not bad, but it can be better."

"Adding user behavior analysis to the server or messaging would be beneficial."

"Named accounts don't work well in this solution. If you use named accounts for your administrative access, the way Smart Rules work is that it takes your SAM account name and matches it to the account name of your privileged ID, which creates limitations on size and how big those names can be because the directory has a 20-character limit."

"When we deploy BeyondTrust, we have to deploy our own database on a SQL server. It doesn't deploy the database. I wish BeyondTrust packages the whole solution in one and includes the MySQL database so that when you deploy it, it deploys everything for you. BeyondTrust gives you the software, but you are in charge of setting up your own database. It is a single appliance just for the BeyondTrust portion but not the database. Unless that has changed in later releases, you have to set up your own database for BeyondTrust Password Safe. I find that part complex because we then need the expertise and help of the database team to set it up, which also increases the deployment time. If they can deploy the database, it will reduce the deployment time."

"I think that BeyondTrust Password Safe could be improved with more testing. In the beginning, they were practically using customers as beta testers. Maybe the product has evolved since I last used it, but if you look at PAM, privileged access management, whatever's out there has already been done. I don't see there being any other enhancements that are being made regarding PAM, except to support more cloud-based applications."

More BeyondTrust Password Safe cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We purchase a monthly license for the product."

"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."

"It has subscription-based licensing. BeyondTrust is three times less expensive than CyberArk."

"The product is quite affordable."

"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."

"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."

"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."

"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."

"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."

More BeyondTrust Password Safe pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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?

I believe one improvement could be having the last used passwords appear more automatically whenever I check for passwords associated with a frequently used system.

What is your primary use case for BeyondTrust Password Safe?

I find that BeyondTrust Password Safe is a very effective application for password management. I find it very easy to use and update.

Azure Key Vault vs AWS Secrets Manager

Comparisons

Compared 71% of the time

HashiCorp Vault vs AWS Secrets Manager

Compared 12% of the time

1Password vs AWS Secrets Manager

Compared 6% of the time

Delinea Secret Server vs AWS Secrets Manager

Compared 4% of the time

ManageEngine Password Manager Pro vs AWS Secrets Manager

Compared 0% of the time

More AWS Secrets Manager Competitors

Delinea Secret Server vs BeyondTrust Password Safe

Compared 17% of the time

HashiCorp Vault vs BeyondTrust Password Safe

Compared 11% of the time

BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access vs BeyondTrust Password Safe

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Key Vault vs BeyondTrust Password Safe

Compared 10% of the time

ManageEngine Password Manager Pro vs BeyondTrust Password Safe

Compared 5% of the time

More BeyondTrust Password Safe Competitors

Product Reports

Enterprise Password Managers

Download AWS Secrets Manager product report

BeyondTrust Password Safe

Download BeyondTrust Password Safe product report

Also Known As

No data available

BeyondTrust PowerBroker Password Safe

Overview

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Beyond Trust Password Safe is an automated solution that combines password and privileged session management into a single platform. Password Safe delivers secure access control, auditing, alerting, recording, and monitoring.

This free and open-source password manager supports Windows and Linux, and some ports are available for other platforms as well. Their proprietary algorithm, Twofish, is considered highly secure, with the advantage that it is not affiliated with NIST. The Twofish algorithm secures the data while keys are delivered using SHA-256 authentication.

The application is easy to use, and you can download the Windows app from several sites. Additionally, the application is available in 14 languages.

Beyond Trust Password Safe Key Features

Continuous automated account discovery: Scan, identify and profile assets with the discovery engine. The solution has dynamic categorization that enables the automated onboarding of assets into groups.
Application-to-application password management: Password Safe offers an adaptable API interface including an unlimited number of password caches, therefore providing scalability and redundancy.
Secure SSH key management: The system automatically rotates SSH keys to enforce granular access control and workflow. Private keys securely log users onto systems without exposing them.
Adaptive access control: Evaluates context and provides access requests by considering factors such as time of access and location to determine the user’s authorization level.
Enhanced privileged session management: Admins can record, lock, and document suspicious behavior without disrupting productivity by managing sessions live.
Advanced privileged threat analytics: Password Safe monitors assets and user behavior every day, analyzing what are normal patterns and detecting deviations.
Multi-factor authentication: Password Safe supports 2FA (two-factor authentication) using Yubikey 4, Nano, or Neo.

What can you do with Password Safe?

Cross-device and cross-platform syncing: You can safely store encrypted password files online, where you can access them via Password Safe-compatible apps.
Drag and drop password: Password Safe has a “Dragbar,” which you can use to complete forms by dragging and dropping icons over the form - for example, passwords, usernames, design tiles, and emails.
Autotype: With Password Safe, when you click on a web page or login box, the autotype feature will try to fill in your credentials automatically for you.
Import and export: You can import passwords from text, XML, or CSV fails. You can also export passwords in text, XML, and the PSAFE format.
Password generator: Generate secure passwords by using the algorithm. You can also define your password rules.

Beyond Trust Password Safe Benefits

Controls third-party access: Password Safe secures the connection and automatically checks privileged credentials. The solution records all sessions.
Uses context to determine access: Password Safe considers risk factors like location, day, or time of access and uses them to adjust the permissions and privileges of each user.
Manages access for privileged and non-privileged accounts: By integrating with SailPoint IdentityIQ, Password Safe effectively manages user access for privileged as well as non-privileged accounts.
Reduces cloud risk: Password Safe simplifies secure storage and session management. It supports major cloud providers such as Azure, Amazon, Google, Rackspace, and GoGrid. It also supports social networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Integrates password and privilege management: Integrates with Endpoint Privilege Management to control the resources users can access and the actions they are allowed to take

Reviews from Real Users

A PAM Architect at a tech services company says, "BeyondTrust Password Safe's features that I have found most valuable are really those that are knitted in. That is their Smart Rules and Smart Groups, where you design your administration model so you create your AD groups and your asset groups, and configure Password Safe."

An I.S. Architect at a insurance company mentions that "Session recording, password rotation, and password vaulting are the most valuable features."

"One of the most valuable features is that this is a product designed with enterprises in mind," adds a Cybersecurity Architect at a tech vendor.

BeyondTrust

Sample Customers

Autodesk, Clevy, Stackery

Aera Energy LLC, Care New England, James Madison University

AWS Secrets Manager vs. BeyondTrust Password Safe