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AWS Secrets Manager vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Secrets Manager
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CyberArk Privileged Access ...
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
193
Ranking in other categories
User Activity Monitoring (1st), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (1st), Mainframe Security (3rd), Operational Technology (OT) Security (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

ManuelTorres - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 23, 2024
Simplifies and secures secret management within the AWS ecosystem, though it could enhance integration capabilities with external platforms
I use it for handling any confidential tasks or operations within my systems. Typically, we rely on the AWS Identity and Access Management center to set specific rules. In most cases, systems autonomously manage the secrets. While there are admins who can handle secrets from the console, we aim to…
SatishIyer - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 21, 2022
Lets you ensure relevant, compliant access in good time and with an audit trail, yet lacks clarity on MITRE ATT&CK
When I was a component owner for PAM's Privileged Threat Analytics (PTA) component, what I wanted was a clear mapping to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a framework which has a comprehensive list of use cases. We reached out to the vendor and asked them how much coverage they have of the uses cases found on MITRE, which would have given us a better view of things while I was the product owner. Unfortunately they did not have the capability of mapping onto MITRE's framework at that time. PTA is essentially the monitoring interface of the broker (e.g. Privileged Access Management, the Vault, CPM, PSM, etc.), and it's where you can capture your broker bypass and perform related actions. For this reason, we thought that this kind of mapping would be required, but CyberArk informed us that they did not have the capability we had in mind with regard to MITRE ATT&CK. I am not sure what the situation is now, but it would definitely help to have that kind of alignment with one of the more well-known frameworks like MITRE. For CyberArk as a vendor, it would also help them to clearly spell out in which areas they have full functionality and in which ares they have partial or none. Of course, it also greatly benefits the customers when they're evaluating the product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 its seamless integration with various AWS services."
"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 security."
"AWS Secrets Manager is used for storing secret information that has to be a secret from your customer and your employees."
"The product is easy to use and is inexpensive."
"The API is fine and works well."
"It has helped from an auditing perspective identify who has access to privileged accounts."
"We have the identity provider for all the authentication processes. However, sometimes, we need access to different applications for customers or clients that are not integrated into the identity provider. For these, we need to store a password to gain access. For example, we use the CyberArk Password Vault for third-party services. This vault needs to be shared with many people in our company."
"The product is for hardening access and making the organization more secure, therefore reducing chances of a breach."
"We like it for the ability to automatically change passwords. At least for my group, that's the best thing."
"It is one of the best solutions in the market. Ever since I started using this solution, there has not been any compromise when it comes to our lab."
"I found it valuable that CyberArk Privileged Access Manager can be integrated with PTA (privileged threat analytics), and this means that it will tell you if there's a risk to the logins and signs of risk and if risky behavior is observed. It's a good feature. Another good feature is the CPM (central password manager) because it helps you rotate the passwords automatically without involving the admins. It can go and update the scheduled tasks and the services. At the same time, if there's an application where it cannot do all of these, CPM will trigger an automatic email to the application owners, telling them that they should go ahead and change the password. This allows you to manage the account password that CyberArk cannot manage, which helps mitigate the risk of old passwords, where the password gets compromised, and also allows you to manage the security of the domain."
"We are able to centrally manage credentials, touch applications, and rotate passwords."
"Because we now have the ability to grant access to management utilities like DNS Manager, Sequel Studio, and MMC, in a secure fashion, without system admins being required to continually reenter various passwords that are stored who knows where, it has really made the system admin's job much easier. It has made the PSM's job much easier. It has made the auditor's job and the security team's job and the access manager's job significantly easier, because we're able to move much more quickly toward a role-based access management system, and that is really streamlining the whole onboarding/offboarding management process."
 

Cons

"It would be good if the AWS Secrets Manager were more customizable."
"The solution's initial setup process is complicated."
"We occasionally have problems with rate limits, although that is a problem more generally with AWS."
"There is a potential improvement in connecting AWS Secrets Manager to Jenkins CI/CD pipeline to automatically reflect changes in production."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"The sidecar feature has room for improvement."
"AWS Secrets Manager could support hybrid infrastructure."
"An area for improvement in AWS Secrets Manager could be expanding integration options beyond AWS services."
"Over the past seven years, I have seen a lot of ups and downs with the product."
"The tool's UI has bugs and lags. It needs to be improved. The deployment process can be complex due to multiple components for various functionalities, each requiring separate infrastructure management. To simplify this process, consolidating all these components into a single platform could be beneficial. The product's pricing could be cheaper."
"​It's hard to find competent resellers/support."
"We'd like to see the creation of some kind of memo field for each device account, which could be used, in our network at least, to leave a note about the device for either the security or network engineering team members."
"I would like to see a simplification of the product."
"CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault's deployment is complex for resources with little experience. Tech support needs to be improved as well based on quality and knowledge."
"The challenge with the product is pricing since it's expensive. It also needs to improve the customization. We encountered some stability issues as well."
"This is probably a common thing, but they do ask for a lot of log files, a lot of information. They ask you to provide a lot of information to them before they're willing to give you anything at all upfront. It would be better if they were a little more give-and-take upfront: "Why don't you try these couple of things while we take your log files and stuff and go research them?" A little bit of that might be more helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is somewhat high."
"I don't believe there is a license cost for the solution."
"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."
"The license CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is on an annual basis."
"CyberArk is very expensive and there are additional fees for add-ons."
"Network and security licenses are currently being managed by other outsource vendors, so they are facing some type of problems in the digital aspect."
"It costs us around $200 per user."
"I believe that this solution is priced well. It's the market leader and I think that it's the best solution."
"Pricing and licensing depend on the environment."
"CyberArk is one of the best PAM solutions and one of the most expensive, but it works better than the others, so the pricing is fair."
"I would rate the tool’s pricing a six out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Educational Organization
31%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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.
How does Sailpoint IdentityIQ compare with CyberArk PAM?
We evaluated Sailpoint IdentityIQ before ultimately choosing CyberArk. Sailpoint Identity Platform is a solution to manage risks in cloud enterprise environments. It automates and streamlines the m...
What do you like most about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
The most valuable features of the solution are control and analytics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
CyberArk Privileged Access Manager comes at a high cost. But the solution is worth its price.
 

Also Known As

No data available
CyberArk Privileged Access Security, CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Autodesk, Clevy, Stackery
Rockwell Automation
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Secrets Manager vs. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
815,690 professionals have used our research since 2012.