HashiCorp Vault

HashiCorp's secrets manager and encryption service; BUSL-1.1 source-available, free to self-host

DevOps / Infrastructure · Source-available (BUSL-1.1) · 36.4k

Reviewed 2026-10-21 · last push 2026-10-20 · repo checked 2026-10-21

What's Good

Release v2.2.0 (2026-10-15), commit on 2026-10-20. ★~36k over eleven years (~60 a week). Useful when you want apps and CI to fetch short-lived credentials instead of long-lived secrets in env files, with one place to revoke and audit them.

The Catch

License first: Vault 1.15.0 and later are under BUSL-1.1, which is source-available, not open source. You may use it in production and host it for your own organization. You may not offer it to third parties as a paid hosted or embedded product that competes with IBM's paid Vault. Each version becomes MPL-2.0 four years after release. GitHub shows NOASSERTION; read the LICENSE file. Some features, such as namespaces and performance replication, are Enterprise-only. Running it well (unsealing, HA storage, backups) takes real ops work. OpenBao is the MPL-2.0 fork.

Verdict

The reference secrets manager and fine to self-host internally; pick OpenBao if you need open source.

See also: OpenBao

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