OpenBao
Shares rank 16 of 20 secrets managers by recommenders
Free, open-source secrets manager people recommend as a Vault alternative, with namespaces and distributed reads praised as free features. Caveat: it needs its own server and infrastructure to manage.
Free, open-source secrets manager people recommend as a Vault alternative, with namespaces and distributed reads praised as free features. Caveat: it needs its own server and infrastructure to manage.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 60%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Enterprise features free and open
“If you want fully free and open source enterprise features you're better off going to OpenBao”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: OneCLI – OSS credential gateway that keeps secrets out of AI agents” “Namespaces and Distributed Reads are fantastic features for a free and open product”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Enterprise for OpenBAO – Open Source HashiCorp Vault alternative” Preferred over HashiCorp Vault
“Vault is fine though, but I prefer OpenBao now”
Comment from 11 Jun 2026 in “Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it” “Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Operational burden of running it
“Try deploying openbao inside kube, if kube decides to restart your pods, you're in for unsealing them at 3am”
Comment from 16 Jun 2026 in “What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes” “they require to be placed on a separate server, and come with their own infra management”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Keeper – embedded secret store for Go (help me break it)” “managing openbao is getting to be a lot to manage each harness by themselves”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “OpenCode 2.0”
Other secrets managers people recommend
The four most recommended other secrets managers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OneCLI | 39 | 8 | 83% | 6 | — | Approved |
| SOPS | 28 | 5 | 85% | 10 | — | Approved |
| HashiCorp Vault | 26 | 10 | 72% | 10 | — | Approved |
| fnox | 20 | 4 | 83% | 9 | — | Approved |
| OpenBaoThis page | 6 | 4 | 60% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
10 of the 13 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I really like OpenBao but wish it was a little simplier to update policies.”
“managing openbao is getting to be a lot to manage each harness by themselves”
“Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao”
“If you want fully free and open source enterprise features you're better off going to OpenBao”
“there is so much feature creep: OpenBao now has its own ACME server”
“Try deploying openbao inside kube, if kube decides to restart your pods, you're in for unsealing them at 3am”
“Vault is fine though, but I prefer OpenBao now”
“they require to be placed on a separate server, and come with their own infra management”
“Namespaces and Distributed Reads are fantastic features for a free and open product”
“I would love a way to have vault/openbao be fully configuration-as-code and version controlled, and only have the actual secret values”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.