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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
7.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
BeyondTrust Password Safe
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Enterprise Password Managers category, the mindshare of AWS Secrets Manager is 18.0%, down from 21.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BeyondTrust Password Safe is 3.4%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Password Managers
 

Featured Reviews

Atul-Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ali Hatamleh - PeerSpot reviewer
Smart tooling streamlines account organization and access through advanced grouping features
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 smart tooling and smart group features are also important as, after finalizing discovery, they auto-collect accounts in the environment and organize them in Smart Groups for easy access.

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."
"Integrating with other services was straightforward, especially within the AWS environment."
"I would highly recommend AWS Secrets Manager for secret management in AWS."
"The most valuable feature is usability, as it is quite user-friendly."
"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."
"The API is fine and works well."
"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 solution protects organizations from internal and external threats."
"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."
"Screen recording is valuable, and integration with applications is easy. We can customize whatever we want. We did a lot of application integration using scripting."
"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."
"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."
"The performance is good."
"It is very easy to deploy. It's easy to use. That's the major thing I like about it."
"I rate BeyondTrust Password Safe as an overall 10 out of 10."
 

Cons

"AWS Secrets Manager could support hybrid infrastructure."
"There is a need for better environmental implementation, such as having a security fund as a solution."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"It would be good if the AWS Secrets Manager were more customizable."
"The sidecar feature has room for improvement."
"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 room for improvement in the pricing model."
"Adding user behavior analysis to the server or messaging would be beneficial."
"Documentation is the primary area of improvement."
"If there was one thing, it would be having the documentation standardized. They should keep the documentation consistent. For example, when BeyondTrust updated one of their admin guides, they left out the information on the discovery account requirements, and then over a period of time, we ended up having to search multiple different documents to put together a string of information for a specific topic, which was problematic. It was minor, but it was problematic. Standardized documentation would be the one thing I would suggest."
"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."
"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."
"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

"We purchase a monthly license for the product."
"The solution is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"This solution is not cheap—it's a very expensive solution. Very, very expensive compared to the features and functions that they offer."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"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 product is quite affordable."
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Top Industries

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

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.
 

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: June 2025.
857,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.