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AWS Secrets Manager vs BeyondTrust Password Safe comparison

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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
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Secrets Management Tools (3rd)
BeyondTrust Password Safe
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Enterprise Password Managers category, the mindshare of AWS Secrets Manager is 12.9%, down from 16.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BeyondTrust Password Safe is 2.7%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Password Managers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS Secrets Manager12.9%
BeyondTrust Password Safe2.7%
Other84.4%
Enterprise Password Managers
 

Featured Reviews

Mahadev Metre - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at Paydoh
Consistent security and efficiency improvements optimize IT infrastructure with effective management
When creating AWS Secrets Manager, it should be automated using tools such as Terraform, Puppet, or Ansible. With Terraform code, you specify the encryption key, secret name, rotation policy, and secret replication. Human error occurs when feeding secret values manually, especially with large amounts of secrets to input. Secrets should never be protected only by IAM. They should be protected by multiple layers, such as IAM and one or two KMS keys. Additional security measures could be beneficial if necessary. The rotation policy is crucial because some secrets may become obsolete, require updates, or get compromised. With a weekly rotation policy, if unauthorized access occurs, the exposure is limited to seven days. The rotation policy can be customized according to needs.
PawanShirose - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Security Consultant at CyberSec Consulting
Has enabled bulk onboarding and password rotation while ensuring secure privilege management
I have faced stability issues when upgrading BeyondTrust Password Safe solution. The upgrade process can be lengthy compared to other modules. For example, upgrading the appliance and reconfiguring HA is easier in PRA. However, in BeyondTrust Password Safe, the upgrade activity can take longer, and I have occasionally experienced being stuck during appliance version upgrades, sometimes duplicating the upgrade. Regarding additional features, we have good features in BeyondTrust Password Safe compared to other modules, such as Secret Safe to secure secrets and the check-in, check-out functionality. We already have the main features, but I think it would be helpful if BeyondTrust implemented a heartbeat check feature on the privileged account level. This feature would allow PAM to check the credentials of privileged accounts, indicating if they are correct or not, showing if the heartbeat has failed if they are wrong.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Overall, this is a good product, we are satisfied with the support, and I recommend it."
"It's highly scalable, so I'd rate it a ten out of ten."
"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 most valuable feature is usability, as it is quite user-friendly."
"AWS Secrets Manager plays a significant role in optimizing IT infrastructure security and efficiency."
"The most valuable feature is security."
"I would highly recommend AWS Secrets Manager for secret management in AWS."
"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."
"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 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 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."
"Password Safe provides integrated password and session management in one solution."
"The actual innovations offered by the vendor stand out to me. They are quick to respond to market demands and the changing environment of privileged access management."
"It simplifies your compliance and tracking to benchmark other credentials and analytics."
"Automation in BeyondTrust Password Safe uses Smart Rules, which eliminate the need for manual onboarding and effectively handle multiple bulk tasks, such as onboarding and mapping."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"There is a need for better environmental implementation, such as having a security fund as a solution."
"It would be good if the AWS Secrets Manager were more customizable."
"We contacted AWS support and waited approximately an hour for assistance."
"The only concern with AWS Secrets Manager is its cost, which can be prohibitive for small organizations."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"There is a potential improvement in connecting AWS Secrets Manager to Jenkins CI/CD pipeline to automatically reflect changes in production."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integrating with certain other platforms."
"The effectiveness of BeyondTrust Password Safe's session management capabilities for SSH and RDP is pretty much robust, but it needs more improvement for other applications and web-based applications."
"The database instance onboarding should be simplified. The problem is that you can scan the assets and databases inside a server, but you cannot onboard them or manage them with the smart tools. It has to be done manually. I think they should try to include more custom platforms."
"The integration with Secure Remote Access must be improved."
"We don't have much control over the appliance. When anything happens in the backend, we have to depend on the support team. We need to raise a case so that they can update the appliance. If we have control over it, we would be able to troubleshoot easily."
"Documentation is the primary area of improvement."
"There are multiple features that have issues, although they could be specific to our environment. What we have seen is that whenever a user gets added to the authentication store, the sync between Password Safe and the authentication store, which is generally easy, takes a lot of time. It does not occur immediately."
"The product needs to have better integration with SAP products."
"It has crashed on us in the past."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"I don't believe there is a license cost for the solution."
"We purchase a monthly license for the product."
"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 cost is somewhat high."
"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."
"It has subscription-based licensing. BeyondTrust is three times less expensive than CyberArk."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is 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."
"The product is quite affordable."
"This solution is not cheap—it's a very expensive solution. Very, very expensive compared to the features and functions that they offer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
5%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise10
 

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 needs improvement with AWS Secrets Manager?
AWS Secrets Manager could not be better because there has been no frustration with the product.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
My experience with BeyondTrust Password Safe's pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive, primarily due to its asset-based licensing model. This is a significant advantage for us because...
What needs improvement with BeyondTrust Password Safe?
I have faced stability issues when upgrading BeyondTrust Password Safe solution. The upgrade process can be lengthy compared to other modules. For example, upgrading the appliance and reconfiguring...
What is your primary use case for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
I am working on both BeyondTrust Password Safe and the PRA (Privileged Remote Access). I have three years plus experience working with BeyondTrust Password Safe solution, and I have hands-on, good ...
 

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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.