etcd vs Vault: What are the differences?

etcd: A distributed consistent key-value store for shared configuration and service discovery. etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master; Vault: Secure, store, and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing. Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

etcd belongs to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack, while Vault can be primarily classified under "Secrets Management".

"Service discovery" is the primary reason why developers consider etcd over the competitors, whereas "Secure" was stated as the key factor in picking Vault.

etcd and Vault are both open source tools. It seems that etcd with 25.9K GitHub stars and 5.26K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Vault with 13.2K GitHub stars and 1.98K GitHub forks.

DigitalOcean, Redox Engine, and SoFi are some of the popular companies that use Vault, whereas etcd is used by Beam, Giant Swarm, and CNCFlora. Vault has a broader approval, being mentioned in 71 company stacks & 17 developers stacks; compared to etcd, which is listed in 27 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.