Strongbox vs Vault: What are the differences?

Developers describe Strongbox as "A secret manager for AWS". Strongbox is a CLI/GUI and SDK to manage, store, and retrieve secrets (access tokens, encryption keys, private certificates, etc). Strongbox is a client-side convenience layer on top of AWS KMS, DynamoDB and IAM. It manages the AWS resources for you and configure them in a secure way. On the other hand, Vault is detailed as "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.

Strongbox and Vault can be primarily classified as "Secrets Management" tools.

Some of the features offered by Strongbox are:

• Serverless
• Simple access model
• Encryption

On the other hand, Vault provides the following key features:

• Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.
• Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.
• Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.

Strongbox and Vault are both open source tools. Vault with 13.2K GitHub stars and 1.98K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Strongbox with 244 GitHub stars and 21 GitHub forks.