Onboardbase vs Hashicorp Vault

Hashicorp Vault is a powerful choice for enterprises with complex infrastructures and significant resources.

But for small and medium-sized businesses, it presents several challenges: because of its steep learning curve, its setup and maintenance require dedicated personnel, which not only leads to increased operational costs but can also be particularly burdensome for teams that need to remain agile and focused on rapid development cycles instead of secret management.

If you see yourself in this scenario, Onboardbase offers a more accessible, scalable alternative without compromising on security. It simplifies the secret management process to make it easy for teams of all sizes to manage and share sensitive data securely.

By switching to Onboardbase, you can unlock a new level of productivity and focus on driving your projects forward with confidence.

All the features you need without the complexity

Setting up Hashicorp Vault is a daunting task. You have to navigate through a labyrinth of account creation, permissions management, engine selection, and encryption key configurations. Each step demands a considerable amount of time because of its steep learning curve, and ultimately, you’re not spending this time working on your product.

Onboardbase simplifies the entire process: after signing up for an account, you can immediately create a new project and start adding your secrets.

At the core, it’s a highly secure vault that leverages end-to-end encryption, ensuring that your sensitive information is protected at every stage. We use AES-256-GCM encryption for data at rest, providing one of the most advanced levels of security available. For data in transit, Onboardbase employs RSA encryption combined with SSL as they move across networks. You don’t need to handle master encryption keys yourself.

Adding secrets is a straightforward process that can be done directly from the user-friendly dashboard, via the command-line interface (CLI), or through the API. Thanks to this flexibility, you can integrate Onboardbase into any existing workflows without any hassle.

Even once you manage to pull your secrets from Vault, there’s still another step of parsing the results and manually injecting them into your environment. The real game changer with Onboardbase is the CLI tool that makes it remarkably easy to automate secret management tasks:

Once you’ve completed a quick local configuration, Onboardbase takes care of the heavy lifting for you.
By using the run command, you can execute your code with the secrets seamlessly injected into your environment. There’s no need for manual parsing or separate injection steps. The secrets are injected as environment variables at runtime with a single command, which can vastly simplify your development process.
If you prefer more programmatic control, Onboardbase doesn’t limit you. You can still retrieve secrets using their SDKs or APIs if there isn’t already an integration available for your CI/CD pipeline, serverless provider, or web framework.

onboardbase login # authenticate to your account
onboardbase setup # configure your project and environment
onboardbase run "node app.js" # run your code with secrets injected

Whether you’re working on your local machine or managing a production environment, Onboardbase has you covered with out-of-the-box support for environment configurations.

The best part? Onboardbase also offers a self-hosted option for those who prefer to maintain control over their infrastructure, providing the flexibility to choose the best deployment method for your needs. So whether you’re a small team or a large enterprise, Onboardbase has a solution that fits your requirements.

Did we tell you you’re burning money?

Choosing Onboardbase over HashiCorp Vault not only simplifies your workflow but also results in significant cost savings.

While Hashicorp Vault presents a self-managed, free option, this comes with significant hidden costs. The burden of setup and maintenance falls entirely on the shoulders of your team, consuming time and resources that could be better spent on core business activities.

Opting for the cloud-managed version may ease some of these burdens, but it introduces a different challenge: cost. Starting at $1.58 per hour, this pricing model can quickly become prohibitive, especially for small to mid-sized teams. When you factor in the necessity of a dedicated budget and resources to keep Vault operational, it becomes clear that HashiCorp Vault may not be the most suitable choice for smaller development teams or organizations without in-house security experts.

The SaaS option is no better. You will be charged $0.50 per secret per month, as well as for API calls. For example, if you have 25 secrets created for the entire month and 25,000 API Operations. You will be charged a total of $12.50 (25 secrets x $0.50) + $0.25 (25k ops x $0.10) = $12.75 for the month! What?!

Onboardbase, on the other hand, offers a straightforward, transparent pricing model that starts at just $14 per user per month. This price point includes all the benefits of a fully managed service without the hidden costs and complexities associated with self-managed solutions as everything is handled for you, from regular updates to security compliance, allowing your team to focus on what they do best.

As your team grows, you can easily add users without worrying about escalating costs or the need to reconfigure your system. This predictable pricing model gives you the peace of mind that your costs will remain manageable as your business scales, something that is harder to guarantee with Hashicorp Vault’s pricing structure, which can fluctuate based on usage and the complexity of your setup.

Invest in a solution that grows with your business! And save you thousands of dollars every year in dev and tooling costs…

What about the team?

Vault’s user interface, though functional, does little to facilitate team collaboration. The auth setup process starts with an administrator configuring authentication methods, which determine how users and systems authenticate to Vault. Then the admin sets up policies that dictate what each role can do within the platform. Once these policies are in place, clients must retrieve a token from the client-side and use it to authenticate with Vault, which then grants the appropriate authorization based on the defined policies. While this system is powerful, it involves numerous manual steps, requiring careful configuration to ensure that everything works.

Onboardbase truly distinguishes itself is in its emphasis on collaboration. Unlike Hashicorp Vault, Onboardbase provides a collaborative user interface, enabling team members to work together more effectively in managing secrets.

It uses role-based access control to manage who can access and modify secrets within the system, with three default roles—Owner, Admin, and Employee—making it easy to assign and manage permissions. Convention over configuration. You can still use different environment configurations to refine secret access rights easily.

With device management, Onboardbase goes a step further and allows administrators to restrict access based on the specific devices used: even if credentials are compromised, unauthorized devices cannot gain access.

It’s crucial to find a solution that not only secures your data but also enhances your team’s productivity, so Onboardbase tackles secret sprawl head-on with powerful integrations. This way, you can unify secrets across most CI/CD tools, UI frameworks, serverless providers, and web frameworks in all stages of development.

Future-proofing

Onboardbase not only meets the needs of today’s teams but also anticipates and addresses the challenges of tomorrow.

Hashicorp Vault has the ability to log telemetry metrics and audit device logs, but requires third-party tools to fully monitor and interpret usage data, adding complexity during installation and maintenance.

Onboardbase takes monitoring to a whole new level by incorporating features that are designed specifically for root-cause analysis and human-error prevention by default.

One of its most powerful features is its ability to monitor secrets in real-time. This capability is not just a luxury—it’s a necessity in today’s fast-paced, security-conscious environment: you can detect secret leaks as they happen, whether you prefer to use a webhook for automated alerts or a graphical interface for a more visual, hands-on approach.

What are you waiting for?

Switching to Onboardbase is a no-brainer for most projects: it’s cost-effective, easy to use in any workflow, and designed to scale with your business!