Sized to the team, not to the feature matrix.
Most teams arrive here from the same place: secrets in environment files, pasted into chat, copied between laptops. The gap between that and a Vault cluster is enormous, and jumping it in one move is how tools get bought and never adopted. Pick the smallest thing that removes the current problem.
If today’s problem is .env files and nobody is going to operate infrastructure — this works by the end of the afternoon.
The same starting point, but open source and self-hostable when you outgrow renting it.
For encryption keys specifically, on AWS, nothing else makes sense at a dollar a key.
When dynamic, short-lived credentials are the actual requirement and you have someone to run it.
Vault-class capability without the cluster — the SaaS answer for teams without a platform team.
When the licence matters and you want Vault semantics under neutral governance.
The best platform is the one your developers will actually use. A perfect Vault deployment that teams route around with a shared password manager is worse than a simple tool everybody adopts.
Tell us which clouds you run in, whether the requirement is keys or secrets or both, and whether a regulator is involved. You get a shortlist and the reasoning behind it. Your details are not passed to vendors.