How platforms were chosen, what was compared, and what this site refuses to guess at.
Ten, spanning the real spread rather than a market census: the three hyperscaler services most teams default to, the self-hosted platforms that define the category, the SaaS alternatives that remove the cluster, the developer-first tools people actually adopt first, and the two enterprise vendors that appear when auditors are involved.
Scope (keys, secrets or both), deployment model, key custody and hardware backing, licence, published pricing and free tier — read from vendor pricing and documentation pages in August 2026.
Several vendors here publish no figures at all, and two publish only partial meters. Those are marked as unpublished or metered rather than filled with an estimate. A comparison table with invented numbers is worse than one with gaps, because the gaps at least tell you where to ask.
No benchmarks, no latency measurements, no security testing. Nothing here was deployed for this comparison. Enterprise pricing is negotiated and any published figure is a starting point, not a quote.
Sibling sites are linked only where the subject genuinely continues — signing keys lead to certificates, for instance. There is no reciprocal footer block repeated identically on every page, because a ring of new domains pointing at each other with the same anchor text serves the ring, not the reader.
No vendor pays for inclusion, position or wording. Table order is editorial. Any commercial relationship would be stated on the disclosure page and marked on the link.