Envshed vs AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager is the default when you're already on AWS. It's also $0.40 per secret per month plus API-call fees, with IAM-only access control and CloudTrail in place of a team UI. Envshed is the other trade — flat $5 per user, a monorepo-native CLI, and a real UI for the humans on your team.
ASM is legitimate. It sits inside your AWS account, encrypts with KMS, enforces access through IAM, and natively rotates credentials for RDS, Redshift, and DocumentDB. If your stack is AWS top to bottom and your security model is IAM, ASM is a reasonable default — one less vendor on the invoice, one less SSO to wire up.
The trade-offs are where ASM hurts small teams. Pricing is per secret ($0.40/month each) plus $0.05 per 10,000 API calls — a few hundred secrets and a chatty CI pipeline and you're well past flat $5/user. There's no team UI worth the name: access is IAM policies, audit is CloudTrail log lines, and collaborating with a non-infra teammate means explaining ARNs. No monorepo-aware config, no first-class environments, no local envshed run. Envshed is the opposite trade: built end-to-end for dev teams that want encrypted env vars, a CLI that understands a monorepo, and a UI a human can actually read.
Feature comparison
| Envshed | AWS Secrets Manager | |
|---|---|---|
Pricing model | $5/user/month flat (Team) | $0.40/secret/month + $0.05 per 10,000 API calls |
Free tier | 2 users · 3 projects · unlimited secrets | 30-day free trial per secret · no free forever tier |
CLI | envshed (pull, push, run, export) | aws secretsmanager (via AWS CLI) |
Monorepo-native config | Yes — .envshed.json auto-detects workspaces | None — secrets are flat resources, not project-aware |
Multi-environment model | First-class dev/staging/prod environments per project | Convention only — naming prefixes or tags |
Team UI for non-infra teammates | Yes — dashboard with org and project roles | AWS console — assumes an IAM-aware operator |
Access control | Org roles (owner/admin/member) · project roles (admin/editor/viewer) | IAM policies and resource policies |
Audit log | In-product audit log (Team tier) | CloudTrail — separate service, separate UI |
Encryption at rest | AES-256-GCM (per-record IV) | AWS KMS (AWS-managed or customer-managed CMK) |
Secret rotation | On roadmap | Yes — native for RDS, Redshift, DocumentDB; Lambda for the rest |
GitHub Actions | First-class envshed step | Via configure-aws-credentials + CLI or aws-actions/aws-secretsmanager-get-secrets |
Best for | 2–50-person dev teams that want env-var UX | AWS-heavy teams already standardised on IAM and KMS |
Source:
AWS Secrets Manager pricing and feature references verified from aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/pricing on April 18, 2026. Figures change — verify on the source before quoting.
When AWS Secrets Manager is the right choice
- Your stack is AWS end-to-end and IAM is already your access model.
- You need native rotation for RDS, Redshift, or DocumentDB credentials in production today.
- Everything reading secrets is an IAM principal — Lambda, ECS, EC2, EKS — and you don't want an extra vendor in the path.
- Compliance or procurement makes adding a non-AWS SaaS vendor its own project.
When Envshed is the right choice
- Your per-secret bill is already uncomfortable and a chatty CI is making it worse — flat $5/user is predictable.
- Your code lives in a monorepo and you want .envshed.json auto-detecting workspaces, not hand-rolled ARN conventions.
- Non-infra teammates need to read and edit secrets without touching the AWS console or learning IAM.
- You want audit trails and environment tooling in the product, not spread across CloudTrail and naming conventions.
- envshed run locally and envshed pull in CI beats wrapping aws secretsmanager get-secret-value in a shell script.
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