Non-Human Identity Tools 2026
Non-Human Identity (NHI) security covers the discovery, governance, and protection of every identity in your environment that is not a person: service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, secrets, machine and workload identities, and the newer wave of AI agent identities. These vastly outnumber human identities in most enterprises, and they tend to be over-permissioned, rarely rotated, and invisible to IAM tooling built for employees. The tools here exist to inventory non-human identities across cloud and SaaS, map their entitlements, flag stale or risky credentials, and enforce least privilege before one of them becomes the breach path. If you are a CISO who can name every privileged user but cannot say how many service accounts hold admin rights, this is the category that closes that gap.
We cover 63 Non-Human Identity tools, 1 free and 62 commercial.
Accuracy and depth improve over time. Last reviewed Sep 2026. Is something off? Reach out.
FEATURED
USE CASES
New to this category? What is Non-Human Identity (NHI)?
Runtime security platform for NHIs, secrets, and AI agents with secretless access
Unified identity infrastructure for AI agents with federated identity & access
Non-human IAM platform for hybrid IT environments with secretless authentication
Identity mgmt for on-prem systems replacing static credentials w/ ephemeral IDs
Identity graph platform for attributing cloud & CI/CD actions to specific identities
PKI solution for AI agent identity and quantum-safe cryptographic credentials
Identity-based access control and security platform for AI infrastructure
IAM platform for securing AI agents & workloads with policy-based access control
Manages NHI and AI agent lifecycle from provisioning to decommissioning
NHI and AI agent security platform with discovery, governance, and ITDR
Secures AI agents and non-human identities with discovery and governance.
Secures AI agents by managing their non-human identities and secrets
NHI discovery, lifecycle mgmt & threat detection platform with NHIDR engine
Enterprise security platform for AI agents from Permit
AI/ML module for device identity security and anomaly detection
Patented trust anchor tech using device hardware attributes for root of trust
Platform for managing and securing Non-Human Identities (NHIs)
SSH key lifecycle management platform for visibility, automation, and control
Federated identity platform for authenticating machine workloads w/o secrets
Identity provider for AI agents with secrets mgmt and access control
Zero Trust access control platform for AI agents, services, and users
IAM solution for AI agents and agentic AI authentication and authorization
Service account lifecycle management from discovery to decommissioning
How to choose Non-Human Identity tools
- Examine the discovery surface. A tool that sees cloud IAM roles but misses SaaS OAuth grants, CI/CD tokens, and on-prem service accounts leaves your largest gaps unmanaged.
- Look for entitlement and blast-radius context, not just an inventory. Knowing a key exists matters less than knowing what it can touch and which credentials are over-permissioned or dormant.
- Test how it handles credential lifecycle. Detecting stale, hardcoded, or shared secrets is the baseline, but rotation guidance and ownership attribution are what actually reduce risk.
- Decide whether you need agentic identity coverage now or soon. AI agents and autonomous workloads spawn short-lived, fast-multiplying identities that older NHI scanners were never designed to track.
- Weigh integration depth with your existing secrets manager, CSPM, and IdP rather than treating this as a replacement. The best NHI tools enrich what you already run instead of standing up a parallel system.
- Separate detection from enforcement. Some tools stop at visibility and risk scoring; others can revoke, rotate, or block. Match the automation level to how much you trust acting on machine identities without breaking production.
Non-Human Identity Tools FAQ
Common questions about Non-Human Identity tools, selection guides, pricing, and comparisons.
It is the practice of discovering, governing, and securing every identity that is not a person: service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, secrets, and machine, workload, and AI agent identities. NHI security tools inventory these identities across cloud and SaaS, map their permissions, flag stale or over-privileged credentials, and enforce least privilege so machine identities do not become an unmonitored breach path.
PAM controls privileged human and some service-account access through sessions and vaulting. Secrets managers store and rotate credentials. NHI security sits above both: it discovers the full population of machine identities wherever they live, attributes ownership, scores risk, and governs entitlements across systems. It often integrates with your secrets manager and IdP rather than replacing them, supplying the inventory and posture layer those tools lack.
Machine identities now outnumber human ones in most enterprises, often by ten to one or more, and they behave differently. They are created automatically, rarely rotated, frequently over-permissioned, and largely invisible to IAM tooling built around employee joiners, movers, and leavers. Generic identity governance was never designed to discover an orphaned API key or a dormant service account, which is exactly where attackers look.
Start with discovery breadth: it should see across cloud IAM, SaaS OAuth grants, CI/CD systems, and on-prem service accounts, not one silo. Then prioritize entitlement context and blast-radius analysis, credential lifecycle detection, integration with your existing secrets manager and IdP, and whether you need agentic AI identity coverage. Finally, decide how much enforcement you want versus visibility alone.
Possibly. A CSPM sees cloud misconfigurations and a secrets manager stores credentials, but neither gives you a unified inventory of non-human identities with ownership, usage, and entitlement risk across cloud and SaaS together. If you cannot answer how many service accounts hold admin rights or which tokens sit unused, a dedicated NHI tool fills that gap. If your estate is small and single-cloud, your existing tools may be enough for now.
