Akeyless Multi-Cloud KMS BYOK vs Tang: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Akeyless Multi-Cloud KMS BYOK is a commercial key management tool by Akeyless Security. Tang is a free key management tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best key management fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Enterprise and mid-market security teams managing encryption keys across AWS, Azure, and GCP will find Akeyless Multi-Cloud KMS BYOK valuable for eliminating key sprawl without surrendering control to hyperscaler KMS services. The platform's automated rotation, centralized audit trails, and NIST PR.AA and PR.DS alignment mean you're not just centralizing key management; you're building a control plane that actually shows you who accessed what and when. Skip this if your organization runs primarily on a single cloud and lacks the compliance pressure that makes BYOK economics work, or if you need the KMS to also handle application secrets and database credentials in one system.
Teams protecting stateless services or ephemeral infrastructure in airgapped or hostile networks should choose Tang for its ability to bind decryption to network presence rather than individual credentials. The free, open-source model (670 GitHub stars) means you can deploy it without vendor lock-in and audit the binding mechanism yourself. Skip Tang if your threat model requires per-user key derivation or if your decryption clients can't maintain reliable network connectivity to a single Tang server; network presence is a weaker signal than possession for most cloud-native architectures.
