Akeyless Secrets Management vs Conjur OSS: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Akeyless Secrets Management is a commercial privileged access management tool by Akeyless Security. Conjur OSS is a free privileged access management tool by Conjur. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best privileged access management fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
Mid-market and enterprise teams managing sprawling credential inventories across cloud infrastructure will get the most from Akeyless Secrets Management because it eliminates static secrets without forcing a rip-and-replace of your existing auth stack. The platform's coverage of PR.AA and PR.DS in NIST CSF 2.0, combined with cloud-native deployment, means you're reducing standing access risk without the operational friction of traditional vault migrations. Skip this if you need strong continuous monitoring and threat detection built in; Akeyless prioritizes access control and data protection over anomaly detection, which means you'll still need a separate tool watching for compromise signals.
DevOps and platform teams building on Kubernetes or cloud infrastructure should adopt Conjur OSS because it solves the hardest part of secrets management: getting non-human identities authenticated and authorized without embedding credentials in code or config files. The Secretless Broker feature eliminates the most common way applications leak secrets, and automated identity enrollment means you're not manually provisioning access for every new container or host in elastic environments. Skip this if you need commercial support, audit compliance enforcement, or a managed control plane; Conjur OSS is free but you're running the security operations yourself.
