Pulumi ESC vs Infisical
Choosing the right secrets management tool is important, and we want you to have as much information as possible to make the choice that best suits your needs. We’ve created this document to help you understand how Pulumi ESC compares with Infisical.
What is Infisical?
Infisical is a secrets management tool that provides a centralized platform for managing and controlling access to secrets. It supports dynamic secret generation, encryption as a service, and comprehensive access policies.
Pulumi ESC vs. Infisical: Similarities
Like Infisical, Pulumi ESC is a secrets manager for cloud applications and infrastructure. In both ESC and Infisical, secrets can be stored and accessed through a CLI, SDK, or web editor interface. Granular access controls can be implemented across all secrets.
Pulumi ESC vs. Infisical: Key differences
Infisical and Pulumi ESC differ in three fundamental ways. First, Infisical manages secrets in its own store and syncs them out to other destinations, while ESC takes an open ecosystem approach: it pulls secrets stored in most secrets and password managers at runtime so you can use them anywhere. Teams can keep using the secrets management solution that fits their needs. Second, ESC environments are composable and hierarchical: an environment can import other environments and inherit their values, so shared configuration is inherited rather than duplicated. Third, ESC takes a software engineering approach to versioning: you can tag an environment and import specific collections of secrets and configuration by those tags, like tags in Docker.
Here’s a detailed comparison of the two:
| Feature | Pulumi ESC | Infisical |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| OSS License | Yes, Apache License 2.0 | Yes, MIT expat license, except for enterprise features in the ee directory, which require an Infisical license |
| Document Store | Yes | No |
| Key-value Store | Yes | Yes |
| Open Ecosystem | Yes, supports pulling and using secrets from multiple sources including HashiCorp Vault, 1Password, AWS Secrets Manager, etc. | Limited, secrets are stored in Infisical and synced out to destinations such as AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault; dynamic secrets can be generated for services such as PostgreSQL and MySQL |
| Developer Experience | ||
| Editing and Authoring | Yes, supports both GUI and powerful Document Editor with autocomplete, docs hover, and error checking | Limited, has GUI editor without YAML support |
| CLI | Yes, available via the pulumi CLI | Yes |
| Client SDKs | Yes | Yes |
| Declarative Provider | Yes, support via the Pulumi Service Provider, which allows management (create, update, delete) of collections of secrets and configuration as a resource through infrastructure as code. | Yes, via the official Infisical Terraform provider |
| Composability | Yes, hierarchical environments inherit values from imported environments | Yes, secret imports pull secrets from another environment or folder, and secret references point to individual secrets |
| Versioning | Yes, entire environments can be versioned and tagged and imported based on the specific version tags or revision numbers | Yes, individual secrets are versioned, and point-in-time recovery rolls a folder or environment back to an earlier state |
| Immutable History & Point-in-Time Recovery | Yes | Yes |
| Values Can Be of Type Secret and Plaintext | Yes | No, values can only be secrets |
| Interpolate Values from Other Values | Yes, new dynamic values can be constructed through string interpolation | No |
| Branching / Personal Configs | Yes, environments can be forked for testing without rewriting entire environments and overriding specific values | Yes, personal overrides let a developer override a secret for themselves while the shared value stays unchanged for the rest of the team |
| Compare Secrets across Environments | Yes, the pulumi env diff command shows the changes between two environments or between two versions of a single environment | Yes |
| Built-in Functions | Yes, support for functions like toJSON, fromJSON, fromBase64, toString allows data manipulation for any scenario | Partial, the Infisical Agent and Kubernetes Operator render secrets through Go templates with Sprig functions; stored values support references but not functions |
| Security and Compliance | ||
| Audit Logs | Yes | Yes |
| Encrypted Secrets Storage | Yes, TLS is used for encryption in transit and unique encryption keys per environment are employed for encryption at rest | Yes |
| Access Controls | Yes | Yes |
| Secure Dynamic Cloud Provider Credentials | Yes, uses OIDC flows to generate dynamic credentials. Available for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. | Yes, dynamic secrets generate AWS IAM users or temporary credentials; Infisical connects to AWS by assuming an IAM role, with IRSA, or with access keys |
| OIDC Trust | Yes, trust relationships are established with third-party OIDC providers | Yes, OIDC Auth lets machine identities authenticate with tokens from third-party OIDC providers such as GitHub Actions |
| Secure Environment Variables | Yes, the pulumi env run CLI command injects only the values an environment exports under environmentVariables, and redacts secret values from the command's output | Yes, the infisical run CLI command can scope the injected secrets by folder path or tag |
| Plaintext Read Only Mode | Yes, ESC offers a read mode that allows reading only plaintext values while not being able to decrypt secrets or access dynamic credentials | Partial, the Describe Secret permission shows secret keys and metadata without their values; Infisical has no separate plaintext value type |
Get Started with Pulumi
Use Pulumi ESC to easily centralize and manage environments, secrets, and configurations. Follow our Get Started guide for ESC to begin. If you want to use Vault or any other secrets manager with ESC, follow the below guides to import secrets from existing secrets managers into ESC environments.
