EnvKey's main focus is on convenience and speed of integration.
- As a hosted service, it offers a ~5-10 minute integration workflow, and doesn't require setting up/maintaining your own secrets server.
- Pulling secrets/config into an app is extremely simple vs. existing open source solutions. You set a single environment variable, add 1-2 lines of code, and you're done. There are a lot fewer hoops to jump through.
- It has a UI that makes it convenient to manage different environments (development, staging, production) right next to each other, and provides a quick visual overview of developer and server access levels. It also offers some other useful capabilities like YAML-style inheritance between environments and quick/secure invitations for collaborators.
In my experience, there are a lot of companies out there who are managing secrets poorly (email, Slack, Google Docs, etc.), but don't necessarily have the capability or desire to make a major DevOps investment in improving the situation. EnvKey offers a much quicker option.
As a side note, while EnvKey's server is not open source, the app and client libraries are all MIT-licensed, and they are designed specifically not to trust the server.
- As a hosted service, it offers a ~5-10 minute integration workflow, and doesn't require setting up/maintaining your own secrets server.
- Pulling secrets/config into an app is extremely simple vs. existing open source solutions. You set a single environment variable, add 1-2 lines of code, and you're done. There are a lot fewer hoops to jump through.
- It has a UI that makes it convenient to manage different environments (development, staging, production) right next to each other, and provides a quick visual overview of developer and server access levels. It also offers some other useful capabilities like YAML-style inheritance between environments and quick/secure invitations for collaborators.
In my experience, there are a lot of companies out there who are managing secrets poorly (email, Slack, Google Docs, etc.), but don't necessarily have the capability or desire to make a major DevOps investment in improving the situation. EnvKey offers a much quicker option.