Infisical vs Knox
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted password managers options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Infisical
Open-source secrets management platform for developers
VS
Knox
Service for storing and rotating application secrets
| Feature | Infisical | Knox |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 98 · Excellent | 65 · Good |
| Category | Password Managers | Password Managers |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 256 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, binary, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 29,401 | ★ 1,271 |
| First released | 2022 | 2016 |
| Replaces | AWS Secrets Manager, Doppler, HashiCorp Vault | HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager |
What are Infisical and Knox?
Infisical
Infisical is an open-source platform for managing and syncing secrets across teams and infrastructure. It offers a friendly dashboard, secret versioning, automatic rotation and integrations with CI/CD tools.
- Centralized secrets dashboard
- Secret versioning and rotation
- Native CI/CD and Kubernetes integrations
- Point-in-time secret recovery
Knox
Knox is an open-source secret management service developed at Pinterest. It stores, rotates and provides access control for sensitive keys, passwords and certificates used by applications.
- Centralized secret storage
- Key rotation and versioning
- Access control lists
- Audit logging
Infisical vs Knox: key differences
Infisical is written in TypeScript, while Knox is built with Go. Licensing differs — MIT for Infisical versus Apache-2.0 for Knox. Knox is the lighter option, starting around 256 MB of RAM against 512 MB for Infisical. Knox is the more established project (first released 2016), while Infisical arrived in 2022. Infisical has the considerably larger community, at 29,401 GitHub stars versus 1,271.
Why pick each one
Choose Infisical if…
- Excellent developer UX
- Broad integration catalog
Watch out for
- Some enterprise features gated
Choose Knox if…
- Battle-tested at Pinterest
- Simple Go service
Watch out for
- Smaller community
Frequently asked questions
Is Infisical or Knox better?
Neither is universally better. Infisical has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Infisical and Knox free and open-source?
Yes. Infisical is licensed under MIT and Knox under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Infisical and Knox with Docker?
Infisical: yes. Knox: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Infisical or Knox?
Knox has the smaller minimum footprint at 256 MB of RAM, compared to about 512 MB for Infisical. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.