What is the difference between Hashicorp open-source vault and Hashicorp enterprise vault

What is the difference between Hashicorp open-source vault and Hashicorp enterprise vault.

I am trying to use Hashicorp open-source vault to save my properties. Now I have created an account on Hashicorp and store some secret as key values. Which I am going to integrate in my spring boot application.

But What I can see is It is allowing me store only 25 secrets in cloud. Check in image below. My definition of open-source is like I can host this in my server and can be store as much screw as I want. Correct me If my understanding is wrong here.

enter image description here

What is the correct way to use open-source in case of Hashicorp vault to integrate with my spring-boot application

This is a fairly large question and I’m barely scratching the surface here, but essentially if you think “which features would an enterprise need?” and it’s not in Vault’s code-available version, that’s where Enterprise comes into play:

Disaster Recovery, Performance Replication, automated upgrades, automated storage snapshots, namespaces so you can have multiple teams/orgs using the same Vault instance, I’ll also give a shoutout to Sentinel Policies - an incredibly powerful tool for automating Vault-related actions. Enterprise and HCP also come with support from HashiCorp in case anything goes wrong.

Vault Ent isn’t for every use-case, but it’s got a lot of power behind it which empowers its users to operate Vault in a robust, reliable and stress-free manner. My opinion is that, if it’s mission critical, you should be using Enterprise. Though I’m probably biased :smile:

HCP includes a lot of these features out of the gate, enabling a lot of practitioners to get started for a much lower cost and with a much lower barrier to entry, in terms of technical knowledge required to get up and running.

I can’t offer specific guidance around your springboot application, since I don’t know anything about it. A bit like asking “what advice can you give me about my pet” without offering any information about the pet :smile: A goldfish will have drastically different requirements compared to a greyhound.

If it’s just key/value storage, OSS or HCP may be your best bet. If you need resiliency, performance, automation, support, or any of the other features that ship with Enterprise, HCP or Enterprise would be the way to go.

Thank you @conor-mccullough for in detail answer. This has given me fair idea about what to pick and when to move to enterprise. I am assuming migration for OSS to Enterprise won’t be difficult task. Also I like the pet analogy which you given. I am using spring boot so thought to put more clarity in question.

1 Like