Top non-human identity (NHI) platforms of 2025

2025 is the year Non-Human Identity (NHI) became a top security priority. Over 50 breaches linked to NHI were reported in just the first half of the year. Gartner formally recognized machine identities as its own category, and startups in this space raised over $400 million in funding.

NHI now touches everything from access management, automated processes, and compliance to incident response and posture management. It deserves the same level of attention as human identity, and that starts with choosing a platform designed to manage it properly.

This guide will break down the top NHI platforms of 2025. For each tool, we’ll explore where they excel, where they fall short, and how to choose the one that fits your team’s infrastructure, scale, and security needs.

Why NHI tools are key for access management

Most engineering teams already manage dozens, sometimes hundreds, of non-human identities, even if they don’t call them that. API keys hardcoded into CI configs, shared service tokens, workload identities running inside containers, and automation bots with wide access are all NHIs. And when left unmanaged, they’re one of the easiest ways for attackers to move laterally, escalate privileges, or leak sensitive data.

It also doesn’t help that traditional secrets managers and Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools weren’t designed for this volume or speed. What used to be manageable with static API keys or service accounts has become a constant stream of short-lived identities that spin up and disappear across pipelines, services, and environments. Furthermore, unlike human identities, these non-human entities often lack secure methods of rotation, auditing, and continuous monitoring, which makes identity sprawl a real threat.

Modern NHI platforms are built to handle this shift. They manage short-lived identities at scale, tie access to specific workloads, log every action, and give developers the tools to plug it all into their infrastructure. To help you choose the right fit, we evaluated platforms based on five practical capabilities that impact day-to-day usage.

How we evaluated these platforms

Choosing an NHI platform comes down to how well it handles modern infrastructure realities, such as:

• Secrets lifecycle: The platform should support automated lifecycle management. It should be able to rotate, expire, revoke, and inject secrets across the entire lifecycle of machine identities.
• Access scope: It should support fine-grained permissions that reduce the risk of overexposure and limit access to only what’s necessary.
• Developer experience: Engineers should be able to integrate the platform into their existing workflows with minimal friction or rework.
• Integration surface: The tool should work seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Audit and governance: It should offer complete visibility and centralized oversight into activity across environments, users, and services, with strong audit logs and access tracking.

These are the areas where NHI platforms either hold up or fall apart.

With that in mind, here’s how each platform stacks up across developer experience, access controls, integrations, and operational complexity.

Now that we've seen a high-level comparison, here’s a deeper look at what each platform offers in practice.

Doppler: Developer-first workflows with enterprise-grade control

Screenshot of the Doppler webpage

Doppler is a secrets management platform built to handle machine identities at scale. It’s designed to fit directly into engineering workflows while still providing the controls, visibility, and security that larger organizations need.

Key features

• Automatic syncing, versioning, and rollback
• Scoped access with Role-based access control (RBAC) at the project, environment, and config levels
• Token-based access for services with least-privilege enforcement
• One-click rotation and revocation without touching code
• Integrations with CI tools, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform
• Full audit logging for every change and access event

For larger organizations, Doppler offers strong policy controls and compliance features. Teams can define approval workflows with change request policies, manage access with custom roles and user groups, and connect identity systems through SCIM. Enterprise key management (EKM), on-prem secret rotation, and custom activity log retention give security teams more ownership and support for regulatory and incident response needs.

Doppler also includes advanced monitoring through a secret health dashboard and supports dynamic secrets, making it easier to issue short-lived credentials for zero-standing access. Everything can be fully managed via Terraform, making it automation-ready from day one.

Drawbacks

Doppler is easiest to manage when adopted and standardized across all services. Partial adoption can make it harder to enforce policy or maintain visibility.

HashiCorp Vault

HashiCorp Vault homepage screenshot

HashiCorp Vault is a secrets management tool supporting various infrastructure and automation use cases. Vault offers capabilities like access control, dynamic credential generation, and security mechanisms for managing non-human identities in large-scale environments.

Key features

• Support for dynamic secrets (e.g., database, cloud IAM, SSH)
• Pluggable auth backends including Kubernetes, AWS IAM, AppRole, and more
• Fine-grained access control using Access control lists (ACL) policies
• Encryption-as-a-service for workloads needing built-in encryption without managing keys
• Built-in secret leasing, renewal, and expiration
• Open source core, with additional enterprise features available under a commercial license
• Strong audit logging and access event tracking

Major drawbacks

Despite its strengths, Vault has a high operational cost. Setting it up in a secure and highly available configuration requires significant time and infrastructural knowledge. Vault also doesn’t treat machine identity as a first-class concept. Instead, it relies on manual mappings between services and authentication methods, which makes it harder to scale in fast-changing environments.

Furthermore, integrating secrets into workloads often requires custom scripts, Vault agents, or sidecars, which slows down deployment and increases fragility. And while Vault logs everything, it doesn’t provide much out-of-the-box visibility; teams need to layer on external tools to get real insights.

Infisical

Infisical homepage screenshot

Infisical is a secrets manager that manages machine identities and environment-specific secrets within engineering systems. It’s open-source, easy to self-host, and comes with a strong set of features built specifically for real-world infrastructure.

Key features

• Dynamic secrets for services like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and AWS IAM
• Universal Auth system for generating short-lived tokens for machines
• CLI, agents, and SDKs for injecting secrets without code changes
• RBAC for both human and machine access
• Git-integrated secret scanning and leak prevention
• Open-source with managed cloud options

Major drawbacks

Self-hosting Infisical introduces some operational overhead. You’ll need to manage supporting components like databases and Kubernetes operators, which take planning and ongoing maintenance.

Furthermore, Infisical’s universal auth for generating machine tokens is flexible, but configuring tokens requires effort and a clear understanding of how permissions and lifetimes are applied. Infisical is a strong option for early-stage teams prioritizing visibility, versioned configuration, and self-hosting flexibility. But you’ll want to evaluate how it scales if you're aiming to support multi-team or compliance-heavy use cases.

Akeyless

Akeyless homepage screenshot

Akeyless is a cloud-native platform built for secrets and machine identity management. It handles static and dynamic secrets, ephemeral credentials, and encryption workflows, all without requiring teams to run their own infrastructure. Its zero-knowledge architecture is designed to minimize trust, and it supports a wide range of enterprise authentication methods.

Key features

• Dynamic secrets for databases, cloud IAM, SSH, and TLS
• Just-in-time access with short-lived credentials
• Broad auth support: OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML, AWS IAM, Azure Active Directory
• Zero-knowledge encryption using Distributed Fragments Cryptography
• Built-in audit logging, dashboards, and policy-based access controls
• Hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-prem support with no infrastructure to maintain

Drawbacks

Akeyless gives teams a lot of control, but that flexibility comes with setup complexity. Configuring workload identity, secrets injection, and policy rules, especially in Kubernetes, requires a strong understanding of how the platform is structured.

CyberArk

CyberArk homepage screenshot

CyberArk provides identity security products and has recently expanded its focus to include NHI management. After acquiring Venafi, CyberArk now offers a full suite for machine identities and secrets and powerful tools for managing certificates.

Key features

• Full certificate and key lifecycle management (issuance, rotation, revocation)
• Support for OIDC, SAML, LDAP, cloud IAM, and device-based auth
• Deep integrations with privileged access management tools and enterprise infrastructure
• Centralized inventory of machine identities and certificate health
• SIEM integration and detailed audit logging for compliance and forensics

Drawbacks

CyberArk’s architecture leans toward static identity models, which can be a poor fit for modern environments where machine identities are constantly created and destroyed. Keeping its inventory accurate and synced in dynamic systems like Kubernetes or serverless platforms takes extra effort, and it’s not always built with fast-changing infrastructure in mind.

How to choose the right NHI platform for your team

Don’t start by comparing features. Start by figuring out where your non-human identities live, what cloud resources they touch, and how they affect your security posture and attack surface. Make a list of the services, pipelines, environments, and automated processes that rely on machine credentials or secrets. Ask:

• Are most of your identities running in CI/CD pipelines?
• Do they support cloud services that scale up and down frequently?
• Do internal tools or vendors run automation on your behalf?

Once you have that mapped out, focus on your team's priorities.

• If your goal is to move fast and clean up secrets management, pick a platform that fits into developer workflows without slowing things down. Doppler and Infisical do this well. They support secure communication between services while improving operational efficiency.
• If you also need enterprise controls, such as audit logs, scoped access, and compliance features, Doppler checks those boxes, too. Doppler balances speed with security and reduces the risk of attackers gaining access through mismanaged credentials.
• If you're managing infrastructure across many teams with complex access policies, CyberArk or HashiCorp Vault might be a better fit. These platforms often offer comprehensive security features but demand more human involvement to configure and operate securely.
• If you’re somewhere in the middle, i.e., scaling quickly but not under heavy regulation, Akeyless gives you strong features without the full overhead of enterprise systems.

Choose a platform that fits your current setup, but won’t become a bottleneck when your team grows or your security needs increase. Ready to see how this works in practice? Schedule a Doppler demo to see how it supports both fast-moving teams and strict enterprise requirements.