OpenBao
Top pickVault before the licence changed — forked, MPL-2.0, run by a foundation.
OpenBao is the Linux Foundation's fork of Vault, taken from the last release before the Business Source License and continued under MPL-2.0. It is not a reimplementation or a lookalike: it is the same codebase, so the API, the CLI, the policy language and the storage format are Vault's, and migration is closer to a rename than a port. Governance is the whole point — it sits under a foundation with multiple corporate contributors rather than a single vendor who can change the terms again. Around 6.9k stars and actively developed. If your reason for looking is the licence rather than the product, this is the answer and there is not much more to decide.
What it does well
- +The same codebase — migration from Vault is close to drop-in
- +MPL-2.0 under Linux Foundation governance, not a single vendor's discretion
- +Keeps Vault's dynamic secrets, PKI and transit engines
- +Existing Vault knowledge, tooling and Terraform providers transfer directly
Where it falls short
- −Inherits Vault's operational difficulty in full — this is not the easy option
- −Smaller community than Vault, and the ecosystem is still catching up
- −No enterprise namespaces or vendor support contract
- −Divergence from upstream Vault will grow over time
OpenBao as an alternative to
Where OpenBao shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
OpenBao head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.