Best Password Manager for API Keys and Secrets (2025)

Your team probably already uses a password manager. But ask yourself this: where are your API keys? Your CI/CD tokens? The database credentials that your deployment scripts pull at 3 AM?

Standard password managers are designed for people — they assume a human is sitting at a keyboard, clicking "copy," and pasting into a login form. Machine-to-machine secrets are a fundamentally different problem. They need programmatic access, audit trails that separate human from automated usage, and architectures that don't collapse if a single vault is breached.

After digging into the security landscape, we found two solutions that actually get this right — each for a different reason.

The Two Paths to Secrets Management

The market for API-key storage splits into two philosophies. One says: build a separate, API-first vault that's isolated from human passwords. The other says: let organizations keep the keys in their own infrastructure, on their own terms.

Both are valid. Which one fits you depends on how much control you need — and how much complexity you're willing to manage.

Keeper Business: The Integrated Secrets Manager

Keeper's approach is the most straightforward for DevOps teams. Their Keeper Secrets Manager (KSM) is a dedicated, API-first secrets vault that sits alongside — but entirely separate from — their human-facing password manager.1

What does that mean in practice? Your developers authenticate via CLI or SDK, pull secrets programmatically, and never expose raw keys in environment variables or config files. KSM integrates directly with CI/CD pipelines, so your GitHub Actions or Jenkins jobs can fetch credentials at deploy time without storing them in plaintext anywhere.1

The separation matters. If a developer's master password is phished, the API-key vault isn't compromised — it uses its own encryption keys and access policies. Keeper also provides granular role-based access controls, so you can grant read-only access to a staging server and full access to production — and audit every single request.3

For organizations already running Keeper for human passwords, adding KSM is a natural extension. The same admin console, the same compliance reporting, but a completely isolated secrets layer.

Enpass: Data Sovereignty First

Enpass takes a different — and for some organizations, more compelling — route. Instead of storing your data on a vendor's server, Enpass lets you keep your encrypted vault wherever you choose: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox, OneDrive, or even a local network drive.2

This is a big deal for regulated industries or companies with strict data residency requirements. If your compliance team needs to certify that API keys never leave EU data centers, Enpass makes that trivially true — because you control the storage layer. The vault is encrypted locally with your master password before it ever touches your cloud provider, and Enpass never sees the decryption key.2

The trade-off? Enpass doesn't have a dedicated secrets-management API like KSM. You can store API keys and machine credentials in your Enpass vault, and the desktop app includes CLI-based access, but it's not purpose-built for the automated, high-frequency credential rotation that DevOps teams often need. It's best suited for smaller teams or organizations where control over where data lives outweighs programmatic access speed.

How They Compare

Which One Should You Pick?

Choose Keeper Business if your team needs a proper secrets-management workflow — automated credential rotation, CI/CD pipeline integration, and strict separation between human and machine access. It's the more complete solution for engineering teams that treat infrastructure as code.1

Choose Enpass if your primary concern is data sovereignty. If your compliance framework requires that secrets never touch a third-party server, or if you want to use existing enterprise cloud storage (M365, Google Workspace) as your vault backend, Enpass gives you that control without sacrificing strong encryption.2

Either way, the worst option is doing nothing. API keys hardcoded in config files, tokens passed as environment variables, secrets stored in shared spreadsheets — these are the breaches waiting to happen. Pick a system, any system, that treats machine credentials as first-class citizens.

Recomate earns affiliate commissions from some of the products featured here, at no cost to you. We only recommend the things actually worth buying — tested, verified, and cited.

Want a follow-up the article didn't answer? Ask the engine — it carries the article's context.