What is OpenBao?
OpenBao was created in 2024 after HashiCorp relicensed Vault to BSL, breaking open-source compatibility. Hosted under the Linux Foundation's OpenSSF umbrella, it preserves the MPL 2.0 license and adds active community governance with co-maintainers from Adfinis, ControlPlane, GitLab, IOTech, SAP, and WALLIX.
Read the full overview
The project reached a critical adoption inflection in 2026: NVIDIA and GitLab publicly endorsed it, GitLab 19.0 ships OpenBao as its native secrets engine, and Broadcom integrated it into vSphere Supervisor as part of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. Percona Server for MongoDB and EdgeX Foundry 4.0 also switched their default secret store to OpenBao.
Open source secrets management, fork of HashiCorp Vault
Key capabilities
- Dynamic secrets - short-lived credentials generated on demand for databases, cloud providers, SSH, and PKI.
- KV store - versioned key-value secret storage with access control at path level.
- Encryption as a service - transit engine for data encryption without exposing keys.
- Auth methods - Kubernetes, OIDC, LDAP, AWS, GitHub, and more.
- Audit logging - tamper-evident log of every secret access and operation.
Most teams start with .env files or CI variables and eventually face a credentials sprawl incident. OpenBao provides the audit trail, rotation, and least-privilege access that static secrets cannot. The Linux Foundation stewardship removes the licensing uncertainty that stalled Vault adoption after HashiCorp's 2023 BSL shift, making OpenBao the credible long-term open alternative backed by enterprise contributors.
“Open source secrets management, fork of HashiCorp Vault”
Technical details
- Access
- Self-hosted
- Source model
- Open source
- Founded
- 2024
- Pricing model
- Open source
- API
- Available
- Website
- openbao.org ↗
- GitHub
- Source repository ↗
What to verify
Profile audiences: Developers, DevOps Engineers, System Administrators.
- Confirm current features, licensing and support terms.
- Validate deployment, data location and access control.
- Test integrations, exports and recovery workflows.
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