HashiCorp Vault is an identity-based secrets management and encryption platform. It stores secrets and issues them programmatically to people, machines and applications, generates and rotates certificates and keys, issues short-lived credentials and offers encryption as a service; access policies are written as code. Vault Community Edition is free and self-managed only. Vault Enterprise adds features such as disaster recovery replication and namespaces, and can be self-managed or run as a managed service on HCP Vault Dedicated.
HashiCorp is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, and has been an IBM subsidiary since the acquisition closed on 27 February 2025. A US parent company is a CLOUD Act signal. HashiCorp itself describes its community products as source-available. When self-managed, you decide where Vault runs and where the secrets are stored; with HCP Vault Dedicated, operation runs through HashiCorp. For a European organisation, self-managing on its own or European infrastructure is therefore the option that keeps the most control on its own side.