# AWS Secrets Manager vs Pulumi ESC (slim)

> AWS Secrets Manager scores 77.7 (BB) on agent readiness against Pulumi ESC's 71.1 (BB), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Pulumi ESC leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do secrets store. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/aws-secrets-manager-vs-pulumi-esc.md (~2,550 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/aws-secrets-manager-vs-pulumi-esc.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/aws-secrets-manager-vs-pulumi-esc
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

AWS Secrets Manager scores 77.7 (BB) on agent readiness against Pulumi ESC's 71.1 (BB), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Pulumi ESC leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do secrets store.

- AWS Secrets Manager: BB 77.7, rank #18 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/aws-secrets-manager.min.md
- Pulumi ESC: BB 71.1, rank #120 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/pulumi-esc.min.md
- AWS Secrets Manager, good for Agents running on AWS compute that should read credentials through a role with no key at all, and for RDS-family databases that need managed rotation. Ahead on Reliability, 77 against 60; Schema & documentation, 96 against 82; Agent ergonomics, 90 against 75; Security & auth, 91 against 79; Transparency & trust, 77 against 65.
- Pulumi ESC, good for Teams already on Pulumi, or anyone who wants one place that composes static secrets, other vaults and short-lived cloud credentials, and agents that need to start with no signup. Ahead on Payments & pricing, 55 against 30; Maintenance & community, 82 against 65. Also Free to start without a card.

| Category | AWS Secrets Manager | Pulumi ESC |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 77 | 60 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 96 | 82 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 90 | 75 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 91 | 79 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 55 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 65 | 82 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 77 | 65 |

| Fact (where they differ) | AWS Secrets Manager | Pulumi ESC |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Amazon Web Services | Pulumi Corporation |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://secretsmanager.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` | `https://api.pulumi.com` |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| Price for secrets store | $0.40 per month (plan) | not published |
| Licence | none | Proprietary service under Pulumi's Terms & Conditions. The Pulumi CLI, the ESC evaluator and the ESC SDKs are Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| Last release | none | 2026-10-07 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-10-01 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-05-18 | no date given |
| Customer content may train models | yes, with an opt-out | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 15.2M npm/wk, 578.4M PyPI/wk | 21k npm/wk, 54k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.9/5 (8) | none |