Bitwarden Secrets Manager vs Infisical

Bitwarden Secrets Manager

End-to-end encrypted, decrypted only on the client that holds the token. No release since 22 May 2026, and the npm SDK is still 1.0.0 from September 2024.

Infisical

Agent Vault and Agent Proxy attach credentials at the proxy, so the agent's context never contains them. Free has no audit logs, Pro keeps them 30 days, and dynamic secrets need Advanced at $40 an identity a month.

Bitwarden Secrets Manager

1. Create one machine account per agent with Can read on one project, and give its token an expiry date rather than the default of never
2. Run the agent under bws run -- <cmd> so secrets arrive as environment variables and aren't written to disk or into the context
3. Fetch with bws secret list <project-id> --output json once per run; bws secret get needs the secret's UUID, not its name
4. Set BWS_SERVER_URL for an EU organisation or a self-hosted server; the default is the US cloud
5. Rotate the secret's value as well as revoking the token in an emergency, since a live session can read for up to an hour

Infisical

1. Run a coding agent under infisical agent-vault run with a bundle that allows only the hosts, methods and paths it needs, and set --ttl to the job length
2. Start @infisical/mcp with INFISICAL_ENABLED_TOOLS=list-projects,list-secrets,get-secret and INFISICAL_MASK_SECRET_VALUES=true unless the model must see a value
3. Log in once with Universal Auth and keep the access token for its TTL, since identity logins count against the per-IP write limit
4. Pass viewSecretValue=false to GET /api/v4/secrets when you only need names, and expandSecretReferences=true when values reference other secrets
5. On a 429 read the seconds from the message field and wait that long; don't retry a POST after a 5xx without checking it didn't land