Dotvault vs Infisical

Infisical is the open-source darling of the secrets-management world — a proper platform with a dashboard, access policies, environment scoping, integrations into CI/CD, and both SaaS and self-hosted deployment options. Dotvault is a single-user macOS app for editing the .env files that already live on your laptop. These two live in different universes. The reason to compare them is less “which one should I pick” and more “which one is the right shape for the problem I actually have”.

Quick comparison

Feature	Dotvault	Infisical
What it is	macOS desktop app for editing .env files	Open-source secrets platform for teams
Deployment model	Local on your Mac	SaaS cloud or self-hosted
Open source	Closed-source commercial	Yes, MIT
Pricing	£29 one-time	Free SaaS tier, paid plans for teams; free self-hosted
Team features	None — single developer	Roles, approvals, audit logs, SSO
Offline use	Fully offline	Requires the platform to be running
Best for	Managing your own .env files locally	A team’s whole secrets story at scale

Platform versus desktop tool

Infisical is a platform. There’s a web dashboard, user accounts, organisations, projects, environments, and a fairly comprehensive API. Secrets are stored centrally, pushed into the services that need them via the Infisical CLI, SDKs, or webhooks. When a secret rotates, the platform is where that rotation happens, and everything downstream picks up the new value. It’s the same shape as a small internal product you might build yourself if you had the time and the team to build it — which is arguably why it’s open source.

Dotvault isn’t a platform. It’s a desktop app. It doesn’t have a server, doesn’t have accounts, and doesn’t push secrets anywhere. It opens the .env files already on your machine and makes them easier to edit, version, and understand. The scope is deliberately narrow, because the audience is developers who don’t want or need a platform — they want a better text editor for one specific kind of file.

So the question isn’t really which one is better. It’s whether the problem you’re solving is “my team needs shared, rotatable, auditable secrets across every environment” or “I’d like to stop breaking my local .env every time I touch it”.

Self-hosting and open source

This is where Infisical has a real and distinct advantage that Dotvault doesn’t try to compete with: if you need to run your secrets platform on your own infrastructure, under your own control, with full visibility into the code, Infisical is one of the better answers currently available. You can clone the repo, deploy it behind your VPN, and never send a secret to a third-party cloud. For regulated industries and security-conscious teams, that’s a big deal.

Dotvault is closed-source. It runs on your Mac, never phones home with file contents, and encrypts your .env at rest using the macOS keychain — so there’s a real “never leaves your machine” story — but the code is not available for audit. If your organisation’s policy requires the source of every tool that touches a secret to be reviewable, Dotvault won’t pass that bar and Infisical will.

This is a fair trade between the two. Infisical is more auditable; Dotvault is simpler and doesn’t require you to run anything. Different preferences, different answers.

Team workflow versus solo developer workflow

Infisical’s whole design is built around teams. Who can read which secret, who can edit, who needs to approve changes, who gets notified when something rotates, who can see the audit trail. All of that is first-class. If you’re in a team of twenty people and need real access controls, Infisical gives you that out of the box.

Dotvault is built for the person sat at a single laptop. No account, no roles, no sharing, no audit trail beyond the per-file snapshot history on your own machine. If your problem is “I need to collaborate on secrets with my team”, Dotvault is the wrong shape of tool — you’d end up bolting sharing on top of it, badly. If your problem is “I have my own copy of a project’s .env files and they’re getting unwieldy”, that’s exactly what Dotvault is for.

Many developers working on an Infisical-powered team project will still end up with a local .env.local they edit by hand for their own development overrides. That’s the file Dotvault is for — not the team’s canonical secrets store.

Who should use which

Use Infisical if you have a team, if you need to centralise secrets across many environments, if access control and audit logs are real requirements, or if you specifically need an open-source, self-hostable option so you can keep secrets inside your own infrastructure.

Use Dotvault if you’re working on your own .env files on your own Mac and the thing slowing you down isn’t distributing secrets across a team — it’s keeping the file in one piece while you iterate. One-time £29, no account, no subscription, no server to run.

The two aren’t in competition so much as they’re different steps on the same ladder. A solo developer who eventually grows into a team might start with Dotvault and adopt Infisical when sharing becomes the real problem. That’s a perfectly reasonable path.