Every category where a model named AWS Secrets Manager for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Secrets management	Identity and access	4%	5 of 40	13%	60	accepted challenger
Privileged access management	Identity and access	0%	24 of 74	33%	3	under 10 labels · led by ManageEngine PAM360 at 21%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for AWS Secrets Manager yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated AWS Secrets Manager across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	3	1	0	4
GPT-5.4 mini	0	4	2	0	6
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	3	0	3	6
Perplexity Sonar	0	2	1	3	6
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	4	2	0	6
Mistral Small	0	3	1	0	4
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	5	0	1	7
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	2	1	4
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	3	0	0	4
Kimi K2	0	3	1	1	5
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	4	1	0	5
MiniMax M2.5	0	5	1	0	6

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct30 labelsNone

Paraphrase32 labels4

Comparative35 labelsNone

Budget-constrained26 labels1

Scale-constrained22 labelsNone

Negative27 labels1not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative172 labels in all, every segment counted; 5 of the 6 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“If you're all-in on one cloud (e.g., AWS or Azure) → use that cloud's native manager (Secrets Manager or Key Vault) first. It's the fastest to adopt” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Secrets · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“Start with AWS Secrets Manager (if you are fully cloud-native) to keep things simple.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Secrets · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“if you're heavily invested in a single cloud provider, their native solution (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, or Google Cloud Secret Manager) may be simpler to adopt” MiniMax M2.5 · Secrets · scale prompt · alternative

“For organizations primarily on AWS ... AWS Secrets Manager provides native AWS integration and automatic rotation ... as the path of least resistance.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Secrets · paraphrase prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and similar tools are fine in the right context, but they can create fragmentation and vendor coupling if you operate across multiple clouds.” Perplexity Sonar · Secrets · negative prompt · soft negative

“when used as *exclusive* solutions - Caution: Tight coupling to one cloud provider makes multi-cloud or migration strategies difficult” Kimi K2 · Secrets · negative prompt · soft negative

“AWS Secrets Manager is relatively expensive when scaling to thousands of individual secrets” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Secrets · comparative prompt · soft negative

“can be more affordable for focused use cases, but they are not full broad PAM replacements” Perplexity Sonar · PAM · budget prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as AWS Secrets Manager, over the 172 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and AWS Secrets Manager was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

HashiCorp Vault160 of 17258Not in the top three

Doppler123 of 17252Not in the top three

Azure Key Vault120 of 1720Not in the top three

Infisical98 of 17221Not in the top three

Google Secret Manager94 of 1720Not in the top three

1Password78 of 17210Not in the top three

Akeyless57 of 1724Not in the top three

Bitwarden Secrets Manager44 of 1725Not in the top three

CyberArk Conjur44 of 1720Not in the top three

OpenBao28 of 1721Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named AWS Secrets Manager. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 133 of the 172 answers that named AWS Secrets Manager and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

blog.gitguardian.com98

envmanager.com77

startwithidentity.com77

safeguard.sh56

doppler.com46

infisical.com45

cycode.com40

guideflow.com39

akeyless.io38

cybervendorguide.com38

554 of the 554 domain citations in answers naming AWS Secrets Manager came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

blog.gitguardian.com/top-secrets-management-tools98

envmanager.com/blog/best-secrets-management-tools75

startwithidentity.com/rankings/best-secrets-management-tools58

cycode.com/blog/best-secrets-management-tools39

guideflow.com/blog/secrets-management-software39

safeguard.sh/resources/blog/best-secrets-management-and-vaulting-solutions36

cybervendorguide.com/guides/secrets-management30

worldmetrics.org/best/secrets-management-software30

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

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