Every category where a model named OpenBao 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	2%	9 of 40	12%	17	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for OpenBao 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 OpenBao 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	0	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	3	1	2	6
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	0	0	1
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	0	2	0	2
Mistral Small	0	1	0	0	1
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	2	0	0	2
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	1	0	0	1
Kimi K2	0	2	1	0	3
GLM 4.7 FlashX	1	0	0	0	1
MiniMax M2.5	0	0	0	0	0

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

Direct3 labelsNone

Paraphrase1 labelNone

Comparative7 labelsNone

Budget-constrained14 labels1

Scale-constrained1 labelNone

Negative8 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative34 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 of the 1 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 have a platform team and want a proven solution → OpenBao (free, truly open source)” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Secrets · budget prompt · first choice

“offers a direct, community-driven alternative... Cons: Requires the same high operational and self-hosting overhead as Vault.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Secrets · scale prompt · alternative

“you should look at OpenBao (a fork of Vault created specifically in response to this license change)” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Secrets · negative prompt · alternative

“consider the community fork OpenBao (Linux Foundation), which restored the open-source license” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Secrets · negative 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.

“HashiCorp Vault (or the open-source fork OpenBao): Historically the industry standard, but Vault is notoriously difficult to configure” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Secrets · direct prompt · soft negative

“It is notoriously complex to set up, configure, and maintain. It requires dedicated platform engineering hours.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Secrets · budget prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as OpenBao, over the 34 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and OpenBao was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

HashiCorp Vault32 of 345Not in the top three

Infisical31 of 3414Not in the top three

Doppler28 of 347Not in the top three

AWS Secrets Manager28 of 340Not in the top three

Google Secret Manager20 of 340Not in the top three

Azure Key Vault18 of 340Not in the top three

Bitwarden Secrets Manager17 of 344Not in the top three

Akeyless17 of 342Not in the top three

SOPS15 of 341Not in the top three

1Password14 of 340Not 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 OpenBao. 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 22 of the 34 answers that named OpenBao and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

blog.gitguardian.com18

infisical.com14

startwithidentity.com14

envmanager.com11

cyberpresso.com8

cybervendorguide.com8

geekflare.com8

guptadeepak.com8

dev.to6

cycode.com5

100 of the 100 domain citations in answers naming OpenBao came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

blog.gitguardian.com/top-secrets-management-tools18

envmanager.com/blog/best-secrets-management-tools10

infisical.com/blog/best-secret-management-tools9

cyberpresso.com/reviews/best-secrets-management-tools8

geekflare.com/cybersecurity/best-secret-management8

startwithidentity.com/rankings/best-secrets-management-tools8

startwithidentity.com/articles/top-6-open-source-secrets-management7

cybervendorguide.com/guides/secrets-management6

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as OpenBao

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as OpenBao; a claim can dispute any of them.

OpenBao (by the Linux Foundation) 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when OpenBao's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as OpenBao, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at openbao.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.