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	Since September 2026
Non-human identity management	Identity and access	5%	10 of 128	0%	5	under 10 labels · led by JumpCloud at 14%
Secrets management	Identity and access	0%	15 of 59	18%	11	accepted challenger	▼−2Since September 2026: 2% → 0%, −2 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

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 and per category, 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. Fourteen models, six prompts per category.

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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	1	1	1	1	4
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	0	0	1
Grok 4.20	0	0	2	0	2
Mistral Small	0	0	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	1	0	0	1
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	0	0	0
Kimi K2	1	1	0	0	2
GLM 4.7 FlashX	1	1	0	0	2
MiniMax M2.5	0	0	0	0	0
GPT-6 Luna	0	1	0	1	2
Muse Glimmer 30B	0	2	0	0	2

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

Paraphrase4 labelsNone

Comparative5 labelsNone

Budget-constrained22 labels4

Scale-constrained3 labelsNone

Negative4 labels1not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative41 labels in all, every segment counted; 4 of the 5 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.

“Start with OpenBao if you have technical resources to self-host, or Infisical if you prefer a managed solution” Kimi K2 · NHI management · budget prompt · first choice

“HashiCorp Vault or OpenBao (a community-driven, MPL-licensed fork of Vault managed by the Linux Foundation)” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Secrets · negative prompt · first choice

“I'd recommend starting with HashiCorp Vault/OpenBao for core functionality” GLM 4.7 FlashX · NHI management · budget prompt · first choice

“best when cost matters more than convenience, because they are fully open source and therefore free, but they can be more complex to operate” Perplexity Sonar · Secrets · budget 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.

“avoids license fees if you self-host, but you’ll need to account for the staff time and responsibility involved in operating it” GPT-6 Luna · Secrets · budget prompt · soft negative

“Drawback: Extremely complex to set up, configure for High Availability (HA), and maintain.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Secrets · budget prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as OpenBao, over the 41 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.

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ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

HashiCorp Vault37 of 418Not among the top eight

Infisical35 of 4114Not among the top eight

Doppler32 of 418Not among the top eight

AWS Secrets Manager28 of 412Not among the top eight

Google Secret Manager24 of 410Not among the top eight

Azure Key Vault21 of 410Not among the top eight

Akeyless17 of 410Not among the top eight

Bitwarden Secrets Manager15 of 413Not among the top eight

SOPS14 of 411Not among the top eight

CyberArk Conjur9 of 410Not among the top eight

A head-to-head page exists where both products are among a category's top eight. 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, five of the fourteen in this edition, so these counts come from 41 of the 41 answers that named OpenBao and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

infisical.com30

blog.gitguardian.com21

akeyless.io18

cybersecuritynews.com17

doppler.com16

startwithidentity.com16

envmanager.com15

blog.railway.com14

cycode.com13

dupple.com12

172 of the 172 domain citations in answers naming OpenBao came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

blog.gitguardian.com/top-secrets-management-tools21

infisical.com/blog/best-secret-management-tools20

blog.railway.com/p/best-secrets-management-202614

envmanager.com/blog/best-secrets-management-tools14

cybersecuritynews.com/best-secrets-management-tools13

cycode.com/blog/best-secrets-management-tools13

dupple.com/learn/best-secrets-management-tools12

cyberpress.org/secrets-management-by-use-case11

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Search and answers

openbao.org is not in Google's top ten for any of the category's searches. In the answers, OpenBao takes 5% of first choices and JumpCloud takes 14%.

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In search

Google, US estimates

Position for “non-human identity management platforms”

–

not in the top ten

Position for “best non-human identity management platform”

–

not in the top ten

Searches for its name, Google: 1,600 a month (“openbao”)
AI search demand for its name, est.: 13 a month
Organic visits to its site: about 1,491 a month
Searches its site ranks for: 119 · 27 in the top three
Sites linking to it: 840
Paid Google search: No ads found in the estimate; that does not mean it runs none

Ads on Google

None found in Google's ad transparency records for the US

In answers

This edition

Share of first choices

rank 10 of 128 in NHI management

Segment leader

14%

JumpCloud

First choices: 4 across its categories
Named in: 41 answers
Its own site cited: in 41 of the answers that named it

Search figures are US estimates from DataForSEO, read September 28, 2026; AI search demand is its modeled, directional estimate, not a count of queries to any assistant. The answers are this edition's. Two measurements side by side: neither is read as the cause of the other.

What it publishes

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Addresses on openbao.org

1,843

subdomains included

Content

counted in the table below

Documentation

1,649

Product · Integration

0 · 0

Kind	Pages	Last 90 days	Latest
Blog	36	9	2026-08-18
Report or ebook	29	undated
Glossary or explainer	8	undated
Template or tool	4	undated

Most recent

2026-08-18Release v2 6 0 blog
2026-08-12Flux openbao secrets signatures blog
2026-08-06Features recursive list blog
2026-07-30Features declarative plugins blog
2026-07-27Karras os siemens 2026 talk blog
2026-07-21Features declarative configuration blog

How it is countedHide how it is counted

Every page openbao.org exposes, subdomains included. Kind is read from the address and title. The last 90 days, the latest date and the twelve months count pages by when they were published, from the site's feeds, a date in the address, or the page's own publication date, read from up to a hundred of its most recently changed pages; a page that says only when it last changed is counted in its kind but not in when, so the recent counts are a floor, and a kind none of whose pages gives a publication date reads undated. Read September 29, 2026.

Follow OpenBao

An email the morning each edition publishes: where this product moved, where it held, and by how much against the noise floor. One address, confirmed by a click; a stop link in every email.

Already following? Everything you follow, with a stop for each.

The company

OpenBao is its own company.

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In its own words

Stated by the vendor, not checked

Positioning: an open source, community-driven secrets manager and fork of Vault managed by the Linux Foundation's OpenSSF
openbao.org
For: organizations
openbao.org
Not stated on the pages read: Price, starting price, free plan or trial, integrations, certifications, hosting, customers

What OpenBao's own pages state, read September 28, 2026: openbao.org, openbao.org/docs/internals/security, openbao.org/blog/tags/integrations. A claimed page can correct any of them.

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.

What a new claim receivesHide what a new claim receives

A new claim receives the current edition's vendor brief for OpenBao by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:

where OpenBao is named, by buyer and by framing, and which cells hold its first choices;
the claims the models make when they name it, ranked, with the strongest and the weakest quoted;
its vocabulary against the segment leader's, and the pages the models cited;
who was chosen in the answers that did not name OpenBao, and every reason the record gives;
a battlecard for each top rival: the head-to-head split, why they win, and the reservation quoted against them;
one page of published figures cleared to show a buyer.