external-secrets VS Passbolt

Something I personally like about EKS is the Amazon Controllers for Kubernetes nowadays they would more preoperly be called 'operators' like the (non AWS and non AWS specific) External Secrets Operator. Essentially you delegate your cluster to create external resources elsewhere on your behalf based on annotations in your deployment.

Vault is extremely complex and heavy for my tastes, and Bitwarden Secrets Manager implementation AFAIU is not open source and not suitable for self-hosting. I like that both can be easily integrated with External Secrets for kubernetes secrets management.

Store the Secrets in a vault like Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, etc., and then use an operator like External Secrets Operator to add them to your K8s cluster.

External Secrets is an operator that integrates external KMS such as Hashicorp Vault or those of the major cloud providers. It reads secrets from the external APIs and injects them into Kubernetes secrets. The operator is a new implementation after the merge of similar projects from GoDaddy and ContainerSolutions.

I use Kubernetes-External-Secrets https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets with aws parameter store

Passbolt - Open Source Alternative to 1Password

Here's another to add to the list, Passbolt. It is open source and basically built for teams and enterprise. It is design primarily with a unique security model which is based on asymmetric end-to-end encryption, with user-owned encryption keys and support easy cross functional team collaboration. Can it hosted on-prem or host it in cloud depending on your preference. Might be too much information and a tad bias as I work here but wanted you to have all the information as passbolt fits your requirement for business level password manager.

Fyi there is also Passbolt.

I currently switched from keepass to passbolt: https://www.passbolt.com/

I might be bias here as I work here but another recommendation would be passbolt. Open source password manager that is built for teams and businesses. You can either self-host or host it in the cloud, really depending on what you require and supports secure granular sharing of credentials with nested permission in just a few clicks. Its a solution that is built with security as a top priority. It supports asymmetric end-to-end encryption based on OpenPGP cryptography using both public-private key for encryption/decryption. No secret key is stored on the server side. Both the free community edition and the paid pro version are 100% open source.

All that said...here's my shameless plug: I work for passbolt. You mentioned you have a small team, you might give it a look: https://www.passbolt.com/ there's a community edition you can install for free on the server of your choice. I'm here and happy to answer any questions.

Passbolt for passwords (backed up to KeepassX files)

Have you checked out Passbolt? Its open source built for teams and organisations. Supports asymmetric end-to-end encryption, based on OpenPGP. Its on-prem or you can host it in cloud. You can either opt for the Pro/Enterprise version or the free community edition depending on what you need.