externalsecret-operator VS helm-secrets

If you are using an external KMS in any case, then there are other options, such as the kubernetes-external-secrets operator that was originally started by GoDaddy and the externalsecret-operator from Container Solutions. If you use HashiCorp Vault, you also have the option of using the Vault Secrets operator. This works similarly to the Sealed Secrets Operator, but instead of managing its own key material, it retrieves the secrets from Vault. The CNCF Technology Radar from January 2021 provides an overview of the types of tools that are available for secrets management.

helm plugin install https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff helm plugin install https://github.com/aslafy-z/helm-git helm plugin install https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets

I use Helm secrets which integrates Mozilla Sops to handle secrets in my Helm charts.

Use Helm Secrets.

ArgoCD users would have to build container images with SOPS baked in using Helm chart extensions or Kustomize extensions. Flux allows configuring sops directly into the Flux manifests.

There is also the helm secrets plugin, which can also be used in ArgoCD with manual configuration.

Not sure if this is applicable for your use case, but you could use helm-secrets to fetch remote value files from https or git: https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets/wiki/Values

$ helm plugin install https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets --version v3.14.0

https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets powered by sops

SOPS is great, and there are a lot of GitOps tools that either integrate with SOPS directly or make it relatively painless to integrate into your workflow, e.g. helm-secrets.

SOPS and helm-secrets: https://github.com/jkroepke/helm-secrets