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Cybersecurity · head to head

Delinea vs Envoy

Delinea logo

Delinea

Cybersecurity

Privileged access management from the merged Thycotic and Centrify

From
On request
Free plan
No
Visit DelineaFull review
Envoy logo

Envoy

Developer Tools

A high-performance L7 proxy written in C++ that is configured by an API rather than a config file, and is usually deployed under a control plane.

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Visit EnvoyFull review

The short version

  • Envoy is free; Delinea prices on request.
  • Only Delinea lists secret Server; only Envoy lists xDS dynamic configuration.
  • Prices and features on this page were last checked on 13 November 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Delinea and Envoy actually diverge.

Attributes where Delinea and Envoy differ
AttributeDelineaEnvoy
Starting priceOn requestFree
Pricing modelQuoteOpen-source
Free tierNoYes
PlatformsWeb, Windows, Linux, macOSWeb
CategoryCybersecurityDeveloper Tools

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Delinea

  • Secret Server
  • Privileged session recording
  • Privilege Manager
  • Server PAM
  • Discovery
  • DevOps secrets
  • Behaviour analytics

Only in Envoy

  • xDS dynamic configuration
  • Protocol breadth
  • Filter chain architecture
  • Observability by default
  • Outlier detection
  • Traffic shaping
  • mTLS termination and origination
  • Hot restart

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Delinea

  • An organisation whose cyber insurer now requires privileged credentials to be vaulted and rotatednot Envoy
  • A mid-market IT team that abandoned a heavier PAM rollout and needs a vault that can be in production in weeksnot Envoy
  • A company removing local administrator rights from every workstation after a ransomware incidentnot Envoy
  • An audit finding that shared service account passwords are stored in a spreadsheet and used by contractorsnot Envoy

Envoy

  • Acting as the data plane under a service mesh or Gateway API implementation, which is how the overwhelming majority of deployments use itnot Delinea
  • An edge or API gateway that needs per-route retry budgets, circuit breaking and outlier detection rather than round-robin proxyingnot Delinea
  • Migrating traffic between service versions or between a monolith and its replacement, using weighted splits and shadow trafficnot Delinea
  • Standardising observability across a polyglot estate, so that latency, error rates and tracing look the same regardless of the language a service is written innot Delinea

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Delinea

  • The Thycotic and Centrify lineages are integrated unevenly, so buying the full portfolio means running consoles and agents that do not share one administrative model as cleanly as the marketing suggests
  • Modules are licensed separately by different units, per privileged user for the vault and per endpoint for privilege management, which makes total cost hard to model and easy to underestimate at scale
  • Delinea does not publish rates, so buyers benchmark against third party and public sector listings; expect list prices to be negotiable by a wide margin, which means the first quote is not the price
  • Thoma Bravo ownership since 2021 has coincided with firmer renewal pricing, and buyers with a single-vendor PAM estate have little leverage once credentials are inside the vault
  • Migrating out of a privileged access vault is a genuinely hard project because every automated process that fetches a secret has to be repointed, so the switching cost is real and the vendor knows it

Envoy

  • The configuration surface is very large and hand-written bootstrap YAML runs to hundreds of lines for routing that Nginx expresses in twenty, which is why nearly every production deployment sits under a control plane and inherits that control plane's constraints as well
  • xDS is the real API and it is not stable in the comfortable sense; the v2 API set was removed outright, resource types continue to be deprecated, and your control plane and Envoy binaries have to be upgraded roughly in step or the proxies stop accepting configuration
  • Extending it properly means writing a C++ filter and building and maintaining your own Envoy binary; the alternatives are Lua, which adds per-request overhead, and proxy-wasm, whose ABI has remained effectively experimental for years with a real performance cost
  • At sidecar density the per-proxy memory and CPU footprint is a measurable share of cluster capacity, since thousands of workloads each carry a full proxy, and this is precisely the cost that has pushed mesh projects towards node-level or ambient architectures
  • There is no single vendor selling support for Envoy itself; you get the community plus control-plane vendors such as Solo.io and Tetrate, so an Envoy-level production bug is your own engineers in a C++ codebase unless a support contract happens to cover it
  • Diagnosing why a request got a particular response involves reading config dumps, the stats endpoint and the RESPONSE_FLAGS codes in access logs rather than a readable error, which is a specific skill you must hire or spend months growing

Pricing, plan by plan

Delinea

On request
  • Secret ServerOn request
    • Priced per privileged user, tiered by edition
    • Cloud or on premises deployment
    • Session recording in higher editions
  • Privilege ManagerOn request
    • Priced per endpoint
    • Local admin rights removal and application elevation
    • Licensed separately from Secret Server
  • Server PAMOn request
    • Priced per managed server or per privileged user
    • Just-in-time server access
    • Licensed separately

Envoy

Free

No published plan breakdown. See the Envoy review.

Which should you pick?

Choose Delinea if

  • You need secret server.
  • You work on Web, Windows, Linux, macOS.
  • You also want privileged session recording.
Delinea review

Choose Envoy if

  • You need xds dynamic configuration.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want protocol breadth.
Envoy review

Questions people ask

Is Delinea or Envoy better?
Neither clearly leads. Delinea starts at On request and Envoy at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Delinea or Envoy?
Envoy has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at On request for Delinea and Free for Envoy.
Does Delinea or Envoy run on more platforms?
Delinea runs on Web, Windows, Linux, macOS. Envoy runs on Web.
Can I use Envoy for free?
Yes. Envoy has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Delinea starts at On request.
What is Delinea best used for?
Delinea is most often used for an organisation whose cyber insurer now requires privileged credentials to be vaulted and rotated, a mid-market it team that abandoned a heavier pam rollout and needs a vault that can be in production in weeks, a company removing local administrator rights from every workstation after a ransomware incident, an audit finding that shared service account passwords are stored in a spreadsheet and used by contractors. Of those, an organisation whose cyber insurer now requires privileged credentials to be vaulted and rotated and a mid-market it team that abandoned a heavier pam rollout and needs a vault that can be in production in weeks are not what Envoy is typically brought in for.
What can Delinea do that Envoy cannot?
Delinea covers Secret Server, Privileged session recording, Privilege Manager, Server PAM. Envoy covers xDS dynamic configuration, Protocol breadth, Filter chain architecture, Observability by default.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Delinea: Is Delinea the same as Thycotic?

Delinea is the merged company formed from Thycotic and Centrify in 2021. Secret Server is the former Thycotic product; the server access products come from Centrify.

Envoy: Should I run Envoy on its own, or under a control plane?

Almost always under one. Directly authoring xDS or static bootstrap configuration is viable for a handful of routes and becomes unmanageable beyond that. Envoy Gateway, Istio, Contour, Gloo and Consul all exist to generate that configuration for you.

Delinea: Is pricing published?

Not by Delinea. Public sector frameworks have listed Secret Server Cloud around 348 GBP per user per year, which is a reference point, not a quote.

Envoy: How does it compare with Nginx or HAProxy?

Envoy is dynamically configured over an API and instrumented far more heavily; Nginx and HAProxy are faster to configure and lighter for straightforward reverse proxying. If you never need to change routing without a reload, Envoy is more machinery than the problem requires.

Delinea: Does one licence cover endpoints and servers?

No. Secret Server, Privilege Manager and Server PAM are separately licensed on different units. Scope all three if your requirement spans them.

Envoy: What does it cost?

Nothing to licence; it is Apache 2.0 and there is no paid edition. The cost is engineering time and, for most organisations, a commercial control plane or cloud service that packages it.

Envoy: Can I write extensions without C++?

You can write Lua filters or proxy-wasm modules in Rust, Go, C++ or AssemblyScript. Both carry per-request overhead compared with a native filter, and the Wasm path has been slower to stabilise than the project originally projected.

Envoy: Is it a CNCF project?

Yes, it is a graduated CNCF project licensed under Apache 2.0, which means the trademark and governance sit with the foundation rather than with Lyft or any vendor.

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