Part of the Certificate Automation Guide

Keyfactor vs Venafi: An Honest Comparison

Both platforms are excellent at certificate lifecycle management. Neither solves the operational problem that's actually costing you money.

If you're comparing Keyfactor vs Venafi for large-scale TLS certificate automation, you're asking the right question for the wrong reason. Both will automate certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation. Both integrate with your CAs, HSMs, and cloud infrastructure. Both will cost you six figures annually.

And both will leave you wondering, two years from now, why your teams are still firefighting certificate incidents.

This isn't a hit piece. Venafi and Keyfactor are serious platforms built by people who understand PKI. But they're solving a technology problem when most enterprises have an operational problem. Understanding that distinction will save you significant money and frustration.

The Quick Comparison

If you need a decision matrix for procurement, here it is:

For pure CLM capability, Venafi has deeper enterprise integrations. For cost-effectiveness and flexibility, Keyfactor often wins. Both deliver roughly 300%+ ROI over three years if you measure avoided outages and reduced manual effort.

Venafi: The Enterprise Incumbent

Venafi built the certificate lifecycle management category. Their platform, now part of CyberArk's machine identity portfolio, is what large enterprises reach for when they need comprehensive certificate automation across complex estates.

Where Venafi Excels

Integration breadth. 189+ connectors to CAs, cloud platforms, DevOps tools, and security infrastructure. If you're running a heterogeneous environment with legacy systems, Venafi probably has a connector for it.

Policy enforcement. Granular control over certificate issuance: key lengths, algorithms, validity periods, naming conventions. Useful for regulated industries where you need to prove governance.

CyberArk ecosystem. If you're already invested in CyberArk for privileged access, Venafi slots into a broader machine identity strategy. Whether that integration delivers value depends on your architecture.

Where Venafi Struggles

Cost. Enterprise pricing means enterprise budgets. The platform is powerful, but you're paying for capabilities you may not need if your estate is simpler than Venafi assumes.

Complexity. Powerful tools require skilled operators. Venafi deployments often require dedicated staff or expensive professional services to configure and maintain properly.

Operational model assumptions. Venafi assumes you know what you have and how it's organised. If your certificate estate is a mess — and most are — Venafi will automate the mess efficiently.

Keyfactor: The Flexible Challenger

Keyfactor built their platform around EJBCA, the open-source CA they acquired and commercialised. This gives them a different architectural philosophy: they can be your CA and your CLM, or just your CLM working with existing infrastructure.

Where Keyfactor Excels

Cost-effectiveness. Significantly cheaper than Venafi for comparable capability. If you're managing 50K-200K certificates and don't need Venafi's full integration catalogue, Keyfactor delivers similar outcomes at lower cost.

PKI-as-a-Service. Keyfactor Command plus their managed CA offering means you can outsource PKI operations entirely if that fits your model. Useful for organisations that don't want to run CA infrastructure.

EJBCA flexibility. If you're already running EJBCA, Keyfactor Command is the natural management layer. The integration is native rather than bolted on.

Crypto-agility focus. Keyfactor talks more explicitly about preparing for post-quantum cryptography. Whether this matters today depends on your timeline, but it's on their roadmap.

Where Keyfactor Struggles

Enterprise depth. For very large, very complex estates, Keyfactor's integration catalogue is thinner than Venafi's. Edge cases and legacy systems may require custom work.

Brand recognition. In conservative enterprises, "Venafi" is the safe choice. Keyfactor requires more internal selling, even when the technical fit is better.

Operational model assumptions. Same limitation as Venafi. Keyfactor automates certificate operations; it doesn't fix the underlying organisational dysfunction that makes certificate operations painful.

Keyfactor Command vs Venafi: The Specific Comparison

Most direct comparisons focus on Keyfactor Command vs Venafi TLS Protect. At this level:

• Discovery: Both are capable. Venafi has more deployment options; Keyfactor is simpler to configure.
• Automation: Both handle issuance, renewal, revocation. Venafi's policy engine is more granular; Keyfactor's is easier to manage.
• Reporting: Comparable. Both give you dashboards and compliance reports. Neither tells you what you actually need to know about operational efficiency.
• Integration: Venafi wins on breadth. Keyfactor wins on simplicity for common use cases.

For large-scale TLS certificate automation specifically, both platforms handle 500K+ certificate estates. The choice usually comes down to existing relationships, pricing, and which sales team you trust more.

Keyfactor EJBCA vs Venafi vs DigiCert

If you're evaluating Keyfactor EJBCA vs Venafi vs DigiCert, you're comparing different things:

DigiCert is primarily a public CA with enterprise services bolted on. Their CLM (formerly Symantec) is adequate but not their core business. Choose DigiCert if you want a CA relationship with management tools included, not if you need a management platform that works across multiple CAs.

Keyfactor EJBCA is a CA platform. Keyfactor Command is the management layer. Together, they're a full-stack PKI solution you control. Choose this if you want to own your CA infrastructure with commercial support.

Venafi is pure management — they don't issue certificates, they manage the lifecycle across whatever CAs you use. Choose this if you have multiple CA relationships and need a single control plane.

The architectural question is: do you want to consolidate on one vendor's stack, or do you want best-of-breed components with integration complexity?

What Neither Platform Solves

Here's where we stop being neutral.

Both Venafi and Keyfactor are certificate lifecycle management platforms. They're very good at what they do: discovering certificates, automating issuance and renewal, enforcing policies, generating reports.

What they don't do is fix the operational dysfunction that makes certificate management expensive in the first place.

They automate issuance, but they don't fix ownership. If nobody knows who owns a certificate, automating its renewal doesn't help. It just means it renews automatically until someone decommissions the service without telling anyone, and now you have orphaned certificates and compliance findings.

They discover certificates, but they don't explain dependencies. Knowing you have 47,000 certificates is table stakes. Knowing which ones are connected to revenue-critical services, which share trust chains, which would cascade if they failed — that's intelligence. CLM platforms give you inventory. They don't give you understanding.

They reduce manual renewal, but they don't touch the hidden costs. The 31% of your certificate spend in labour, the 21% in firefighting, the 41% in lost innovation — these aren't renewal costs. They're coordination costs, discovery costs, incident costs. Automating renewal addresses maybe 15% of the actual problem.

They don't prepare you for what's coming. Certificate lifetimes are dropping: 200 days from March 2026, 100 days from March 2027. At some point, 47-day certificates. Brute-force automation doesn't scale when renewal frequency triples. You need operational models that treat certificates as infrastructure metadata, not as individual objects to manage.

The Alternative: Infrastructure Intelligence

We built 3AM because we spent years watching enterprises deploy Venafi and Keyfactor and still drown in certificate operations. The technology worked. The outcomes didn't.

3AM starts from a different premise: you can't automate what you don't understand.

Instead of buying a CLM platform and hoping it solves your problems, 3AM builds understanding first:

Visibility without disruption. Passive discovery from validation traffic. Deploy in a week, see what you actually have without touching issuance workflows. Most enterprises find 30-40% more certificates than they knew existed.

Issuance bridge, not issuance replacement. 3AM sits between your clients and your CAs — internal PKI, public CAs, cloud services. You get a single control point without rip-and-replace. Your existing infrastructure stays.

Operational intelligence. Dependency mapping. Trust chain visualisation. Anomaly detection. The context that turns a certificate inventory into infrastructure understanding.

Prepare for the future. When certificates need to renew every 47 days, you need infrastructure that thinks ahead. 3AM's predictive analytics and self-healing automation shift certificate operations from execution to oversight.

Making the Decision

If you've already decided you need a CLM platform and you're choosing between Keyfactor and Venafi:

• Choose Venafi if you're a large enterprise with complex hybrid infrastructure, existing CyberArk investment, and budget for enterprise pricing.
• Choose Keyfactor if you're cost-conscious, cloud-native leaning, or want PKI-as-a-Service options.
• Choose DigiCert's CLM if you're consolidating on DigiCert as your primary CA and want integrated management.

If you're not sure you need a CLM platform — if you're wondering whether there's a better way to solve the underlying problem — we should talk.

Calculate What You're Actually Spending

Before you buy any platform, understand your real certificate costs. Not the budget line — the hidden labour, the firefighting, the engineering time that should be building products.

Use our certificate cost calculator →

Or Start with Visibility

Deploy 3AM's discovery layer. Four weeks, no disruption to existing workflows. See what you actually have before you decide what to buy.

Book a discovery conversation →