Compare
Trustplane vs Teleport
Teleport answers who a workload is. Trustplane answers whether this specific request may proceed. In many stacks, the honest answer is both.
01 What Teleport does well
A serious platform, and we will say so.
Teleport is a mature platform with deep open-source roots, and its Machine and Workload Identity product is a serious piece of engineering. If you need identity for machines across your estate, they are a strong choice.
- Issues short-lived X.509 certificates and JWTs to workloads, compatible with the SPIFFE standard.
- Workloads join by platform attestation — an IAM role, a Kubernetes service account, or a hardware TPM — so no long-lived secret is embedded anywhere.
- Mature RBAC, audit logging, and broad coverage across SSH, Kubernetes, databases, and CI/CD.
02 They are an input to us, not only an alternative
This is a compose, not a replace.
Trustplane consumes SPIFFE identities. If you already run Teleport Workload Identity, the identity half of our first check is already solved: your workloads present an SVID, and our boundary uses it as the attested identity it matches against a trust anchor. This is a compose, not a replace.
Their identity, our per-request decision.
03 Where the models differ
What the credential authorizes.
The difference is what the credential authorizes. A short-lived certificate or JWT identifies the holder for its lifetime — Teleport's own guidance on SPIFFE notes that a stolen JWT-SVID can be replayed for as long as it remains valid, which is precisely why lifetimes are kept short. Trustplane does not issue a credential that stands for a period at all: each request carries its own proof, bound to that request, and consumed on use.
Question
Teleport
Trustplane
What is issued?
Teleport ·A short-lived identity document for the workload
Trustplane ·A proof for one specific request
How long is it valid?
Teleport ·Its certificate or token lifetime
Trustplane ·One use
Where is access enforced?
Teleport ·At the Teleport proxy, for Teleport-protected resources
Trustplane ·At your own API boundary, for your own API
What if it is captured?
Teleport ·Usable until it expires
Trustplane ·Already spent
04 When Teleport alone is enough
When not to add us.
If your requirement is machine identity and access to infrastructure — servers, clusters, databases, pipelines — Teleport covers that ground and we do not compete for it. Add us when the thing you need to protect is an API being called by agents and services, and you want each call judged on its own merits.
Identity from them. Decisions from us.
Comparisons describe each product as its own public documentation describes it, as of September 2026. If we have something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.