Cavos vs Turnkey

Turnkey provides secure key management infrastructure running in hardware-backed secure enclaves, exposed as a low-level API for building wallets and signing systems.

Turnkey and Cavos both take hardware-backed security seriously, but they sit at different layers. Turnkey is key-management infrastructure you build a wallet product on top of. Cavos is a finished embedded wallet product where the user’s own device — not a remote enclave — is the default signing authority.

Capability	Cavos	Turnkey
Layer	Complete embedded wallet SDK: auth, wallet, recovery, sponsorship.	Key management infrastructure and signing API; you build the wallet experience.
Where keys live	On the end user’s device, non-exportable.	In hardware-backed secure enclaves operated as infrastructure.
Time to integrate	Quickstart to sponsored transaction with one SDK.	Longer: you assemble the product layer yourself.
Server-side signing	Not a general capability; the on-chain account is the sole authority over signers.	A core capability with policy controls.
Chain coverage	One SDK with chain-native adapters. Starknet, Solana, and Stellar available today.	Broad cryptographic curve and chain support at the signing primitive level.
Recovery	Non-custodial recovery codes on every chain, multi-device passkey approval, and opt-in hardware-isolated social recovery.	You design recovery on top of the provided primitives.

Choose Turnkey when

You are building your own wallet or custody product and want raw, policy-driven signing primitives.
You need server-side signing for automated or backend-initiated transactions at scale.
You want fine-grained organizational policy, quorums, and approval workflows over keys.

Choose Cavos when

You want a working embedded wallet with login, recovery, and sponsorship rather than building one.
You want the signing key on the user’s device rather than in a remote enclave you delegate to.
You are targeting Starknet, Solana, or Stellar and want native adapters out of the box.

Frequently asked

Is Turnkey a competitor or a building block?

Mostly a building block. Teams frequently use Turnkey to build something similar to what Cavos ships as a product. The decision is usually build-versus-buy rather than a feature comparison.

Does Cavos ever use enclaves?

Only for opt-in hardware-isolated social recovery, which runs in Google Confidential Space with pinned attestation measurements and can schedule at most one bounded add-signer operation. It is off by default and is not a general server-side signing capability.

Other comparisons

Cavos vs Privy Cavos vs Dynamic Cavos vs Web3Auth Cavos vs Magic

Evaluate it against your own requirements.

Start with the quickstart and reach a sponsored transaction on your target chain.

Read the quickstart Create an account