The account is the whole difference
Keepsafe asks for an email address before it will protect anything. That is a reasonable trade if you want your photos on every device you own and you are comfortable with a company holding them. It is a strange trade if the reason you wanted a vault in the first place was that fewer people should have access to your files.
Vaultine has no account system. There is no sign-up screen and no password to create. You choose a 5x5 pattern or a six-digit PIN at setup, and that derives the key that unlocks your vault. Nothing about the app is linked to your identity, because the app was never told who you are.
Where the files actually live
This is the part worth being precise about, because both apps use the word "encryption". Keepsafe's listing describes cloud backup and syncing across devices, which means your files exist on its servers and access to them runs through your account.
Vaultine encrypts each file on the device with AES-256-GCM before it is stored, and the stored data is split and randomised so nothing on disk resembles the original. Pull the drive out, mount it on another machine, run recovery software over it — without your pattern or PIN there is nothing readable to find. If you turn on Dropbox backup, files are encrypted before upload, so Dropbox holds a blob it cannot read. We hold no keys either, which is what zero-knowledge means here: a statement about who can decrypt your files, and the answer is nobody but you.
When you are made to unlock it
Sometimes refusing is not an option — a border, an argument, someone who will not hand your laptop back. Vaultine gives you two prepared answers, and both look like an ordinary successful unlock.
The Decoy Vault opens on a second code and shows a different vault holding whatever harmless files you put in it, so you decide in advance what someone sees. The Duress Vault opens on a third code, shows an empty vault, and wipes your real vaults as it does, for the times when the files must not survive the next few minutes. Both are Pro features, and both are deliberate: you configure them, you stock them, and you know exactly what they reveal.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Because Vaultine rejects any code it does not recognise, the vaults on your device are exactly the ones you created — no more. A vault app that derives its key from whatever gets typed cannot make that promise, because every input opens something.
One vault, four platforms
Keepsafe is a phone app. Vaultine runs on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, which matters if the documents you actually want protected are the ones on your laptop. Most apps in this category are mobile-only, so this is less a feature comparison than a difference in what the product is for.
