[alanctkc]

I'm a smallstep developer.

From a mile high view, the thing that makes step somewhat different is the heavy emphasis on usability and reducing overall complexity of managing your own PKI holistically.

So, even if smallstep is more complete in a feature-for-feature comparison to alternatives, the primary focus on ergonomics and filling the "humanized" tooling gap is why you might pick it over another tool... depending on your needs.

In a sense step is to cfssl/openssl as httpie is to curl. You can accomplish a lot of the same things, but they're at different levels as far as mental tax and overall approachability.